Hey guys, this is Erik Johnson. I have Asperger’s and I teach people how to make money from home. Today we have an exciting train story. I got my train shirt on. And, you know because Asperger guys, Aspies as they call them,. they like trains, they like bridges. They like lights. They like repetition. And they like routine. And I do all of those things very well.
But anyways, I want to talk about a train trip my wife and I had in 2018. It was a really exciting year. Things were blowing up. I was making great money with my blog, in network marketing, and also a company paid me to post articles on my blog.
So we got on the California Zephyr outside of San Francisco. We’re gonna make it all the way back across the country and have a 50 hour train trip in a couple days. I think it was two nights, three days but incredibly beautiful.
We started out outside of San Francisco in Emeryville and my wife and I had our laptops, and this was gonna be really exciting because I just love trains. I’ve always loved trains, I hopped trains when I was in my 20s. One time I hopped the train from Seattle, all the way down to Roseville, California with some friends.
I got homesick turned around and left and those guys are drinking and I wasn’t drinking at the time. It’s hard to be a sober hobo. So anyways, I just love trains because they’re massive. They’re mysterious. They make weird noises, hissing noise and have huge electric diesel motors and I’m just fascinated with them. I also like the smell of diesel.
Even when I was a little boy on my dad’s sailboat he had a diesel motor and it would just go glug, glug, glug, and I would literally sniff the exhaust fumes because it was diesel. But that’s another story.
Anyways, so here’s the way to make money – totally perfect for an aspie and that is taking a train and enjoying the scenery. We got a big coach. So it had beds in it. We could fold down the seats, the benches into beds, right by the window. So all of this beautiful view is going past us and we’re making money online, and so I’m going to tell you how I did it.
It was a long trip and during the trip when there’s no internet, you’re out in the middle of the desert, just beautiful planes whipping past you at 70 miles an hour, you have nothing to do but like I said I have Asperger’s, and so I rock back and forth. It’s what I do. I’ve been doing it since I was eight years old. I can literally rock 14 hours a day from morning until night.
So I love working from home because I can rock and listen to music. Those are my two favorite pastimes. And on the train, get this, so I love trains already, but I can rock while the scenery goes by and make money at the train stops.
So here’s what happened. I was working for a company that paid me to post articles on my blog. My blog was doing pretty good. It had a domain authority of 35, which that’s how you rank blogs. If you increase your domain authority, you can look it up. If you’re blogging, it’s important information.
If you want to start making money with your blog, you can have people pay you to post articles on your blog. It’s literally a 10 minute copy and paste job. And I was working for a company called Fat Joe out of the UK, and at that point in 2018 they were sending me like three articles a day sometimes.
So when we pulled into the station I would get the internet again. And lo and behold, there would be three emails from Fat Joe, another company is called the Hoth, and they also paid me to post articles on my blog.
They write the article, they just want backlinks for their clients in these articles on people’s blogs, it’s called blogger outreach. So check it out. People pay to have these articles slapped on my blog, and other people’s blogs. And so I literally would get these emails that would say, Here’s another one. Here’s another one, Erik. And it was just an article in a Google Doc, usually sometimes a Word doc, and I would just copy and paste the article, login to my blog, copy and paste the article, slap it in, and I made 50 bucks per article.
So we’re talking $150 a day for 15 to 20 minutes of work and I could only do it when the train was in the station and sometimes while the train was going, and California Zephyr was one of the oldest trains Amtrak has – very historical and it’s just amazing. It goes all the way across America to Boston, Chicago. I got a Chicago dog at the Amtrak station. And, and then we just landed in New York City.
My wife and I stayed at the Doubletree in Times Square. Our room was only $400 a night, and still today she doesn’t know how she got it that cheap. They booked the same room during New Year’s Eve for $7,000. But that’s one way you can make money traveling on a train if you’re an aspie like me and you love trains.
Another way you can make money on a train is just YouTube. YouTube will start paying you once you hit 1000 subscribers or a certain amount of hours of watch time, I forgot what that is. It could be 4000 hours. It could be 10,000. I think it’s 4000 hours. So you have to hit one of those, and don’t buy fake subscribers, just do it organically.
But all you have to do is you can talk about trains. You can talk about your Asperger’s, or your autism or anything, anything that’s unique about you. You could talk to ex-addicts – I could talk to ex-alcoholics. I was an alcoholic. Those are the greatest videos because you’re pouring your heart out.
It’s called vlogging. It’s not really video marketing videos, 10 minute catchy little top 10 list article videos, it’s more like a journal, but with video and then you do enough of those videos, you’re going to form a tribe of people that just watch you and eventually YouTube will pay you. Plus, you can put affiliate marketing links under your video, whatever you want to promote whatever product you love, or a service you love, maybe some kind of magazine.
