I thought it would be fun to see how much money I’ve made since I began my quest of earning money online several years ago.

Cafepress - $16,561.16

Zazzle - $232.82

Shutterstock - $148.61

POD Affiliates - $117.93

Printfection - $79.00

Istock - $72.48

Mturk - $59.29

Website ads - $45.70

Associated Content - $26.67

BigStock Photo - $23.00

Squidoo - $8.35

Canstock Photo - $4.20

Total - $17,379.21

As you can see, Cafepress is the winner by a mile. Probably several miles. I started this all in the winter of 2005. I discovered Cafepress and stock photography (Shutterstock, Istock, Bigstock & Canstock) at the same time. Worked on both for about six months, but then the photography fell by the wayside as Cafepress proved to be more profitable for me. I’ve left up my images that I uploaded so I still get a few sales trickling in every month. Nice to use as credit for downloading images when I need them.

Zazzle comes in second place with $232.82 so far. But even though I discovered Zazzle also in 2005, I only uploaded a few images and then forgot about it. The 10% royalty just wasn’t enough to justify my putting a lot of time into it. That changed however just before Christmas 2007. I still have a few issues with Zazzle, but I’m slowly building up my galleries there.

I have a few designs up at Printfection, but without any bulk editing tools it just takes way too long to do anything. Also, the only way to customize my storefront is with CSS, and I haven’t gotten around to learning that yet. My skills are pretty old school (html & tables).

Spreadshirt is noticeably absent. Until I can figure out how to integrate the products into my own website (which has been on the back burner for a while), I’ve decided to hold off on Spreadshirt for a while. My ultimate goal is to have my own website where my customers can purchase my products from Cafepress, Zazzle or Spreadshirt (to take advantage of all the unique items), but I need to figure out a way to do it so that the customer will not be confused.

Not doing too bad on the POD Affiliate thing, considering I’ve only been working on if half-heartedly for a few months.

The $60.00 I made at mturk was in the first few weeks it started up. I don’t bother with it much anymore.

I play with Squidoo occasionally, and it seems there are some people who make decent money there, but it doesn’t seem to work for me.

I used to write little articles for Associated Content when I was bored at work, but at my new job I can’t do that anymore.

So, Print on Demand has proved the most successful for me (duh). Only $982,620.79 left until I make my first million.

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