About

I’ve been earning online from Pakistan for ten years.

It started in 2016, badly. I was looking for any job, any skill, anything that would pay. I started a YouTube channel about kids’ topics and got it to 15,000 subscribers — a few AdSense payments, nowhere near enough to live on. So I tried blogging. Then Amazon affiliates. An agency website. An ebook. Local ecommerce. Crypto trading. For two years I tried everything and earned almost nothing.

In 2018 I started writing content for local clients at rates I’m embarrassed to repeat. Then a friend mentioned Etsy SEO, so I tried selling it on Fiverr. That one worked.

I built a team in Manawala, a small town in Sheikhupura district, and trained every person myself because nobody nearby had done this kind of work before. For a while I had two offices — one in Manawala for the Etsy SEO team, one in Bahria Town Lahore for content writing. Eventually I built my own office in Manawala. Somewhere in there I did a $5 logo order and revised it twenty-six times, because I didn’t know I was allowed to say no.

In 2022 I taught Etsy SEO to 250 students. Most of them didn’t make it. A large part of that was mine to own — I taught what I knew instead of what they needed.

Then a difficult couple of years. My family’s financial situation changed and I became responsible for everyone’s expenses very suddenly. The business contracted. I closed the offices, the team left, and I tried to run everything alone until it became obvious I couldn’t.

So I stopped trying to. No team, no clients, no offices — I chose mobility over scale. Today I run an Etsy shop selling digital products, by myself, and I’m building a tool for Etsy sellers called Rankazo.

I earned around $200,000 over those ten years. I should be in a much better position than I am. I never managed the money, my expenses grew every time my income did, and I put too much into things that couldn’t be sold when I needed them to be.

For ten years I wrote about none of this. Almost nobody around me knew what I actually did for a living.

That’s what this is. I write about earning online from Pakistan — how to get clients and actually get paid, what to do with money that arrives irregularly, explaining to your family that you have a job when you don’t have an office, and what years of working alone does to a person.

Some of it is how-to. Some of it is what I got wrong. All of it is from doing the work.

If you’re trying to build an income that doesn’t depend on a job — or you already have one and nobody around you understands it — this is for you.

Aqib Hameed
Lahore, Pakistan