101 Ways to Make Money Online
Update, Jan 2011: For
the last few years I've had several thousand people a day reading this
page. Yes,
per day! Many of them write in.
But, please, if
you have a suggestion for making money online or like
some assistance with making money online,
go to
our forums rather than emailing me.
Otherwise, continue to the article...
Disclaimers
There's no catch and I'm not trying to sell you an ebook. Or anything
(read
about conmen who do). I'm not
even signing you up for a newsletter, and none of the links in this
article are "affiliate links" that earn me money.
Some ideas here are nice and have halos, others smell of dog urine ... but all these methods allegedly
generate lotso dosho, and every single one is legal at least somewhere.
There may be overlap; some ideas may be repeated (and some may
not be covered at all), but I'm still maintaining there are
101 ways to
make money online,
partly because it makes a good headline. No, solely because it makes a
good headline
. It sucked YOU in, didn't it?
You won't get anything for nothing, but there are a lot
of things you can get for
nearly nothing. Like getting to pick holes in my
list. Go ahead. Pick holes and then link back here to send floods of
visitors to see how
stupid I am.
I've put together a lot of these ideas from thousands of hours
discussing businesses for sale with their owners. They've shared with me
how their businesses operate, how they make money online, how they built their
businesses up etc. They've given me access to their traffic stats, their
earnings and accounts and tax figures. Many even gave me access to their
Adsense or other "main earner" accounts. Some of those businesses were so
irresistible that I bought them. And sold them. And bought others. It's a
game. I love it.
Most of these business ideas can be run from anywhere in the world,
even the United States, Australia and other non-English speaking countries. For
consistency sake all figures are quoted in US dollars.
Each method is summarised in a single small para so appreciate it's not
the complete unabridged version. And, no, I haven't tried each one, so out
of the 101 business models to make money online 102
may be completely dud. But
at our forums I do expand on
some of the money-making ideas that worked for me.
More disclaimers will come when people sue me (suing can make you
money, see #66)
Finding business ideas:
1. Spend all day browsing Site For Sale forums (like the
list we have here) for the myriad ways people earn money online. People
looking to sell their sites actually tell you how they make money! Pick
one that suits you. Research it a bit, and away you go to start your own
business. Or use a search engine to find
ways to make money online. It seems so easy that it's almost
impossible to find someone who
doesn't know how to do it. But why
stop at one search engine (SE)? Most people get to less than 1% of the top
qualify info they're seeking because they rely on just one SE,
don't have the vaguest idea of
advanced
search features available, and don't know the benefits to be had using
specialised SEs, local SEs etc. ).
More
search ideas.
2. Bundle the two above to tell other people how to
make money
online. They always want to know. It doesn't matter if you don't know
yourself, you can still charge them for it. Trust me, over 90% of the
people selling "Learn How To Make Money Online" products just read a few
ebooks and now pretend they are experts. Don't go spending
money on internet cons promising to make you a millionaire.
Here's
how to spot them.
3. Be more inventive with your search. Look for
small business franchise newsletters. Or for home jobs in your
particular niche or hobby. (And check point #2 above for those
specialised SEs). You can also go through the appropriate
DMOZ categories
(examples:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12)
But using "search" is just the start of the game. There are simply
so, so many ways. We hope you hang around to find out.
4. Like the guy you can pay to
stick a message in a bottle for you and throw it into the sea. He's
made tens of thousands of dollars already. And there are
several others
like him in all parts of the world. They really are cluttering up our
waterways. Do
you live near a sea or
river?
Join the cleanup of those
bottles and get your council to contribute.
Domains
5. The dot com gold rush made many millionaires but there's still plenty
of money in domain real estate and still some good catches available. A
good dot com may be difficult to find now. But there are a lot of
gTLDs
and
ccTLDs from the .info to .eu to .tv to .co.in
to .co and they all present
opportunities being
discussed in several good
forums. Put your thinking hat on, buy a famous word domain for a few dollars and put it up on the domain selling sites.
6. Lost your thinking hat? Hang out at
SEDO.
DNForurms,
Afternics and other
places where
domains are bought and sold. Provided you learn enough about
the market to recognise bargains you could make a living from just buying
existing domains and reselling them.
7. If you're smart you'll run
dictionary checks against available domain
names and auto-check them against search volumes (using
OST,
Wordtracker etc.) for that term and Pay Per
Click (
PPC) rates in the major ad networks
(
example) to work out which ones are likely to
be more profitable (
how
to make money with PPC). If you can pick up the domain for a profitable term
that's searched for often you can use a
domain parking program. Or post a little bit of relevant content and
get a link or two ... and the search engines will start sending you
traffic. If the phrase people are typing in coincides exactly with your
domain name it gives you a great head start with SEs.
8. If you're smart AND a linguist, you'd be doing that in
multiple languages. And not paying for any domain till you've
tried it free for five days to see if it does indeed get any type-in
traffic (and how well that traffic converts). After you've tried it for
five days and dropped it there's nothing to stop you immediately picking
it up again for another five day trial. Strange, but true. It's not
kiting,
it's legal.
9. Misspellings. Massive opportunities still exist in the misspelling/typo
market. People trying to get elsewhere land on your site instead ... and
you sell them stuff (or use the
domain parking idea). Some even tempt fate by making
PPC
opportunties out of
typosquatting on trademarks. Finding typos has
never been easier. There are many tools that will
find misspellings for you. How easy can it get?
