Arbitage Opportunties, Brokerage, Finance businesses, miscellaneous
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Big bucks
76. While most webmasters use PPC to refer to Pay Per Click old timers use
it jokingly to refer to P*rn (where *=o), Pills and Casinos. Those are
probably the three biggest money areas on the net and have probably made
more millionaires than any others. But they are very competitive and are
difficult markets to er, penetrate. However, there are lots of legal,
legitimate opportunities here some of which are expanded on
here.
Arbitrage/brokerage
77. Example of a pure arbitrage opportunity: For a while buying traffic via
Google Adwords and sending that traffic to pages of little content and
Google Adsense ads generated reasonable profits when done astutely. Sure,
Adwords and Adsense are two sites of the same coin. But I did say you
needed to be astute to recognise where the opportunities were and you need
to test, test, test. There are
still lots of
contextual
arbitrage opportunities about. Especially when you work across programs
(e.g., buy traffic from MSN, sell to Yahoo).
78. There are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in the finance world as
discussed below but if economics and finance talk bores you to death,
there's sports arbitrage. Different online bookmakers may offer different
odds on a sporting event. By taking the better odds at each bookie you
could come out ahead irrespective of the actual outcome of the event. If
you're really clever you could make a program to do this for you. Why
don't the bookies adjust their odds based on what their competitors are
offering? Because
they have to balance their own books. Their prices are decided based on
how their own punters are betting.
79. Hosting: You don't need to buy a lot of server hardware to
provide a web hosting service. Many big hosting
 companies allow
"reseller" accounts where you sell hosting plans to customers and the
hosting company will host them all for you under your Reseller account
umbrella. You get to charge customers as much as you want. Some
Resellers provide value added services and charge more for these. At
places like
WHT
you'll find that resellers sometimes sell their customers as a "bundle"
i.e., you can pay some money to buy a reseller "business".
80. Related to the above is free hosting where you provide small website
owners free hosting and in exchange you serve ads to all their pages to
make the revenue to pay the hosting company and yourself. Early pioneers
of this model are well known names like
Geocities and
Angelfire.
81. Being a broker can be done in a thousand different ways. There are some
entrepreneurs making healthy profits just by bidding for projects on
places like elance and
guru (and
others) and farming them out to a bank of
writers/programmers they use on a regular basis.
Finance
82. Trading from home is really catching on in many parts of the
world. You don't need to be an expert on stocks & shares. You can trade
on commodities, currencies, lots more. Trading futures allows you to
leverage even small $100 amounts of capital into huge fortunes (or
bankruptcy).
83. Gambling is a far cry from trading futures but a route to riches for
many. No, not the traditional horse racing type of gambling where the only
long term winner is the bookmaker. I'm talking gambling
against other gamblers, I'm talking the numerous ways of gambling online (search).
And there are a million
books and ebooks that claim to "teach you how to win".
84. HYIP, or High Yield Investment Programs are just what
 they say on the
tin. They are also highly risky. You invests your money and you takes a
chance, but some pay as much as 100% per day.
How do they do it? A very
few are putting your money into investments with even better rates of
return. Others are simply going to keep paying out the first few customers
with investments collected from later ones.... and then they go bust.
Pyramid style. Maybe the ones who make the money are the ones who get in
early... or actually start HYIP programs.
eBay/Amazon etc.
85. What's it with eBay? You just can't get away from them. Their bulk
"dictionary purchase" of ad terms from the Google Adwords/Adsense system
means you find ads for eBay no matter what you're looking for, even if
it's for toenail clippings or dead pets. Whatever the reason for their
success you can join the bandwagon and sell your rubbish on eBay and
convert a garage of old junk to hard cash.
86. And when you've acquired a fair amount of experience with selling your
own rubbish, start selling others' rubbish. How to get your hands on
enough trash? Place an ad in your local paper to do house clearances, or
just buy stock from wholesalers in - yes, you guessed it - eBay itself.
You can get anything from unused toasters to umbilical cord containers. A
lot of ebay sellers are actually shopkeepers; they buy stock new from
wholesalers and sell them in eBay instead of a physical bricks and mortar
shop... and make a healthy living doing so.
87. You've now got a lot of experience buying and selling in eBay. It's
time to write a book or ebook on how to use ebay to generate millions. It doesn't
matter that you haven't made millions yourself. People still buy these
books even if it's just to learn their way about ebay which can be quite
daunting for some. And you can sell it on ... you guessed!
88. Don't fancy writing? Then set yourself up as an
eBay assistant.
eBay itself will send you people who need help with their complicated
system. And you can charge them a commission.
89. Alternatively, setup a shop to
accept goods from those who can't list them themselves. Yes, a physical
shop. There are lots of them springing up all in big cities. The
operation is simple. You take something in from somebody, sell it on ebay
and retain a percentage for all your efforts.