Let’s see there’s a Aspergers magazine and they will pay you every time you sell a subscription to their magazine. You could literally put your affiliate link for that magazine – you would have to apply to their affiliate program. And then you get your own link and when someone got a subscription through your link, you would get paid by that company.
So a lot of YouTubers do that. They have an affiliate link under their video. And they have a link under their video, and they get paid whenever something sells. So there’s affiliate marketing, there’s blogging, and there’s YouTube.
Those are the top three that you can do on the road. All you need is a laptop. You don’t even need a laptop. There’s people that can do all of this with their phone. They’re so tech savvy. I’m just not like that.
So that was the trip guys. And I love the feeling of making money that way – while traveling. I literally could probably live on trains. Especially if it’s in coach or the sleeper cars, those are the ones you want the ones where you get to two bunk beds that fold into chairs and you can just watch the scenery go by. It was a little stifling – sometimes it was hot and sometimes the train rocked. But there are a lot of fascinating tunnels and there were a lot of them that went through a lot of desert, but kinda like the Grand Canyon type, you know where the sides are all rocky. I’m terrible at geography. I’m not going to have any names for you.
The bottom line is we went through like Salt Lake City, we can see the salt beds. Chicago, like I said, was pretty cool. It was actually during November, so it was like 17 degrees in Chicago, and I just had that feeling like it was really hardcore there, like, you know, it’s already the murder capital of America, and it was just frigid cold and people die from the frost from exposure every day to the homeless and I just felt this. I’ve never felt it before . It was like a real city but it had this really dark energy. There’s homeless people around us. And you know, we just stayed by our table and the little restaurant in the Amtrak station. I mean, we did not venture out of that place at all.
And then New York City was amazing. We just got a cab and it took us to Doubletree. We got a big warm chocolate chip cookie in the lobby. That’s what Doubletree does, and its affiliates. So if you want to make money and live a good life, you know, Asperger’s and Aspies feel isolated; sometimes they feel like people don’t understand them. They feel isolated. They’re uncomfortable around people.
You know, I just stay at home, especially after the lockdown. I have more social anxiety than ever because, you know, I’ve literally been home for a couple of years. I go out just to get some groceries. I haven’t really formed any friendships here because we just moved here a couple years ago, and I don’t even know if I want to do that. Maybe go to church or to the Racquet Club racquetball club.
That’s the other thing Aspies love is geometry, and I can get some serious geometry going with a racquetball because you can hit different angles of the walls, and it turns into kind of like geometric shapes if you follow the blue ball, and it hits a corner wall and then the front wall and then it hits the ceiling, it kind of forms, and then comes back to you, it forms like a geometric shape.
And so for you mathematical formula guys, who also like sound and repetition. I mean, I took to racquetball like a dog, I mean, a dog chasing a ball, I just could play by myself for hours, just hitting the wall. And that’s the other thing that Aspies love is repetition. I could listen to the same song over and over 100 times and not get tired of it. So it’s very interesting. And to be honest, I just found out recently that I had Asperger’s. That’s why this channel is evolving and kind of focusing more on people with Asperger’s because my wife about a year ago mentioned, she’s like, you know, you got a lot of signs of Asperger’s.
And so I started researching it, and it can be depressing and it can make you angry when you first find out. But a lot of people are finding out they have Asperger’s in their 40s. I’m almost 48, but it just put everything in my life into perspective. It answered a lot of questions.
But there’s a lot of sadness there because I hurt a lot of people in my past, have a lot of arguments with girlfriends and then alcoholism just exacerbated all of that.
So that’s how you make money online: YouTube, blogs, and affiliate marketing, like I said, you can sign up with these affiliate programs and you make money when people sign up through your personal link that the affiliate marketing company gives you.
You know, another example would be something like coffee, but let’s say there’s a really cool coffee that you like. And you could type in the coffees name and affiliate program after that into Google and see what Coffee Company has an affiliate program. And then you sign up, and you just get your own personal link. So when someone buys coffee through your website, you get a commission.
And people love affiliate marketing, but the thing that you need is traffic, lots of visitors to your website. That’s why a lot of people fail and not only at affiliate marketing, but network marketing – is they don’t get enough traffic to their websites. So, you got to build up your YouTube channel, you got to build up a blog. If you don’t want to do those things, you have to have money already and run advertising.
Or you can use your Facebook. A lot of people have a good following on Facebook and they can just start – you could even do Facebook Lives on the train if you got a connection, internet connection, and just start doing videos consistently and you will form a tribe of people. And they’ll be like, whatever you talk about, they’ll be into it, and if you have a link under the video, you say, check it out, check out what I’m doing for money, you know, or check out what I’m doing for weight loss or check out what I’m doing to calm my Asperger’s or calm my anxiety, click the link under this video.
You can do it easily like that just have a call to action. tell people what you want them to do after the video or after the blog article. And that’s it guys. I hope you enjoyed the story. Hit that subscribe button if you’re new here, and we’ll talk to you soon!
Thanks for reading!