About Me

In case you want to know a little bit about me, here it is:

My name is Anca Dumitru, I am Romanian and I live in Italy. I studied Italian and English at the University of Bucharest (Romania) and then I started to work as a teacher of Italian and English and as a researcher in linguistics. After I moved to Italy, I tried to find work, but it was very difficult. I was 32 at the time and all the ads were for younger people (ouch!) or for people with specific experience in specific fields. As soon as I bought my first computer, I started to look for jobs online. I liked a lot all the business ideas that I found in the USA, unfortunately they could not be applied in Italy (for instance, I really liked the idea of a lawn sign business, but there is no request for such things in Italy :-(

I had a little baby and nobody wanted to hire me. I could't send her to daycare, because the public ones only accepted children of working parents (I didn't work, which meant I could stay at home with her; but, by staying at home with her, I could not look for a job. In the end I am happy that I got to be with her all the time for the first two years of her life). And the private daycare cost a lot, so... there was nothing I could do.

In 2001, when everything IT-connected was in full swing, I took a programming course. Everybody was hiring, even people without an experience, who learned as they worked. By the time I finished the course, the Internet bubble had burst and people were laid off, no hope for us to get hired.

In the meantime I had sent my resume to 175 translation agencies, in order to work as a freelance translator. Only 5 of them answered, saying that they'd add me to their database. Only 2 of them ever sent me work and... only 1 of them ever paid me!So much for translation agencies found online.

In the end, by pure luck, I managed to find two agencies which started to send me work. In the beginning I earned less, because there was less work. I tried hard to show them that I am reliable and serious and available, so I accepted even the tiniest translations and I also accepted those translations that arrived on Friday evening and had to be ready by Monday morning.

Little by little, I managed to establish a name for myself and now I work from home as a free-lance translator. The truth is I work a lot, as regards time, because I like to check my translations at least three times, and so it takes a lot of time to finish something. But I'm glad that I can maintain myself and my daughter and, most of all, I'm happy that I can be with her whenever she needs me.

During all these years I had the idea that the best way to earn money was to have your own site. I found by chance SiteSell and read their free courses (about becoming an affiliate, selling your knowledge and your swervices, making money with net auctions). After four years I managed to save a little money from my work as a translator (in the beginning I only earned about 400-500$ a month) and I bought their product SBI. I did apply what they said, but I don't have the time necessary to continuously add content to my sites. Nonetheless, the traffic to my sites (now I have 3 of them) keeps growing and I started to earn some money, too.

I can say that I finally managed to work online, as I receive and send the translations by e-mail, so I can program my day around my daughter's activities and we can also go on holiday (for me, working holidays, as I'm on the beach in the morning, in front of the computer at noon, in a pizzeria in the evening and again at work at night).

I'm still dreaming of the beautiful moment when most of my money will come from Internet marketing and I'll have lots of time to travel and see the world. Maybe I'll start blogging about my adventures in Internetland and share with you what kind of possibilities there are (I know a lot about them by now, it's just that I don't feel I'm cut for most of them. For instance, you can get traffic to your site with article marketing... the problem is I hate writing articles!)