Hey guys, Erik Johnson here. So I want to talk about how to make money with Asperger’s, and I basically self diagnosed, a couple years ago, on the autistic spectrum, and recently I quit stimming after 40 years of rocking back and forth. But I want to talk about a little bit of the financial side of having Asperger’s and what I do for a living, and maybe this can give you some insight.
So the last six years, I have worked from home and I’ve been very fortunate. Recently, things are changing now and you know there’s a lot of economic uncertainty. This last year has been really crazy and so I want to talk about how I’ve managed to stay afloat, and that’s barely staying afloat, but I’m at least doing what I love.
Six years ago, I started a blog, and I joined a network marketing opportunity. Now, I knew better, I knew it wasn’t a pyramid scheme. I knew that you had to put in a lot of work and build an organization from the ground up, and eventually it does look like a pyramid when you have an organization built, but it’s not like you can join and just automatically have a ton of people under you, that’s a Ponzi.
So anyways, I started network marketing in 2014, and I looked up a lot of bloggers who wrote articles about network marketing, and then at the end of every article they had a call-to-action to something that they are promoting online. It could have been workshops or online courses or a network marketing opportunity itself.
So, I started to write because I already liked writing. You know I published three ebooks on Amazon. They didn’t really do that well but at least I had a sense of business around writing. So I was like why not use my writing skills and create a blog.
So I started writing articles and around the 200th article, I started to attract the right people into my network marketing business. Then, CBD oil launched, or became mainstream in 2018, and luckily, I wrote a few articles about CBD oil that landed on the first page of Google, and 2018 was absolutely phenomenal.
But I did get a little jaded – a little power went to my head and I was still stimming 12 to 14 hours a day, rocking back and forth while listening to music while I made money, and I thought my life was forever changed for the better, but I was getting a little bitter and cocky. I didn’t know how to handle it.
In 2019, my business started to decline, and I didn’t know what to do. I did not want to go back to a restaurant job, you know, that was my whole life as a cook in restaurants and it was very high stress, long hours, very hot, very, you know, cutting yourself whatever, there’s lots of accidents in the kitchen and it’s hot and it’s just crazy work.
I had a heart attack when I was 32, and I didn’t want to be in that stressful environment anymore so I basically downgraded my position to dishwasher. I actually like washing dishes, because the Asperger’s in me, I love repetition. I love seeing the dirt, the food crumbs fly off the plate when I spray it, you know little stuff like that. It kind of tickled my Asperger’s side. I was fine with it. It wasn’t that much of a pay decrease either.
But anyways, I got out of the restaurant business completely with this home business, but it started to decline in 2019. So I was like what the heck am I gonna do. I did not want to go back to work because I was self isolating more than ever, and I was rocking 14 hours a day, and I was like I have to stay at home. I have to work online, which I still do successfully in 2023.
How to Make Money with Asperger’s
So I discovered, while I was trying to fix my blog’s SEO, I discovered backlinking services. So I started to buy backlinks for my blog to try to help increase its traffic and build its SEO, I realized that they hired blogs to host articles, and since I was a blog owner, I was like hey i’ll host articles on my blog.
So they said great. We will start paying you $25 an article to put on your blog, and it was better than network marketing. All I had to do was copy and paste an article that they wrote, and slap it on my blog, and I made $25. There were some days that they sent me over five articles.
So I made you know $125 and it took 10 minutes to post each article. So literally, you know, an hour of work for $125, or more. I just thought that was great.
So that lasted for a little while and then all of a sudden, 2019, they stopped giving me articles and I was like what’s going on? I really need this, and they’re like well, your blog has a really bad score, spam score, we can’t use you anymore. I wanted to lash out and say well you guys created that, you gave me really crappy articles, and it kind of destroyed my blog, but I refrained and I didn’t yell at them. I was like okay thank you – let me know if you have anything.
So this last year, I have watched my network marketing business greatly decline, because of all these crazy things going on politically and economically. I don’t want to say what they are but you know what I’m talking about. And it doesn’t feel in alignment with me anymore. I’ve done network marketing for six years and it’s declining. I was kind of holding on to the ship, as it was going down.
Then finally one day I was like I’m gonna let go. It is not in alignment with what I want to do. God has called me to help other people with autism addictions, and with Asperger’s.
So if you want to make more money, you really have to get in alignment with what you really love doing. I know you’ve probably heard that before, but MLM didn’t last for me because it wasn’t in alignment with my true self and God told me that I have a way bigger gift to give humanity, and it’s helping people with the same things that I’ve struggled with.
So if you really want to help people and get excited about it, I would look at what you are currently doing in your life, and overcome something. The battle is overcoming it, but then when you get to the other side you can help others win their battles.
I think that the best way to make money is to help others, and it’s taken me a long time and I went through a very, I was greedy for a long time. I wanted, you know, more money – it was never enough, you know, if I made $8,000 a month I wanted more. I got really hungry for more, more and more and more, because I was trying to fill this empty hole inside of me. I wasn’t satisfied because I wasn’t in alignment with what I really wanted to do.
