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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?