40 Ways to Make Money Online

I keep mentioning the words ‘unique’, ‘creative’, ‘interesting’ throughout this site. That’s simply because that is what will make you money online. That is the trick to make money online and that is in a nutshell what every site out there will tell you.

A custom designed site will sell for more than a standard one using a free template. A custom script will sell for more than a free one. A custom or unique idea, will get more traffic than a cloned one.

So if you outsource design and programming for a site, you have instantly raised the value of your website. Why not outsource the writing a content too…

You have just created a niche site which will have potential buyers falling over themselves to get their hands on it.

Whether it be a custom designed and programmed image hosting site or celebrity rating site, if some of it is custom built, that instantly adds value.

The key is of course to keep the costs down. Don’t pay a designer $100 to design a site for you. Start a thread on a popular forum asking who can design a site for you for x amount. You may get slammed by top designers, but screw them – there are guys out there who will work for peanuts and be more than happy to design a site for $10 – a quality design too. Let people fight it out in a price war whilst you wait for a quote you can afford.

Same with programming… head over to elance or rentacoder and post your request. Cheapest quote wins (provided of course they have a decent reputation). Combine the design, programming and domain name and you have almost certainly created a site you can sell for at least double what it cost you

Wordpress is the biggest blogging platform out there. There are literally thousands of themes and templates out there for wordpress.

Get one designed from scratch, buy one or create one yourself and you’ve got yourself an instant money maker.

You see, if you own a decent looking theme, loads of people are going to use it on their blog. So imagine you want you’re website promoted and needed lots of links, fast. What would be a rapid but cost effective method of doing that? Hmmm….

Buying footer links on wordpress themes of course!! On 99% of wordpress themes there are links on the bottom of them which usually display a link to the designer who created the theme and one or two ‘sponsors’. These sponsors have paid to have their name and link there.

So if you get your hands on a good theme, head off to sitepoint or digitalpoint and sell the footer links to buyers. Like I’ve said, if the theme looks good, people will buy the links.

My good friend Walsho has created an ebook on this topic specifically which goes in to more detail, so if you want to explore this option futher you can check out his ebook here.

Setting up a proxy site is easy. If you don’t know how, hire someone to do it. Someone will install a free script for probably under $5.

Here’s a few quick links on proxy related stuff;
http://www.proxybuilder.com/Link2 (builds you a free custom proxy script)
http://proxy.org/form.shtml (copy /paste code and get a proxy service on your site)
If you don’t know what a proxy site is, it basically allows you to bypass firewalls and security settings to get to all of those ‘blocked’ sites you may have at work or school.

You simply promote the proxy amongst friends in school, workplace, emails, on forums etc… and watch the traffic boom.

Sell once the site starts making money and you’ll be guaranteed healthy profit. A typical proxy site will sell for 4 times it’s monthly revenue. So if it earns $4 in it’s first week through adsense or whatever, that = $16/month which we multiply by 4 to get a $64 sales price. Depending on design and customization, plus the domain name, you may get a bit more. That’s a very rough figure.

Assuming you buy a .com domain for $9 and have a host, that’s $55 right there.

It’s easy money and just requires a little bit of initial promotion. People use proxies all the time to bypass firewalls at work and school. They also get banned all the time, so new proxy sites are always needed.

Go here if you are interested in buying an ebook with more detail on how to make money with proxies.

Getting anything under a 5 letter .com is virtually impossible nowadays. If you come across a decent one, snap it up ASAP. There are people who do nothing but wait around and pounce on expiring domain names, in the hope the old buyer forgot to renew it and will have to buy it back for $$$.

There are also decent domain names which simply aren’t registered.

• Powerhose.net
• Spamdealer.com
• Thorfy.com

These are just 3 domain names which I’ve come across in the past that were not registered yet. But these are what I’d call good domain names. You could profit from all of these. Hopefully some of you will. To find unregistered domain names I use a site called instantdomainsearch.com and randomly enter domains I think *might* not be taken. Persistence and patience is the name of the game here.

The first two are what are known as keyword domains. They contain real words, dictionary words put together. These are the best type as they’re more valuable when it comes to SEO. There’s also more chance that people will type them in naturally.

Thorfy.com is an example of a brandable domain name. It means nothing, but it sounds good – and that’s where the value lies. Bebo, Flickr – they mean nothing really, but they’re short, easy to remember and sound good… that’s the ‘web 2.0’ domain world we now live in.

Some of you might ask why I haven’t registered all 3 of those domains above – the answer is I want to show you guys you CAN still buy decent names and sell them. Many people think it can’t be done, those days are gone, but I’m telling you now, and as you can see above, this CAN be still done.