So the other thing I want to talk about is that I got an alignment, and I created a new blog called addictionfreed and it’s basically to help people like me quit addictions. I’ve talked in other videos that I had over eight addictions and I’ve unraveled them all and I’m down to zero.
So I’m vlogging every day to tell you guys how I’m doing and what I’m doing to stay sober and celibate and stop stimming and all this stuff and it feels great. I can talk about it all day long because I’ve been stimming since I was eight, and I’ve had several addictions, alcoholism for 16 years.
Music was even an addiction. I know it was an addiction because I would get a dopamine hit every time I listened to music. I would listen to heavy metal really loud on a huge PA stereo system, just to get this buzz, so that was an addiction. The stimming was forty years, music was 40 years, fapping was 30 years, fapping is slang for something that boys do that, you know, grown men shouldn’t be doing. I did a video about that.
So anyways, I started this blog, and just recently someone offered to buy my business blog. The one that I was like I don’t want to do network marketing anymore and literally a month later, a friend of mine offered to buy my blog, and I said okay, because it wasn’t in alignment.
I’ve also been doing a lot of abundance work and breathwork to raise up the vibration and to activate my chakras, and it’s actually bringing in a lot of unexpected money. So, I’ll leave a link to that as well under this video. But the point is that when I sold the blog for $2,000, the first thing I wanted to do and this is poverty thinking, it’s lack thinking it’s a lack mindset is I instantly wanted to blow all the money, because it made me feel uncomfortable to have it.
If you want to attract more money, you should have savings, you should have money in the bank to at least feel a little bit safe, and to raise your vibration. Because we usually have a very low vibration when we are worried, and if I blew all that money, I would get back into worry because I’d be like, what did do – I just blew the money.
I wasn’t gonna blow the money on stupid stuff. I was gonna pay down credit cards and stuff like that. And that’s true I can still do that, but I can wait a couple weeks until we move back to Texas before I pay down my cards. I don’t need to just pay off everything, you know, today. Like, it’s uncomfortable to hold on to money, that’s because I think that I might not get any more, but it’s reversed because you want to spend it too. So you can get back into that fearful state of scarcity. It’s really bizarre reverse psychology. I can’t explain it any better.
So I’m going to sit on that money. And the point of this is to really get in alignment with what you want to do, and hopefully you want to help others. When I was doing network marketing, I didn’t want to help people that much. I just wanted to take the money and run, and I wanted more money. Because the business was not in alignment. I was turned off by network marketing eventually, because of a lot of insider politics and stuff like that so I was actually promoting it for probably two years too long because I wasn’t passionate about it anymore.
So, if you hate your job and you just don’t like anything you’re doing, try to reevaluate, and find stuff that you’re passionate about. I would definitely get online with what you want to do. Create a YouTube, look up how to title your videos and look up how to create thumbnails, because you want to increase your click through rate on YouTube, on videos.
Look at creating a blog, look at creating, I don’t know Facebook Lives or something, create a community, and create a brand and develop a mission statement that people can get behind you on, you know, be the one that is the change, and be passionate about it, if you’re doing it just for money people are gonna see right through you.
So really just start writing down five things that you love doing. And it can really be as simple as eating food. Okay, well if you love eating food. You can review the food you buy from a grocery store. If you do enough food reviews on YouTube, you know, 300 to 500 videos and you put a link to something under your videos, some kind of affiliate marketing offer that lines up with your videos, you could start making money from home.
People with Asperger’s and autism have a really hard time getting a traditional job and traditional jobs are leaving like never before. It is very scary and I am very fortunate that I am home. But the last three months have been really a struggle until I sold my blog.
But I’m very grateful because the struggle actually led me to create my new brand, the addiction freed. Now I’m truly in alignment with what I want to do. I had to struggle a long time. I had to go through a financial downward spiral since 2018 – so literally almost three years of panicking and ego crushing times, but it’s been the best time of my life, because now I can do videos like this and just talk freely, instead of doing these hyped up, you know, MLM infomercials that people didn’t even really like.
When you’re in alignment, you will also get a ton of traffic because they can see you’re passionate, they can see that you’re genuine. But if you do anything with the ulterior motive of making money, they are gonna see right through you. Even if you just mentioned it really fast. So try to just stay true to yourself, and start vlogging and inspiring others just by you improving every single day.
You don’t have to be a superhero to start doing videos. In fact, you should start when you’re down low, because then at the end of the year, If you do a video every day you’re going to have 365 videos and you can go back yourself to the very first video and be like, Wow, I have really improved. In fact, that’s what I’m doing with this channel. If you go back to my first video or my second or my third video when I stopped rocking, I show you how nervous I am. I show you my hands that have calluses from the rocking. And it’s pretty bad. I think I already looked different.
So do stuff that inspires you guys and create a lot of content around it, and then put some type of affiliate marketing offer under every video and you will start making money from home. So I hope this helps. Leave a comment if you work from home. What are you doing, we’d love to hear from you. And we’ll talk soon.
Here are more Resources for Asperger’s and Addiction.
