Every Wednesday, I will try to interview a person who in my opinion is working to be successful or has become successful. I will be doing this to show you that being successful is a choice! Today we are going to speak with Jason Pereira about his success so far in online money making. Like him you can choose to start working towards making money online 
Gaetano - Thanks Jason for accepting our invitation and agreed to be interview by SuccessfulFootsteps.com. For our readers who are not familiar with you could you please introduce yourself?
Hey Gaetano – sure, no problem. Doubt anyone would be familiar with me, but anyways, here we go J. I’m Jason Pereira, a sixteen year old University student. I live in
Gaetano - Great! Could you please go back to the very start. Can you recall the first time you got interested in making money online? What was the first attempt to make money and how did it go?
I had some time to kill in the summer, so decided to spend it trying to make some money online. One of the (only J) skills I am blessed with is a gift for writing, so I thought I might as well put that to good use.
My first experience at making money online was not a good one. I ended up writing those spammy articles only for SEO at a mere $2/500 words – they were not fun to do, and did not improve me in any way either. They did however allow me to get the necessary start up capital for my first domain name and hosting, and it was a valuable learning experience to get rid of my naivety at that early stage.
Gaetano - Today you blog at theuniversitykid.com for money. Can you please tell us something about theuniversitykid.com and what business you have you tried? Could you summaries your success for our readers?
I don’t really blog at TUK for money, to be honest – the cash I make out of it relative to the time I put in is minimal. I do however blog to try and gain a (slowly increasing) community of valued readers, ones that I can hopefully help learn some ways to make money online.
The University Kid was originally started on a whim, as part of a contest between friends (that has now died down). After settling down, I ran a couple of contests (one of which for $150 is going on at this moment) in order to build readers, RSS subscribers, comments and various other metrics that define a successful blog. It is currently a medium sized blog… I’m going to take it much, much further.
Gaetano - What was the biggest challenge you have ever faced in making money online? How did you go about solving it?
The biggest challenge I faced was probably my naivety, and working for rates way below what I was worth just because I was too inexperienced.
Not knowing the workings of the Internet is probably another thing – I had no idea what GoDaddy was or that we could actually buy a domain name. Hehe !
Gaetano - Jason, what do you suggest to our readers who are trying to startup their own online business?
I’d recommend they go slowly, do one thing at a time, and engage in a little bit of the ‘dirty work’ they need to get their initial capital up. Not at the low level that I started up, but things like forum posting, paid blog posting services and various other low capital activities like domain flipping can help a total beginner to the online world.
I’d also recommend they find someone that will help them along, and stick to that person like glue. There are a lot of scammers and other dishonest people on the internet, and without experience a complete newcomer can suffer.
Gaetano - Jason, what is in your opinion the most common mistake that online startups do?
People try to do too many things too fast. People aim at starting the next million dollar website, when they first need to look at the next hundred dollar website.
Also, don’t get too much into the whole online thing. Take a break every so often, go out and do stuff. Remember, if you’re not having fun, it’s not worth doing.
Gaetano – Jason, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. Everyone go to www.theuniversitykid.com
No problem, and cheers for the multiple plugs. Good luck with the site! J
