making money on the internet

I'm an avid reader and I love to think about what have I learned from books over the years. One of my favourite topics is making money, but I'm not one of those "I want to be a millionaire" types.

I recently read "The four hour work week" by Tim Ferris and its probably the nearest anyone has come to successfully describing my philosophy of life. (See the Amazon link below)

Basically it runs like this:

1. Once you get beyond the basics (food, water, shelter etc) then happiness is derived from doing not having. I think lots of people never really learn this lesson, just look at the reports in the Sunday newspapers to see that having lots of material goods or money does not make you happy.

2. If happiness is derived from doing then you have to do what makes you happy! Pretty obvious but not at all common. I looked back at books that I had read, hobbies that I taken up (and some that I had discarded along the way), people I had spent time with and the times when I had been happiest to eventually understand that I enjoy teaching people (I get a buzz from seeing them learn new skills and develop those skills), flying light airplanes (relies on my own skill and has to be done well to survive), travelling to different countries (so much to learn from other nations and peoples), cooking and eating good food (a simple pleasure which does not need Michelin stars or anyone elses opinion to make it great) and being near the ocean (can't explain that one but I know that a lot of people feel the same way).

2. Knowing what makes me happy means that I now know how to spend my days. So, in order to do this I need to develop as many income streams as possible since having a full time job and working hard at it will inevitably take up over 60 hours per week. Even if that job is enjoyable, I don't want to rely on a single source for income since all jobs are temporary if you really think about it.

3. Since I want to spend my life doing stuff and this relies on having some money to live (I believe that the actual amount is a lot lower than first thought) then I need income from somewhere that is as automated as I can get it. The obvious answer is the internet and internet businesses. In business terms I can automate order winning, order fulfillment, invoicing and cash collection.

Ok, having reached that conclusion I set out to learn all about internet based businesses. Wow - what a lot to learn! I'm still learning but its a fascinating topic. My first idea was to build an ebook site (a very common idea) which can not only be used to sell ebooks but also, I've discovered along the way, to host pictures for ebay items, host automatic download items, set up affiliate links etc. I went through several versions of the site to finish up with the current designs at
www.internet-ebooks.net

Once I had this set up I set about learning about driving traffic to it and its slowly building up. I learned about adsense, classified adds, blogs and a host of other ways of driving traffic. Take a look and let me know what you think of the site, I'd love to hear your comments.

I then wrote a couple of ebooks, including:

"How to Collect 50,000 Tesco Clubcard Points". I sold this on ebay when they allowed digital download and I remember selling about 30 copies. Then ebay changed the rules and banned digital downloads so I changed to selling it on CD-ROM, which required me to learn new skills such as making a CD autorun, creating ebook covers, creating packaging, building the download page, automating the production of the discs etc. You can see the result at
Tesco.ebook.googlepages.com


I then developed another product called "Create Your Music Money Machine". You can see the result at
http://internet-ebooks.net/recommends/the_music_money_machine.html"


One of the best sites I found for automating disc production is:
www.kunaki.com

It's a really cool site which will allow the production of discs, production of the packaging (its very professional), and delivery.

To completely automate the process its best to get hold of a product called "Discmojo" which will:

capture buyer/customer lists and use it to send out offers and promotions to maximize your profits.

automatically send the unique order ID and receipt to the customer through Kunaki thereby vastly limiting your support requests.

allow instant payment to PayPal once the customer pays for your CD/DVD. No minimum commitments or monthly fees!

It comes with full installation videos and once you set it up, you can start receiving payments and set up a new set and forget income stream. . .so, it's absolutely in line with my philososphy as described earlier. Check it out here:

internet-ebooks.net/recommends
/discmojo.html



The other tool which I have found invaluable is a specific piece of software to automate digital delivery of ebooks. It delivers an automatic download link which is customised for the buyer and allows only a specific number of downloads. Again the result is very professional. The product is called "SmartDD" - take a look at it here:


www.internet-ebooks.net/recommends/smartdd.html

To get your copy of SmartDD.

Click Here to Get It Now

A great product and again I have woken up to orders delivered overnight by this product with the money in my paypal account!

Ok, enough for now and still lots to learn!
Hope you enjoyed my journey so far and see you soon.