Get rich off the net... so I don't have to!
See below for the latest addition to my money-making ideas! WordBay - the easiest way to earn from eBay!
Just to bring you up to speed, I don't know about you, but I occasionally get an idea about how I might one day get rich off the internet, but somehow I never get round to going through with the ideas due to lack of time or know-how or I just can't be bothered.
Some of the ideas are stupid, but some of them actually might be worth trying!
I have been meaning to make a little site where I share some of the ideas I have had, absolutely free! Only I never even got round to doing that, either!
So this Squidoo Lens is the best I can come up with!
Below, there is a list of all the ideas I have had for getting rich off the net! There's no catch - if you can be bothered to get off your lazy backside, unlike me, you might get rich rich rich off the internet!
I'd rather at least someone was...! And when you do get rich, rich, rich, remember your old friend markowe, won't you :)
Oh, and just so you know, I do have some ideas I am NOT telling you
Choosing a hosting company
Lensmaster recommends BlueHost
We recommend BlueHostIf you are just dipping your toe into the murky waters of online marketing and money-making you may not yet have a host for your web sites and are not sure how to go about choosing.
Well, the worst thing you can do is choose at random - that's pretty much what I did and ended up with a shoddy (well-known, but I won't mention them here) host that couldn't do everything I wanted to do (even as a novice webmaster) and had lots of downtime, so my websites weren't even working a good portion of the time! That's not to mention the incredibly overloaded servers which took forever to serve up my pages.
How do you know "what you want to do" though? If you are new to all this webmastering, then you probably don't really know for sure. And I can't definitely tell you what you will need either. But I am going to stick my neck out and say that the minimum you will want to do is:
- have more than one domain (preferably unlimited), all hosted on the one account, so you can start your multi-million dollar web empire!
- install PHP applications. What's that? Well, almost any free website software you use will need this: WordPress, Joomla, forum software like PHPbb, VBulletin, etc.
- tweak certain server settings. Without going into detail, you DO want to be able to do things like have nice search-engine-friendly URLs on your site, like articles/cooking-outside, rather than §ion=articles&article=cookingoutside - NOT all hosts allow you this flexibility!
After having a bad experience with my initial choice of host I went with BlueHost and have never looked back. For a relatively small-time webmaster like me, it's absolutely fantastic, huge amounts of storage, responsive servers, little or no downtime, unlimited domains and all for about $6.95/month.
So as long as you are not notching up tens of thousands of visitors a day (trust me, that's not going to happen overnight) BlueHost is a great, affordable solution. So go for it, start that web empire now!
WordBay - make money with Wordpress and eBay - FREE!
Make money by creating eBay niche sites in just a few minutes using WordPress
Here's a new way to help you make money! I wrote a little WordPress add-on which allows you to EASILY create an eBay niche site (like this one, selling Used Musical Instruments) using an existing or new installation of WordPress.
Check out WordBay here!
You DO need a hosting package and a domain - but these are dirt cheap now (see the site for some suggestions), but after that you can have a site up and running in as little as 20 minutes! After that you can sit back and wait for the pennies to roll in!
Check out WordBay here!
You DO need a hosting package and a domain - but these are dirt cheap now (see the site for some suggestions), but after that you can have a site up and running in as little as 20 minutes! After that you can sit back and wait for the pennies to roll in!
Get rich off the net by taking photographs!
Shutterstock sells your photos for you
Here is another one you may not have thought of: are you a budding photographer? An undiscovered amateur talent? Ever thought you might make money selling your photos? Shutterstock lets you do just that!
Initially you have to upload 10 photos for approval and then after that you can become a fully-fledged member, upload your photos and get paid every time someone downloads them.
What's the catch? Well, have a look at the standard of photos - it is actually quite high. I certainly couldn't get any of my photos approved. Also, they are looking for the typical "stock" type of photo, that are likely to be used by marketers. Nature photos are pretty much out, so all those fabulous sunsets you snapped on holiday probably aren't going to get approved. It's the really good photographers that are getting rich.
But if you have just a little bit of talent, well, there are people making thousands per month on Shutterstock, and they are probably still saving their best photos for full-blown professional sale, so there's room for you too... what are you waiting for!?
Initially you have to upload 10 photos for approval and then after that you can become a fully-fledged member, upload your photos and get paid every time someone downloads them.
What's the catch? Well, have a look at the standard of photos - it is actually quite high. I certainly couldn't get any of my photos approved. Also, they are looking for the typical "stock" type of photo, that are likely to be used by marketers. Nature photos are pretty much out, so all those fabulous sunsets you snapped on holiday probably aren't going to get approved. It's the really good photographers that are getting rich.
