October 26th, 2008
In part 1, I talked about some of the successful models that have enabled many individuals to make money online. After reading it, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, it’s all good but takes too much work.” So in this part 2, I will talk about how to make money with the least amount of work. But caveat emptor, there is no such thing as free lunch…
Both Spedia and Cash Fiesta allow people to make money while surfing online. It’s one of the oldest ways to deliver advertisements from the Internet to your desktop. After enrolling in their program, you download this installer. Make sure you place this installer in a folder first, because it simply extracts all the files to whatever folder the installer currently resides in. And this can cause a mess in your file management. Afterwards, a horizontal banner that contains many flashy advertisements appears on your desktop, which can get annoying very fast. Nevertheless, if you use “extended desktop” with two monitors, this is not so bad.
Another way is to enroll in Google’s AdSense program. If you’re using Blogger.com, it is very simple to set it up (simply go to Blogger help and search for “AdSense.”) Once enrolled, you can place a variety of contextual ads on your blog and/or your personal page.
Categories: Internet |
Tags: AdSense, Blogger, Internet, money | No Comments
October 26th, 2008
In Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, he talks about how the Internet “flattens” the playing field. The Internet has indeed empowered many individuals. Nevertheless, people have long associated Internet with both “freedom” and “free.” I remembered when Yahoo Mail first started to charge for POP, forward, and other services, many users turned away. But paradoxically, many individuals somehow are able to find ways to make money online.
EBay is already a household name. Many people (800,000+ according to a recent study) are already making money either full-time or part-time on eBay. With eBay’s recent introduction of ProStores, people without the means/knowledge to develop full-fledged e-commerce sites have at least three quick channels (auction, eBay Store, and now ProStores) to sell. Yahoo Store is another solid choice. Of course, nowadays, there are a slew of merchant sites available for everyday web users such as Amazon.com and Overstock.com. All of these options seem very attractive, but as any successful seller knows, to make money, one has to source the perfect suppliers, and that takes a lot of work.
Nevertheless, many other innovative ideas have sprung up in the past. For example, Save Karyn is a site to, well, save Karyn, a shopaholic, from her $20,000 credit card debt. Karyn basically put up a site asking people to donate money. She doesn’t need to be saved anymore and is now writing books about her experience (sold in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Netherlands, Croatia, Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan). It’s safe to say, she has not only achieved her original goal, but also made a healthy profit along the way, thanks to the Internet.
Give boobs (be warned, there are some adult content links) is another interesting but very successful example. Michel is an Asian lady that put up a site asking people for donation so she could get a breast enhancement. The site was launched on Dec 2002, and she achieved her goal of $4,500 on April 2003. Quite an amazing feat!
My personal favorite is The Million Dollar Homepage. Alex is a University student that wants to avoid the huge student debt and make some money as well. His idea was to make $1,000,000 by selling 1,000,000 pixels on his site for $1 each. The site was launched on Aug 2005, and Alex achieved his goal on Jan 2006! Now how many of us can make a million that quickly?
No, these people aren’t exactly techies. But they’re able to capitalize on the power of the Internet.
To be continued…
Categories: Internet |
Tags: Amazon, Auction, eBay, Internet, money | 2 Comments
