But once you’ve set off on the journey, the gurus earning their thousands and thousands of dollars per month can seem so distant compared with your own reality. It’s hard to relate their continuing success to the £2.53 you earned in your first month, and doing so seems to diminish your own achievements, underlining just how far you have to go to match them.

Instead it’s a good idea to find peers in the blogosphere or on forums that are also just starting out. Following their progress – something you’ll find much easier to relate to – will be an inspiration, and dare I say you may find a little bit of healthy competitiveness rising up in you as you try to raise your game and redouble your efforts to beat their earnings.

Discovered largely via the comment pages of Lissie’s great Passive Income blog, here are three individuals who have just recently started out on their own make money online odysseys who you might like to follow closely:

• Matt from A Little Extra Money
Matt has been blogging about his online money making antics since February of this year. His revenue streams include completing surveys for cash at OpinionWorld, and writing articles at Hubpages and Infobarrel from which he earns a share of the advertising revenue via Google Adsense. Reflecting his blog’s title, Matt seems to be treating his extra earnings as “the icing on the cake” and tries to put in time whenever he can take it out of his busy schedule. He earned £16 in August, but he’d had more successful months than that in the past, with his total income from his various revenue streams totalling up to hundreds of pounds so far this year.

• Joel from the Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
Joel has taken a very interesting line indeed with his blog, choosing to set it up as an “experiment” to test the effectiveness of a popular make money online program, The Keyword Academy (TKA). His plan is to apply the techniques taught by TKA over a six-month period, and to see if he can at least get his money back from what he spent on the program in that time. It’s a novel idea and something I’ve been following with interest. As of early August, Joel had made £18 from his sites by following the techniques outlined by TKA, which I expect to see rise significantly if he has got his head around the techniques and he puts in the elbow grease.

• TipTopCat from My Money Making Experiment
TipTopCat has dabbled in the world of online income for some time now, having taken part in last year’s 30 Day Challenge but not really having found any success with it at the time. However, she found as the sites she created for the challenge aged, they crept up the rankings and started earning her Adsense income. She took part in this year’s 30 Day Challenge, as well as the 100 hubs in 30 days HubChallenge, which to me shows real commitment: few people actually finished that effort, despite many taking part. As of August 2009 she was making £100 in Adsense per month and an extra £17 in Amazon affiliate earnings, a new revenue stream for her. It’s looking very good for TipTopCat indeed and hopefully in September she’ll be able to bust the £150 or £200/month mark, on her way to her ambitious yet achievable goal of £1000/month in passive income by the end of the year.

I hope you enjoy following these new starters just as much as you do reading the success stories of people like Griz et al, and that seeing them out there making money will inspire you either to redouble your efforts or to get started in the first place on your journey to make money online.