But if you have just a little bit of talent, well, there are people making thousands per month on Shutterstock, and they are probably still saving their best photos for full-blown professional sale, so there's room for you too... what are you waiting for!?
22nd December 2007
Get rich off the net - ideas.
Here are some new ideas that I have actually been using:
1) Start a blog where you discuss problems from a particular area. Use the pages to promote software products that will solve the same problem. You can sell software from RegNow as an affiliate, and some of the commissions are very generous, even 40%, because a big margin is earned on software!
For example, write a page about how to prepare chicken-wings and then promote an e-book of chicken-wing recipes!
It's easy to sign up to RegNow and the whole system is quite straightforward.
2) Use WidgetBucks on your website or blog (you don't have a website or blog?! Go make one now!). There has been quite a stir about WidgetBucks, but the fact is, if you have a blog or website with mostly North America visitors, this little widget looks great and earns you money every time someone clicks on it or buys something through it! It's one of the rare schemes through which I started making money straight away!
1) Start a blog where you discuss problems from a particular area. Use the pages to promote software products that will solve the same problem. You can sell software from RegNow as an affiliate, and some of the commissions are very generous, even 40%, because a big margin is earned on software!
For example, write a page about how to prepare chicken-wings and then promote an e-book of chicken-wing recipes!
It's easy to sign up to RegNow and the whole system is quite straightforward.
2) Use WidgetBucks on your website or blog (you don't have a website or blog?! Go make one now!). There has been quite a stir about WidgetBucks, but the fact is, if you have a blog or website with mostly North America visitors, this little widget looks great and earns you money every time someone clicks on it or buys something through it! It's one of the rare schemes through which I started making money straight away!
Something to click
Oh, here are a few links that I no doubt have some ulterior motive in sharing here!
It's gotta be... cool red stuff!
The place to buy cool red stuff - from red mp3 pla more...0 points
The First Page of the Internet
The place where it all begins!0 points
OK, here they come - prepare to get rich!
The ideas that never were....
This list will, I hope, be ever-expanding, as my ideas continue to match my laziness and inertness.
Just one thing: feel free to use these ideas to get rich, but I won't take any responsibility for any consequences of trying any of the ideas. I will be happy to take a cut though. Are you ready?
Just one thing: feel free to use these ideas to get rich, but I won't take any responsibility for any consequences of trying any of the ideas. I will be happy to take a cut though. Are you ready?
- A viral "family connections database".
Been done before, I know. But the idea of this one
would be that you enter your own name and the name of at least one close relative, along with your email addresses (yeah, I know, but people can put in secondary mail addresses, doesn't matter - it would be strictly NO SPAM, of course).
You would enter what your family relationship is to the person (they would have to confirm it in the email they receive), and I suppose you could enter friends as well.
The database would start to grow family and friendly connections between people, and you would ensure that there was (publicly-available) data on famous people in there too.
Eventually you could start doing things like searching to see if you can find connections between people! And it wouldn't be like a community/dating/social thing - that's boring, get out and meet real people! - it would be so you could type in the name of someone famous, for example, Simon Mayo off the radio and it would say like "your cousin John's cousin has an aunt whose cousin is Simon Mayo". Wouldn't that be cool?! EVERYONE would try it - at least once... Well, you get the idea!
And the whole system would be open, and free - none of this paying to contact the people on the list - and all the love would be shared around (and lots of ad revenue made, or something).
Easy to do, I reckon, if you know anything about database programming (I don't), and you could end up with a member base of millions, with a bank account to match! I just can't be bothered though. - Capitalize on people's extreme boredom! (poipoipoi, lkajsdajsd and kjhkjhkjh).
OK, do you know what one of the things is that people do in moments of extreme boredom while sitting at their computers?
They type things like lkajsdajsd, poipoipoi and kjhkjhkjh into search browsers, or the URL window. These are phrases obtained by thrashing the keyboard in moments of, usually, extreme boredom or frustration.
Surely you can capitalize on this? You need a site which caters for extremely bored or frustrated people (I'm gonna hazard a guess and say it's men usually) and is optimized for these "spontaneously" generated keywords. Quite tricky to find out what they are, but you could use something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to at least get an idea of the search traffic for a particular phrase. For example, if you key in "lkjlkj", it actually indicates a certain volume of searches! Oh, but looky here, somebody's thought of it already! The advertiser traffic is high for this phrase too! And look at the similar keywords that get generated - practically all related to the enlargement of a certain male appendage.
Are you following the logic here...?! Why not offer these poor, bored, frustrated fellows something a bit more fulfilling? I dunno - use your imagination!
Research into some of the other common "random" key combinations. None of them generate THAT much traffic by themselves, but if you could optimize a site for a number of them, why... the sky could be the limit (well, the ceiling at least).
