Archive February 2010

Eternal question: How to make money fast

Ok so I was thinking about this today. If I was starting from no-where and I had to learn how to make money fast with the internet what would I do? It’s one of those weird hypothetical questions because what exactly are the rules of the game? If you’re saying that I have none of the knowledge or resources that I have now to help me then it changes the situation quite a lot. But anyway technicalities aside I wanted to look into the question as I think it’s one every new person to the internet business world is asking. One thing I do want to clarify is how much money we are talking about and what kind of timeframes are involved. There’s so many get rich quick scams on the net these days that promise millions overnight with no work that I want to be realistic with people over what can be achieved. So what I’m going to look at is how easy would it be for a completely new person to the industry to make £500 extra a month part-time (I’m going to assume most of you still have day jobs).

• Writing content. I have actually talked about this one on the blog before and I really do see it as a legit source of income that you can just get started straight away with. The thing about writing content though is that you don’t really get paid all that much in the beginning. This is because there’s a big price range when it comes to quality of content as people are using content for all types of purposes. Most of the prices are in US cents and I’ve seen quotes from 1c per word all the way up to 3c. There was a post by a guy over at smartpassiveincome.com where he talks about how he started his online business just by writing guest posts for other bloggers. Seems like he was actually getting quite good money but I think the key to his success was getting developing a regular deal direct with bloggers who were looking for quality content. So there were no middle men and he was writing quality content for around 3c a word. He says he was only doing about 2-3 hours a day yet was making over £600 a month which is very impressive. So it does seem worth looking into but you’re going to have to wait for a while till the bigger pay cheques start to come in.
• Building websites. So as you can all guess this is my favourite method for making money because it’s the one I’ve spent most of my internet career on. It’s a method with solid foundations because as long as there’s an internet there are going to be people surfing around trying to buy things and if you can attract those people (even if it’s a small number) there is money to be made. There’s no doubt that this technique is much more technical than the last of just writing content for money however the great thing is that a website can be making you money while you sleep were a labour intensive things like content creation can feel more like a 9-5 job. One major problem with the website thing though is the time it can take to get results. Since Google and other search engines will be one of your main sources of customers you need to realise it can take a few months before you get any traction there. Still the webmasters who have mastered the overall skill are often able to generate money quickly.
• So this method is very unusual and it’s something I only recently learned about myself. The good thing though is it seems like a very fast way to make some extra cash, indeed some of the figures I’ve seen says it’s possible to make around £500 in a week or two with it. I first read about the idea at theregister which is an IT news site. They don’t usually have stories about making money through the internet but this “gambling for free”  idea caught my eye. Now don’t get me wrong I’m not advocating gambling as a way to earn money as I hardly ever do it myself. I don’t even play the lottery because I think it’s a system to keep people lazy and stupid. Anyway you may or may not know that many of the online betting sites give away cash bonuses for new players or so called “free bets”. They can do this because of the huge potential value of a new customer on these betting sites. The “free bet” can be anywhere from £10 to £100 and it’s added to your account as soon as you sign up. However the thing is you usually can’t use it until you deposit and equal amount of your own money via credit card and then you have to bet the whole amount (and hopefully win) in order to claim it. Ok so no secrets so far however there are also lots of sites that let you bet on a team to lose like Betfair etc and this means you could bet against yourself ie the free bet on the other site. So normally when you bet against yourself both bets cancel themselves out however when some of the money is free (ie 50% of one bet) then you are guaranteed a return. Now the return probably isn’t going to be huge as you can expect anywhere between 60% and 70% profit. So on a £200 bet 50% of which is free you could maybe make between £10 and £30 profit depending on fees and other conditions.  That amount of profit may not seem like a lot however when you consider the sheer number of betting sites that are doing introductory offers its clear you can make some good money very quickly. The original article here probably explains this better than I have done but hopefully I’ve got across the basics.

I actually have a few more ideas for making some quick cash but I don’t want to confuse people with more ideas than they need as the internet is often confusing enough. It’s also worth noting that if something’s too good to be true it probably so all the methods detailed above require a reasonable amount of work in order to earn a return. Even with the last “gambling” idea you have to keep detailed track of what you’re doing and spend time signing up to all these sites and adding your details, nothings easy lol. Still hopefully it will give you guys some inspiration on how to make money fast with the internet.