10. Domain parking and
type-in traffic: People sometimes
guess at URLs. If they want a plumber
they may try plumber.com though they've never used that site themselves.
Find terms that people may be typing in (I will provide a detailed guide
to this when I get a chance), buy the domain and populate it
with ads. There are several ad programs to
monetise your parked domains.
Or combine this with the previous idea to buy plummer.com or similar typo domains
to make money online.
11.
Drop catches. People sometimes forget to renew their domains and these
expire. Picking them up will give you some remnant traffic from sites that
link to this domain/people who've bookmarked it etc. In some cases the
traffic can be pretty high. Provided you're fast enough to replace the
copyrighted content that was there with something else you can make quite
a profitable business from doing nothing else but this.
12. A variation on the above. Sell the domain back to the previous owners.
Note that you may want to tread carefully and get familiar with the rules
for that
TLD before you start sending off ransom notes. For example, with
ICANN (domains that end in .com, for example) the moment you send the previous owners an email
saying you've got their domain and you'll give it back for $10K...
you've lost. It can't
look like a ransom demand. Be reasonable
and read the small print of the
UDRP. No UDRP required if
you're sitting hostage on twitter.com/theircompanyname or the equivalent
at blogger, myspace or other big destination. LOL, watch them
kick themselves and sack their web advisors who told them about taking
the "dot info" but omitted to mention the importance of protecting the
brand by owning the associated myspace directory (and others)! And it costs you
nothing!
13. Run a domain management service. Hundreds of thousands of
webmasters (or more) have a large portfolio of domains. A lot of them would like the boring
bit taken out of their domain management. You can run their
DNSes or just a service reminding
them when
each domain comes up for renewal. Or an automated monitoring service to tell
them when one of their domains/sites is inaccessible.
14. Start a directory to list domains for sale. That's what people like
SEDO do. You can get money just for allowing domains to be listed in your
directory.
15. If you're running a service putting buyers and sellers of
domains/sites in touch with one another you could get money for add on services (like
providing
escrow
facilities). For ideas have a look at what existing domain intermediaries
offer.
16. Run a domain research service. Wonder what happens when a manufacturer
is looking to name a new model car? Or starting a new range of
clothing? They need trademark and patent research but now they also need
some domain research. Which of the literally thousands of combinations and
misspellings (+
sucks.com) are taken and which do they need to
buy? With a few of the free domain tools discussed on this page,
here and one or
two more - like
free DNS tools - and a little time you could provide them a service
they'd pay a lot of money for.
17. Start your own country: Whoa! yes, you're reading it right. If you've
heard of
Sealand (
what
is Sealand) you'll know that starting your own country is not that far
fetched. Once you have your own WhackyCountry you can apply for a .wc
(yuk) TLD. Sell millions of domains. Keep some for yourself. Ever wanted
a Google.___?
18. Perform domain services for businesses and then send them a proforma
(even if they've never heard of you). Explain that it's free this time
but you'll gladly keep acting for them for a small fee. For example,
there are thousands of big businesses whose half-wit
webmasters/ developers didn't put in a redirect from the non-www to the
www versions of their sites (or vice-versa). One entrepreneur made a few thousands just
from pointing out to businesses how they were losing hundreds of
customers every year who were landing on
http://xxx-companyname.com and finding
nothing there.
I'll talk about domain opportunities some more on
this page when I get a chance.
Buying and selling internet businesses
19. Many sites runs on "auto-pilot". A common price these sell for in
site-for-sale forums is 12-24 months' worth of net earnings (silly
price, but it's true). Provided you don't mess the site up you can recover your capital in
as little as 12 months and then ... sell the site to recover your capital again.
Double your capital every year. 100% return. Sack your stockbrokers. It
really is a crazy world!
How to buy a business.
20.
Site flipping doesn't require as much capital and expertise as many
people believe. Like property flipping,
you buy one that needs a
bit of TLC. Do it up, then sell it on for a whacking great profit. And,
the beauty is you never have to deal with tenants!
21.
How about cornering a little market? There are
DMOZ
categories with grandfathered sites (sites that have been listed for many
years) which aren't being updated. If you can pick up a few sites in the
same category and merge their content suddenly you "own" that niche. That
opens a lot of possibilities as all roads lead to you and if you recommend
a product on multiple sites, people are going to think that product is the
best and are going to click your affiliate links to make you money.
The rest of the 101 to come later.
Only kidding, only kidding, here's
Page 2 >>
New: To
assist the hundreds of people writing in every month asking for help with
website businesses or offering suggestions and advice on other ways of
making money online, I've started the
forums. It's free to read and you can join the discussions if you
register.
It's an incredibly useful resource with thousands of information and
advice packed posts and, in the spirit of this article, it's all free.
Note to new members: Quality of discussion is very high and spam is not
tolerated so tread carefully.
Your
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On
that warm November morning in 2002 when I hit publish on my first ever
blog post I had no idea that I was doing something that would shape my
life for the next decade and beyond.
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you’re not satisfied with The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing—31
Steps to a Profitable Blog after 60 days, let me know and I’ll refund
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Your
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