40 Ways to Make Money Online

I touched on this earlier but anything which you can claim to be ‘custom’ is worth a hell of a lot more than something with is ‘default’ or ‘standard’ or ‘free’.

So assuming you have money to spend, you can buy quality designers, programmers and even marketing and sales experts to do the work for you.

“It takes money to make money” as they say and that applies to the online money world also.  I’ve shown you 20 ways to make money online with $0 investment, being honest, the REAL money you’ll make will be from investments.

The bigger the risk, the bigger the rewards. In other words, the more you invest, the more you can make.

Large scale projects can run into thousands and thousands of $$$$ very quickly and when you add in marketing costs and server/bandwidth costs etc, it can all be very expensive work.

But if you have the cash, do it right from the start and build a site to your own satisfaction while you can. My biggest regret online, was not spending money when I had it.

If you have some spare cash, invest it, don’t leave it sitting about – it’s not going to make you any more cash that way!

There are loads of bedroom college dreamers and wannabe teen entrepreneurs who need cash to put their ideas in to action. It’s always a risk giving strangers money. You may never see it again. But just think, what if you had invested in facebook or youtube or google or any of these multi billion dollar sites?

Today’s losers are tomorrow’s winners and it’s crucial to realise that some 14 year old entrepreneur you’re talking to today, could end up being a billionaire in a few years time.

So always respect and guide those people who ask for help or even cash. Never dismiss anyone unless you know they are just after a fast buck. Having a relationship with future superstars could well pay off not today, but down the line when the tables may be turned and you need a dig out.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t throw my cash at a stranger who promises me the world, but if I got talking to them, did a little research and maybe joined up on a partnership paying for a host and domains, programming etc… (rather than giving them the money directly), it would be a pretty low risk investment that could well mature in to a profitable business and relationship.

One word of advice though, never invest what you can’t afford to lose. Investing is calculated gambling and an art in itself. A few hundred bucks is all I’d invest as quite simply, I don’t have the cash to throw around. But if you’ve a few hundred grand lying around, it’s a different story.

To catch all the latest and greatest e-startups, head to KillerStartUps or mashable.

Domain names are the new real estate. All of the 3 letter .com’s are taken and nearly all of the 4 letter .com’s are taken.

So that leaves 5 letter .com’s. Although world economies might be hitting the rocks, don’t worry about things online – things are still booming and even if/when we do have another dot com bubble burst, get ready to pounce on expiring domain names and sites that are selling for peanuts.

You only have to look at sedo.com‘s recent sales to see how much domain names are selling for nowadays… Here’s a few of the big guns over the pasty few years

• Sex.com sold for $14m
• Porn.com sold for $9.5m
• Business.com sold for $8m

A good tool I use to ‘snipe’ expiring domains is http://freshdrop.net/

Creating a facebook or bebo application for users to add to their profiles is the ultimate marketing tool for your site.

These sites have millions and millions of active users who range from all sorts of different backgrounds and age groups… it’s a mouthwatering prospect for any site to have a successful facebook or bebo application as it means traffic and lots of it.

Most people can’t create a facebook app themselves, but thankfully, sites like rentacoder, elance etc… have loads of programmers who will do the job for you, for a price.

You might have a simple site which gets images and creates a little slideshow for example… you could create a facebook app and watch your traffic spiral out of control as people start to use it and check it out. Add a simple link to your site somewhere on the app and you’re laughing.

Of course traffic on it’s own doesn’t = cash. But if you follow the advice on this site, you’ll have no problem turning traffic into cash. A few affiliate links or CPC ads on your site and bob’s your uncle.

There’s a difference between creating a unique site or product and creating a demand for it. Use aggressive tactics to promote your site or idea – if you get x amount of traffic by next week, you’ll burn a $20 bill and put the video on youtube.

If you raise $300 in donations by next month, you’ll record yourself running around naked in a shopping centre…

These sort of techniques are great as they reward users with pure entertainment and novelty factor whilst catering to your financial needs.

The trick is to think outside the box and come up with something that will get people talking. The ‘Save Toby’ appeal worked a charm – where donations had to be made or Toby got killed (Toby being a cute fluffy rabbit!).

Then we had the guy who’s girlfriend promised him a threesome if his site got 1m hits. There’s also the guy who put his phone number on the web and tried to get as many calls as possible… All of these guys may not have made much cash directly from these ventures, but they are catapulted to e-celebrity status overnight and they can then go on and set up other sites with a huge following and major respect.

It’s important though to not actually kill a rabbit or chop your right arm off if you don’t receive what you’re looking for! If you do, you’re taking this making money thing a *little* too seriously.

You’ve all heard of the saying; “You can’t sell what you don’t have“. Well drop shipping proves that you CAN sell what you don’t have!

Simply put, dropshipping allows you to buy products which people have ordered off YOU. Instead of having the products delivered to your house and then ship them on to the buyer (that can end up expensive when you add in postage), arrange to send them directly to the buyer, and you take whatever slice of a ‘handling and services’ fee you want – write your own cheque, but remember that if people are gonna buy from you, you’ll need to price your product competitively.

You might ask why would anyone get me to order products for them when they can just order directly like I’m doing? Good question.

