40 Ways to Make Money Online

Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut… the list is almost literally infinite! These are just the crème de la crème of social networking sites, the ones we’ve all heard of.

But check out myghetto.com; it sold for $105,500 and made between $3-4k profit per month. It had about 200k members which was undoubtably the most attractive thing about it. Users = money from a buyers point of view – the more users the better.

Or how about jibble.com – sold for $12.5k just over a year ago. A few thousand members, brandable name, running phpfox – a common script. Nothing spectacular, but the owner netted $12.5k for his efforts.

Social networking is the future of the internet. If you can build a niche social networking site and drive traffic to it, ultimately getting signups, be prepared for a bidding war when you put your site up for sale.

I myself am in the process of developing my own social networking site – BeerChief. They ain’t cheap or easy to develop and scale, but if you have the cash to invest, those things won’t be a problem.

Integrate this with number 31 (getting a facebook app) and 39 (getting a toolbar made), and you’ve got yourself a real solid money maker on your hands with loyal members and huge exposure. You are diversifying and not putting all your eggs in one basket, and that, my friends, is the key to being successful online. NEVER settle for one revenue stream. Always experiment, always try new things and you shall be rewarded.

Alexa, Google, Firefox… these guys all have one thing in common – they all own a toolbar.

You may not know this, but Firefox earns most of it’s revenue from it’s google search feature.

Now ok, that is a browser, and not a toolbar, but you can see where I’m going with this.

If you have any sort of a unique service or product, get a toolbar made and integrate it with your site. Stumbleupon are another example.

If a toolbar is useful, and interacts with your favourite site, you will install it. That’s how users think, so all you have to do is create an exciting new service and mix it with a toolbar. Then your users will effectively have access to your site 24/7, anytime they browse the net!

The money is made through search revenue like google adsense. If your toolbar is acting as a default search engine, and stopping the user from going to google.com, then you are on your way to fortune.

There are toolbars for displaying site statistics, displaying your adsense revenue, displaying webmaster controls, whois results etc.. all you have to do is find a niche – ask yourself what would be of interest to people? Perhaps a toolbar that alerts you when you have new mail in your
myspace/bebo account? Or a toolbar that highlights a keyword when entered by the user?

You can use toolbars to link back to your site, or link to affiliate programs, even ask people to donate to a paypal account… if the toolbar is useful, people will install it. If it compliments and integrates with a quality website, it is a golden ticket to fortune.

Making toolbars is easier than ever and yet again (you can create your own here), if you’re stuck, head over to elance or rentacoder or getafreelancer to get one made.

Content is King, no doubt about it. In order to make money online, generally it’s a three step
process; Content = Traffic = Revenue.

All 3 are needed in quality and quantity to build a successful site.

Paying people to write content is probably a sound investment, as sound as you will get. Search
engines love unique and fresh content and if you have vast amounts of new content coming online
daily, you’ll rocket up the google rankings.

With all of this content on your site, you can then profit from affiliate links and targeted ads, for
example with adsense.

The great thing about a site with lots of unique content is that you’ll get all kinds of niches and areas
of interest. Through sheer quantity, you’re bound to start nailing down top slots in search engines
and thus driving highly targeted traffic to your site, which means more revenue and users will be
more likely to click on ads or affiliate links.

Ezinearticles, wikipedia, consumerreview… these are all sites powered by content and the more
content the merrier.

If you think about it, say you want to buy a camera, you’ll search for it, and more than likely click on
ads to buy the camera or click on any affiliate links you see as you’re very interested in the camera
(otherwise you wouldn’t be searching for it).

They say automation is the key to passive income. If we take an automatic car for example and compare it to a manual car, it’s less stress, easier to operate … the downsides are that you lose a certain degree of control and they’re more expensive to initially buy.

Doing everything manually and by yourself is free, but it’s time consuming. There comes a point where you have to ask yourself is it worth automating whatever it is you’re doing.

Say you have an ebook and are selling it. Isn’t it awkward trying to receive payments and manually send out the ebook to the buyer? Wouldn’t it be much easier to have it all automated so that the buyer automatically receives the ebook once he pays you?

Or lets take another example – sending a newsletter to a list of emails. Wouldn’t it save so much time automating everything so that the newsletter can be sent to thousands of people with the click of a button?

These are really basic examples of how automation can save you so much time and hassle. You can hire people to write custom scripts that will automate things for you – maybe it’s buying domain names or sending a text to your phone when you receive an email from ‘x’…

I guess this isn’t technically going to make you money directly, but I feel it’s a huge part of making money online – automation frees up your time and allows you to use that time to make money elsewhere doing other things. It is absolutely vital you have free time to think up of ideas and get
started on them… you don’t want to be manually sending out emails or sorting out payments for ebooks etc… if you can afford to automate, do it, and automate as much as possible.

These days, you can even hire what’s known as a virtual assistant who will do all your dirty work for you for a fee. Install scripts, manage sites, respond to emails etc… this can greatly increase YOUR productivity and lets be honest if YOU’RE the person hiring an assistant, you must be doing something right and therefore you have even more time to do other things right

Every now and then you may stumble across some superb offers. Whether it be a coupon you receive or a closing down sale – whatever.

Most people when buying something online will buy repeatedly off the same site if they’ve had good experiences. So despite the fact their may be products cheaper elsewhere, most people are too lazy or scared to buy from a ‘new’ seller.

Ebay is a classic example. Many people automatically assume ebay is the cheapest place for everything. They don’t even research anywhere else. I know that, because I used to think like that.

I’m going to give you guys a link which I know has products for cheaper prices than on ebay;
http://www.dealextreme.com/

As you’ll see from their site, they offer free worldwide delivery and extremely competitive products, with discounts for buying in bulk. These guys mainly ship computing/electrical stuff from Asia, but I use them all the time and have never had any problems. Beware though, if you’re buying in huge quantities and running up bills of $100+ there’s a good chance you may have to pay customs taxes, etc…

It’s a simple case of checking out ebay, making a list of prices for certain items, comparing them with prices from the site and then doing the math. If you can undercut other ebay sellers, you’re basically guaranteed sales.

A good example would be to bulk purchase 25 x 2TB hard drives and sell them individually on Ebay for a profit of $500+, not bad for a couple of hours work.

A site’s value is commonly worth 10 to 12 times it’s monthly revenue. That’s an unwritten rule in the webmaster world and of course there are exceptions to the rule e.g. if the site is newly set up or if it hasn’t been monetized yet etc…

Sometimes, you’ll grab a bargain and people will be looking for a quick sale or need the cash ASAP. You should never impulse buy or be rushed in to paying for a site, but there are a few quick checks you should make when buying the site.

• Is the pagerank valid?
• Has the site been banned from google or adsense?
• Is there traffic stats over a long period of time?
• What sources are the traffic coming from i.e. are there any paid ads taking in traffic?
• Why is the buyer selling the site?
• When does the domain name expire?

Fortunately for you, there are also a few free tools that I use which I’ll share with you to speed up the ‘research’ process.

• General site checker – http://www.spyfu.com/
• Check if banned in google – http://www.iwebtool.com/google_banned
• Check trademark – http://www.google.com/search?q=check+trademark
• Site value guesstimator – http://www.estibot.com

If all of those tools return no surprises, then you can be fairly confident you’re getting a clean and legitimate website.

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.