Are you gambling or making money?
You might not be aware but as I write this the US government is seizing some of the top online poker domains because they were illegally trading in the US. I think you’re not allowed to gamble in America unless it’s in Vegas (probably because they can’t tax it online). The reason I’m mentioning this is that for a long time many people saw playing poker on the internet as a realistic way to earn money online. I never did I have to mention, and not just because I’m terrible at poker but because 99% of people will never be good enough to make a living from it. The problem was that many people were selling poker playing as a legit way to make money from home, almost like it was a job lol. Again I’m not saying it doesn’t work for some people but if it does its because:
- Often these players have to play 100s of games to carve out a profit, even if you’re a great poker player you still only have a slight advantage. You have to maximise that advantage over 1000s of hands.
- They practice for years to actually get good at the game. All those eBooks that say you can beat the pros with 2 weeks training are lying.
You see to me given the above a much better investment of my time would be to create something worthwhile that attracts visitors and customers. Also I don’t want a living that can be wiped out by some government at the drop of a hat, what would you do if your main income source disappeared overnight?
But how do you create something that has value, especially on the internet where everything seems to have been done before? As I’ve mentioned a few times the online world has never been about being completely original as some of the best businesses just made better versions of existing ideas. What I’m talking about most though in terms of value is content, because ultimately content is what decides how successful a website is (and how rich you get). I forget how many times I’ve arrived at some ecommerce site that has technical stats on their products but no opinions/reviews/insights on why I should buy their product, its lazy marketing and it makes my head hurt.
So what content does actually “sell” online? Well for a start people really love product videos because they illustrate what you’re selling in a dynamic way. If a picture tells a thousand words then a video is probably a million. But what if your selling a service instead, I.e. yourself? Ok so if you’re trying to explain some business process then put it into an info-graphic with lots of nice colours/arrows/cartoon characters to explain what it is you do. The attention span of people online is about half of other types of media, get to the point of what you do and give them a chance to buy it. Webmasters seem to get stuck in this rut of overselling things, people just want the basics of what it does and trust that you’re going to get it to them.
As you can tell I’m still on the creating websites bandwagon because I think it’s one of the easiest ways for someone new to create an income online. But not only that, to me owning a website is like owning a property, it’s an actual assent and not some scheme like filling out surveys or trying to learn poker. The problem occurs when you ask people to make an investment of time and money into something like building a site, trying to win against a casino is more appealing! Still I know a lot of people who are getting into internet marketing these days with various rates of success, I’ve never said that it was easy.
So back to my original point about creating content that sells, there are 4 points that you want to stick too:
- All content on your site must be original and created by yourself, don’t outsource unless you really know what you’re doing.
- Different markets need different types of information, for instance my blog is mostly about information so it makes sense I have a lot of text. But if you’re selling RC helicopters then you need some videos up there.
- Find the right tone for your content, yes if you’re a solicitor then you can’t be too jokey but for most other general sites a casual tone is better.
- Give people some way to talk about your content and even make content for you. Allowing comments and reviews is great for involving people or take it a step further and create a forum. It does need managing as you have to delete any spam that gets though (which is inevitable) but the value you get in interaction with your customers is invaluable.
Ok so this post is getting a little long, I know some of you are just thinking when is this guy going to shut up and tell me an easy way to create and income fast! I suppose I could make something up and sell you some concept that’s never going to work, but what’s the point in that? There’s enough junk online already without me adding to it, then again did I mention I’ve just worked out a way to beat the roulette wheel?
Paid surveys and competitions won’t make you rich
I remember reading years ago about a family that was constantly entering competitions (1000s) working on the theory that they would eventually win something and they did. What they didn’t mention though is the amount of time they had to spend filling out all these forms and signing up for offers. In fact if you added up all the time they spent vs winnings it came out at the minimum wage! Also bear in mind that many competitions require you to buy something or at a minimum give away some personal information, there are very few truly free competitions.
Another craze going around at the moment is the whole paid surveys thing. Now it’s true that there is a big market for statistical information especially by large companies who have to base products and services around the way we think. But the price they actually pay per survey is often ridiculously low ie Scambusters recently blogged how it worked out around £0.20 an hour. Also these surveys can be really detailed and require a lot of personal information, I don’t want to go all tinfoil hat but do you really want to be throwing your life history around the net for under 50p an hour? At a minimum don’t be surprised if you get a huge increase in junk mail to your supplied address.
This week I was also reading on a popular “Money” blog about a system to beat the roulette wheel at online casinos called the Martingale system and if anything it did give me a laugh. Don’t you think if there was a way to beat the casino everyone would be doing it? Actually some people have beaten the casino before with things like card counting but that method is scientifically proven while Martingale has lost a lot of people their life savings.
So far this post has been pretty negative and maybe you’re wondering if there are any legitimate ways to make a living online? The key is the word “Earn” because to me if all you’re prepared to do is follow some £99 eBook then you don’t really deserve to make it. All the people I know who have been successful online have brought their own ideas to the table even if it is someone else’s system they are following.
A big part of it may be desperation as with money getting tight many people are looking for a way to make money on the net from home but that desperation often leads to wishful thinking. But some people are definitely getting rich though, do you realise that all of those bloggers and webmasters who send you to survey and competition sites are getting paid a fortune for doing so? You can get angry at the middlemen or you can analyse what they are doing and find the real profit for yourself. Remember for the people pushing these get rich schemes it’s not a scam to them, because they really are getting rich from it!
So what am I doing to increase my earnings? Well there’s a limit to what I can talk about here for one as I have mentioned before the more people in any given market the less money there is. But I will say that I’m always working on more than one method at a time, partly due to my short attention span and my need to keep myself entertained. I do hope to give away some solid money making advice here but I can promise it will always be based on reality and not the latest gimmick. Until next time.
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.