Firstly, they may not know about the cheap sites that I use to get bargains… they may not have a credit card which most of these sites require… they may live in a country which the product’s site doesn’t ship to… there are loads of reasons why there is a demand and profit to be made for dropshipping.

Here’s a couple of sites which may be of use if you want to try out dropshipping

• dealextreme.com (Good place to get tech stuff at great prices)
• altech.com.au (Computer parts from Australia)
• eyo.com.au (Another computer parts drop shipper from Australia)

Don’t’ be surprised if you see most of their stuff on ebay, selling for slightly more than what these guys charge.

Unique articles sell. They take time to write, but in the end they are worth it as content brings in traffic. Unique content keeps you safe from legal issues (copyright and all that), plus it keeps you onside in search engines… Search engines will crucify your site if they find out your site has stolen content on it. It’s a big no-no.

But a nice custom designed site, with say 10 articles on a good niche subject will sell for good money. You can hire article writers on elance, constant-content or forums like digitalpoint. Articles don’t cost much, some people charge per word, but 10 x 500 word articles won’t set you back any more than $10. Add in a custom design and logo, maybe another $20. A good domain name – $9. So that’s a total of about $39, you should have no problem selling the site (when it’s all finished) for $50+.

Of course, if you’re really on the ball you can design a site and write content yourself. I myself created a site, designed a header for it, then added about 5 small articles. Sold it for $30, and that was a pretty poor day at the office, it should have gotten $50+, but all it cost me was $8.99 (for the domain name), so I made over $21 just from that one site which probably took two hours in total to set up and write/design.

Had I got the full site designed and added more content, I probably could have sold the site for triple what I got. Laziness stood in the way however.

There are loads of free scripts out there and just as many paid ones that offer support.

Here’s some of the big name opensource scripts that require very little technical knowledge to install;

• Wordpress
• Pligg
• Joomla
• Phpbb
• Moodle

Creating themes and customizing the script slightly is quite often a very time consuming process, especially if you’re not familiar with design and slicing/coding.

The easiest way to customize a script or get a design/theme done is to simply outsource it to someone who knows what they’re doing.

Some successful examples of customized opensource scripts (like the ones above) are;

• Blogengage.com
• Hugg.com
• TechCrunch.com

These sites are all powered by free opensource software that you or I could install and use. All they did was tweak things a little and work hard to build up a community and traffic. Now, there are probably worth thousands each.

Closely linked to arbitrage, we move on to buying traffic and selling affiliate products on our site. I’ve metioned these networks before, but Clickbank (CB) and Commission Junction (CJ) are just two affiliate ad networks which display a big list of affiliate products and websites which allow you the opportunity to sell products and earn commission.

What we do is, we buy ads on google/yahoo/msn and advertise our site, which in turn advertises a particular ebook or product, which we have seen on CJ or CB.

The thinking behind this is that we may earn like $20 for the sale of every ebook we make. If we spend $20 on ads, that may get us 100 clicks, and if we get 100 clicks, we’re hoping to get maybe 2 people who actually buy the product. If every 2 people out of 100 buy the product, that’s $40 for us –  a profit of 100%.

So we are in effect, acting as sales people for a product we’ve no connection with, but if we like the look of the product and think people would buy it, then it’s worth promoting right?

These sites are all over the place – just google anything with ‘make money’ in the title and you’re guaranteed to find all sorts of sites selling ebooks and scripts that promise to make you money online. Most people don’t even care what sort of product they are promoting – hence all the spam and low quality sites selling dodgy ebooks and potentially illegal scripts.

This method of earning money involves a little extra work, but it is undoubtedly the most profitable, provided you do it right.
What is arbitrage? Here’s the definition; ‘The purchase of securities on one market for immediate resale on another market in order to profit from a price discrepancy’.

With regards to online arbitrage, I’ll translate that into plain English! We all know about google adsense and adwords. You’ve probably heard of YPN or yahoo ads, and maybe MSN ads also.

Arbitrage involves buying traffic from one search engine, and driving it towards another. Google Adwords is without question, the biggest CPC (cost per click) ad network out there. The downside of that though, for an advertiser, is that it can be quite expensive on a ‘per ad’ basis. Some ads could cost you $1 or $2 PER CLICK! That’s a hell of a lot of cash once the clicks start adding up.

So a more economical way of advertising would be to buy the same ads and traffic on Yahoo or MSN for a cheaper price than you would pay on Google.

Now lets think for a second… we’re using yahoo and MSN because google is more expensive, but if google is more expensive, then don’t they pay publishers more than MSN or yahoo do??

Yes they do. Google adsense will pay a publisher maybe 50c for that $1 ad paid for. MSN or Yahoo might only pay a publisher 30c for an ad that cost maybe 50c.

So how about we get our brains working here and buy ads on yahoo and MSN, but also use google adsense on our site for a higher payout.

After all, if we’re advertising a site about ‘football’, we’ll be paying for football related ads on yahoo/msn, but displaying football related ads on our football site. With carefully placed adsense ads and good blending, we have now created what’s known as PPC arbitrage.

If people click on your ads on MSN or yahoo, the chances are they will also click ads on your site (your google ads). So although this takes a lot ot testing and tweaking with ad units and blending and keywords etc, if you stick at it, you will eventually find a sweet spot that works and is profitable. You can also use those links I included earlier for getting a few free $50 & $100 msn and yahoo vouchers.