I'm on the final stages of putting up a blog. The blog is designed to get people to sign up to my mailing list and offer a few affiliate products. I plan to achieve this by providing unique, high quality information and by being extremely honest while reviewing some products I am affiliated with. It will belong to the "make money online" niche. My dilemma is that I am 17 years old, finishing up my senior year of high school. Despite this, do have a decent amount of experiance when it comes to making money online. I've made over $20,000 this past year using various online money making methods (affiliate programs, adsense, etc). I'm sure that's not a lot to some of you but it's not bad when my only other options are to either be a busboy or deliver pizzas or something. While I'm not nearly as qualified as some of the current top internet marketing gurus, I'm sure I'm at least as qualified most of the other self-proclaimed gurus. I can also write fairly well and can learn quick. My question is weather or not I should try to use my age to my advantage. Initially I decided that 17 was too young to try to maintain a trustworthy image. Additionally, most of the programs that generate income for me (adsense, clickbank, etc) prohibit anyone under 18 from signing up in their TOS (I'm not too worried about this one, I doubt these programs are trying to track down paying customers, but I don't want to have to really worry about something comming back to haunt me, especially with all the competition that exists in this field). But there are also advantages of being under 17. I guess I could probably promote myself as some sort of child prodigy who is already a genius in the field of marketing (I'm not really a genius, my grades in school are lousy, I just happen to be passionate when it comes to making money ). It could probably get me some press coverage at least. If I was 18 I would go with this option in a second, but there are added legal/trust issues since I'm 17 and I'm stuck on this decision. Am I making too big a deal about this? I could just leave my age out entirely from the blog, but I feel it's somewhat important and it may come up from time to time in my writing. Let me know what you guys think. By the way, I'm a long time lurker, first time poster. These are some great forums, thanks guys!
i'm 18 and i am starting to do what you did a year or so ago. i'm not too sure if we can consider ourselves 'prodigies' because i don't have the stats about how many high online-income earners fall below the 20-year-old boundary. like you, i put off one-year of college in order to do this. Will i tell the world that i'm only 19 (in future) and making more than what most teenagers do? i don't know. all i can say is that you (and i) should continue with this money making venture.
Judging by your post I'd say whatever you decide, you're going to make it work for you. It's nice to see such a clear and intelligent post (as most on this forum are of course! ). $20,000 is a lot at 17. I can only imagine what your income will be at 27...