Check out this example I knocked up in five minutes, focusing on poipoipoi, lkjlkjlkj, hkjhkj, and, particularly in the case of left-handers, asdasdasd.
It has, to date, generated approximately 3 hits, so you can see there is potential there! - A "getting rich off the internet" site.
Put together an actual decent site full of ideas about how to get rich off the internet, where the point would not be to sell your own crummy, rehashed book on Beating Adsense or whatever, but to actually give people valuable ideas that they would get rich from and then be forever grateful to you!
Naaaa... stupid idea, come to think of it... - Big, massive errors database.
What do you do if you are using a program, any program, and it comes up with some strange error, and you have no idea what the problem is?
Wouldn't it be handy to a have a database of errors of all possible kinds, compiled painstakingly by some poor lackeys, where you could just key in a section of the text (as I normally do, but using a search engine) and it would come up with some possible solutions, or links to them.
Chances are someone has already had the same problem, and very often they do have a specific explanation and a workaround of some kind. And the answer is OUT THERE somewhere.
You could generate revenue with the usual combination of ads/affiliate stuff, and the largest part of the job would be trawling around the net collecting all those errors from the forums, manufacturer help pages, etc. etc.
Any volunteers? - Collect LOADS and LOADS of email addresses from all over the internet and then bombard them, millions of them, with advertisements for some product, preferably of a slightly dubious nature.
JOKE!!! - Write a blog about something you are learning about now - say, a new software package or something. Ten to a penny that there are people out there encountering the same problem as you, and cannot find the solution on the support sites because the problem is too "obvioua". When you solve the problem, post a solution to your blog. You can carry advertising to support the blog.
Who wants to be a millionaire?
More musings on getting rich off the net!
Do you know, I honestly, truly do NOT want to get rich off the net, or anywhere else for that matter, other than, possibly, by hard work, building the "real" bricks-and-mortar book business I co-own. But even there, most of the fun is in getting there.
I suppose it would be nice to have a... well... chubby Adsense check plop onto my doormat every month, but all this stuff about earning millions while I sleep... Naaaa.. Where's the fun in that...?
I will keep posting my ideas here for "getting rich off the net" (or at least, for a reasonable Internet business), but... on your own head be it..!
I suppose it would be nice to have a... well... chubby Adsense check plop onto my doormat every month, but all this stuff about earning millions while I sleep... Naaaa.. Where's the fun in that...?
I will keep posting my ideas here for "getting rich off the net" (or at least, for a reasonable Internet business), but... on your own head be it..!
Getting rich quick sucks!
...or "Why I gave up on the lottery!"
National lotteries are a case in point, in illustrating my aversion to getting rich quickly!
Think about it - the lottery basically enables ONE person out of a participating population of MILLIONS to get filthy, stinking rich overnight! And that in the face of odds of tens of millions to one!
The lottery has no regard for whether that person DESERVES it (by whatever measure that might be determined), whether they are a GOOD person, whether they NEED 100 million dollars..!
When the National Lottery appeared in the UK in the 90's, I bought a few tickets, until I realised, hey, do I actually WANT to become a millionaire overnight?!
The answer had to be... NO! I don't want to be catapulted into the echelons of the megarich at the roll of a numbered ball! What about my friends, my life, my way of thinking? I am happy the way I am!
From that moment on, I have never bought a lottery ticket. The risk is just too great...
P.S. To illustrate my point, check out this debate from a couple of years ago at http://board.dogbomb.co.uk/archive/index.php/t-27387.html
Of course, most people there are assuming that winning the lottery is a good thing! What if winning the lottery were actually a fitting punishment for a criminal, a guarantee of his future misery and despair!
Think about it - the lottery basically enables ONE person out of a participating population of MILLIONS to get filthy, stinking rich overnight! And that in the face of odds of tens of millions to one!
The lottery has no regard for whether that person DESERVES it (by whatever measure that might be determined), whether they are a GOOD person, whether they NEED 100 million dollars..!
When the National Lottery appeared in the UK in the 90's, I bought a few tickets, until I realised, hey, do I actually WANT to become a millionaire overnight?!
The answer had to be... NO! I don't want to be catapulted into the echelons of the megarich at the roll of a numbered ball! What about my friends, my life, my way of thinking? I am happy the way I am!
From that moment on, I have never bought a lottery ticket. The risk is just too great...
P.S. To illustrate my point, check out this debate from a couple of years ago at http://board.dogbomb.co.uk/archive/index.php/t-27387.html
Of course, most people there are assuming that winning the lottery is a good thing! What if winning the lottery were actually a fitting punishment for a criminal, a guarantee of his future misery and despair!