By the way, I use name.com to register all my domains – $8.99 for a .com, with free private whois protection thrown in. Godaddy and the rest are good, but why pay more when you can get the same for less?

Facebook, Myspace, Bebo… you know what these are. But have you ever thought about making money with them?

If you have a large amount of friends on your profile, you have the ability to send messages and bulletins to all of your friends. People will pay you to send messages to your ‘friends’, things like promoting a new site or affiliate program.

DigitalPoint forums are a great place to find this sort of activity. Some people do nothing but set up accounts, add everyone they can find to their friends list, then sell the profile at a later date for a few bucks. Not exactly being a good friend, but it *does* help raise a few bucks and more often than not, these sites themselves spam you with stuff you don’t want to see, so your friends are probably used to it. Quite often you’ll see people selling accounts boasting 10,000+ ‘friends’.

If you use stumbleupon.com or digg.com, you can also make money for using your accounts. Check out subvertandprofit for more info.

There’s also a site called piqq.us (formerly diggboss) which basically allows you to build up diggs and stumbles for a rainy day in return for digging and stumbling other people’s links. A little unethical perhaps, but now you know why all of those seemingly ordinary/average articles somehow make their way on to the digg frontpage

If you don’t have cash but need it, ask for it. Recently, a guy was able to visit his sick wife who was in another country, thanks to a huge number of small donations from the internet community.

Now ok, the last thing we want is fake stories about this sort of stuff, but if you genuinely need cash and are prepared to pour your heart out or work hard for it and be honest, there are people out there who will feel for you and perhaps think to themselves “what if I where in his position?” or “that happened me before, I know the feeling”.

If you say something like “look, I’m broke, I need $500 cash by next month and am prepared to do anything for it…. Then list your skills and experience, people will quite often give you little jobs which may all add up. I’ve seen this done loads of times on digital point forums.

The key is honesty. Don’t try and lie or make up some stupid story as experienced webmasters and browsers will just see right through you. If you need money, don’t be afraid to let it be known. If you’re prepared to work for it, nobody can criticise you.

Got an idea for a site you think might work? Great. Got cash to put in to it? Didn’t think so. Unfortunately, the cash part is where most of us average joe’s fall down… I know because I’m one of them.

I have all sorts of ideas and inspirational moments but most of them come to nothing as I simply don’t have the cash to get them off the ground and I don’t have the skills to do it all myself.

That’s why partners are so great. I’m working on one or two projects where the bills are split and the work is spilt. It’s great as not only is it 50 % cheaper and 50% less work, but I also get to build up a relationship and hopefully make a friend and solid contact out of it all who I may be able to do business with in the future.

The downside of course is that profits are split 50/50 but as I always say “Half of something is worth more than all of nothing”.

You’ll find investors/entrepreneurs on webmaster forums like youngentrepreneur and sitepoint.

Don’t try and tell me you don’t have an old phone or computer or cd player lying about the house. LIAR!!

Get you’re ass in gear, get that stuff on ebay or craigslist and sell it. It only gathers dust and takes up space otherwise. Unless it’s a collectable or has sentimental value, the only thing stopping you from getting rid of this stuff is pure laziness. I know because I’m just like you, but I do my best to sell any junk I don’t want.

Not only can you get rid of it on ebay/craigslist, you can also make money from it! Everyone’s a winner – you get rid of the stuff, you get paid, the buyer is a happy and ebay take a small cut of the dosh.

First of all, you can’t sell vouchers if you don’t have vouchers, right? So we need to get vouchers.

Google Adwords often give away $20 vouchers or $50 vouchers… so do Yahoo and Msn. There are certain sites/links who will give you a voucher for free;

http://services.google.com/marketing/links/awo-fr-oa-jdn07-mktg1
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/en_GB/arp/sponsoredsearch_v1.php?o=GB0283&AID=10396887&PID=2494994&SID=QualityNonsense
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/choose.php?o=US2258
http://startadcenter.com/inexpMar%5Faff/

*note: all links were working when this ebook was published, they tend to change/re-direct to homepage every few months.

Webmasters have ‘contests’ to encourage traffic and build up hype. They also have to offer prizes to encourage people to read their blog or sign up to a newsletter etc…

Here are a few contests I’ve come across recently with pretty decent prizes on offer. Most of the major bloggers will have some sort of contest every month.

• http://www.tylercruz.com/vote-for-me-win-100/
• http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/10/31/game-set-match-rss-contest-over/

It’s usually pretty simple to enter and as the old saying goes, “You’ve got to be in it, to win it”. Keep an eye out for all of these contests and eventually, you’ll win something on the law of averages. On Smemon’s blog he has held one or two contests giving away free adspace and sometimes he’d have 4 ads slots, with 5 entrants, so the chance of winning would be pretty high.