90. Think building an ebay business is too much like building a normal
business? If you've got the capital you can take the easy route. A lot of
ebay "shop" (businesses) come up for sale in
site-for-sale forums and with
business brokers. The ebay
username and feedback generally accompanies the business so you continue
to benefit from accumulated goodwill (though the "transfer" is
something that eBay may not approve of).
91. Opportunities to make money in eBay are limited only by your
imagination. There's money in everything from making connections (putting
people in touch with other people) to coming up with or commissioning software
to make the average ebayer's life simpler or more productive (thousands of
such programs already exist). There's even a business model involving just
searching for and finding items that have been misspelt in the listings.
92. It's not just eBay. Any merchant big enough or third party affiliate
manager program - from Commission Junction to Clickbank - has
opportunities. For example, you can
create an Amazon affiliate site.
Others
93. Set up a proxy (example). People seem to want to surf at work AND
access sites their IT system blocks them from viewing. A
proxy allows them
to get around that restriction.
Some proxy services get by just on the
advertising (as it's easy to get enormous page views in the proxy
business). A very good one will even have people paying a few dollars
each. There are several ways to
monetise a proxy.
94. Enjoy networking?
Social networking Web 2.0 style?
Make money with it. If you build up
sufficient reputation in places like Digg people will start approaching
you to start some buzz on their company or their new product. At one point
Netscape offered top "Diggers" a sweetener os $1,000 to move over to their
competing service.
95. Selling databases of parts/directory listings/modified or value added
DMOZ data/ email lists. The DMOZ
directory is a massive directory put together by volunteer editors. And
they give away their content for free. Kind of. You can download their
database and combine it with other information - like phone number and
postcode from Yellow pages- to add value / enhance those listings.
You could then sell the enhanced product.
96. Find jobs for your friends.
An easy way into the personal recruitment business. Know a friend
who's just right for a particular job? Make the connection between friend
and employer and you could get up to $5,000 for a few hours work.
97. Get paid for your unused computer cycles. Is your computer sometimes on
while you aren't actually sitting at it? Then it's using electricity but
not performing "work". Joining a distributed computing group like
SETI
lets you use that computing power to help reach some worthy/unworthy goal.
However, you can also
use those cycles to earn money by selling them to companies who have
large computing tasks then can't do completely in-house.
98. Take the cap around: Do something nice. Provide some information that
helps someone, perhaps someone grieving for a lost partner. Or info on how
to volunteer to help orphans in Africa, or find an internship. Make it useful.
Or just make it very funny. Then stick
a donation button on there for people to support your work. You'll be
surprised at how well a donation button works on the right type of site.
No, it won't work on this page - or any page promising to make you a
millionaire.
99. Start an
article directory. Giving away free articles (with embedded links) is
one way for webmasters to build incoming links to their sites. For other
webmasters these free articles are a great way to fill out their otherwise
bare sites. Be the middleman. Popular article directories make a lot of
money from the contextual ads they post on all the free articles they are
displaying on their site.
100. Start a content site: The most common way webmasters earn
money is probably contextual programs like
YPN and
Adsonar. But mainly
Adsense. It's simple,
quick, doesn't involve any complicated new skills. You simply put up a
website with useful/informative content and some Google provided code, get
a few links to the page and wait. Traffic will start flowing to it. The
volume would depend on the topic and quality of content. Visitors would
see ads served by Google and related to the content of the page. Each time they
click on an ad you get anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. I
personally know at least 20 webmasters who earn in excess of $10,000 per
month this way. There are thousands of others.
The 101st method is my personal favourite because I find it
hilarious:
There was this bloke who bought an email list of one million email
addresses. He sent half of them a stock tip that a certain stock was going
up, the other half got the same message predicting that the stock would go
down. 50% of them saw him proved right. He ignored the rest and split this
50% into two groups. Half got an email with another up prediction and the
other half got the same email with a down prediction. He rinsed and
repeated a few times till he was left with about 15,000 people who saw him
get it right several times in a row. They were obviously very impressed.
He then invited them to pay $5,000 each for a seminar with him on picking
stocks! :)
CONCLUSION
I make a healthy living online and with multiple income streams (no I
won't tell you how much. Remember, I'm not trying to sell you anything). I
put this article together originally because friends and family kept
harassing me to show them what I did for a living so they could do it too.
I collected some of the ideas for things I had done myself, got some more
from the thousands of
site-for-sale threads (and detailed conversations
I've had with those sellers) and threw some more obscure/zany ones in
here for good measure.
May money just flow to you. If finances are tight right now, take heart
- money happens, it's easier than you think. I feel very privileged to
live in these interesting times, times full of opportunity, times where
I've been able to give up my day job, work at my leisure, enjoy my kids
growing up, retire decades earlier than I normally would and spend time
writing this drivel instead of running the usual rat race. God bless the
Internet and Good Luck. You CAN do it.
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