December 28, 2008

So, what are the ways to make money online?

Honestly, the real money is in the trading of financial instruments: forex, commodities, stocks and bonds. That's where we want to be. However, such things are either:
  • low risk, but low return, or
  • reasonable return, but significant risk as well.
The low risk strategies require very large amounts of money before overhead is negligible (mid 7, if not 8 figures). The reasonable return strategies probably require 7 figures to comfortably generate 6 figure income. With a bit of luck we can bootstrap from low 6 figures, so that'll be our initial goal: $200k net.

Initial "making money online" research immediately turns up the following:
  • be paid to click (PTC), be paid to read (PTR) email,
  • surveys and mystery shopping,
  • be paid to write articles for content aggregators,
  • paid per click (PPC) advertising,
  • affiliate marketing,
  • ebay and amazon selling,
and several, at best, quasilegal and/or morally questionable options. I'll only explore ethical business options here and, happily, there seems to be no need to look beyond those options.

Being paid $0.003 per click probably isn't intersting to you, but each and every one of these options is generating money for someone, so we'll give each its due in upcoming posts.

3 comments:

  1. Like your blog Zack. I PTC on 4 sites. Most of them pay .25 cent. On the face of it not much! However $30 dollars over Christmas for 90 mins is not a bad trade. Its more what you do with it is what counts. Because it goes into my paypal account in dollars, I can pay Godaddy. If I have to convert my £UK to dollars, I end up practically doubling the price. My Web sites are all hosted at Sedo, and although they are not pulling in much money there is a steady trickle of cash coming in. The word is trickle.... ie dripping tap. This is in Euros.

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  2. Thanks for the compliment JB, and for the info!

    I think a lot of people would be happy with $US 20/hr, particularly as a fallback. But of course at a 1/4 cent per click, you'd need over 2 clicks per second. Advertisers justifiably ask for a few seconds viewing time, so that level probably isn't going to be available outside of peak recruiting times like Christmas.

    Really good affiliate marketers can do better with residuals ... it's something to look at to see if it makes sense to spend time on. Of course, the real winners are the site owners, but to earn, they have to make the site attractive to advertisers, and that means reasonable ad view times, and at least some conversion (of viewers into buyers). I'll post some more thoughts on it tonight.

    I think the PPC strategy can eventually pay off, especially with a little bit of traffic building.

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  3. Affiliate marketing is the way to go for me because it's more of a low risk/yielding the biggest results type of thing.

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