(part time or full time, and working at home)
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. This list
was put together more as a laugh. It may change your life. Or it may annoy you
enormously because of its er, brevity. I hope it does both.
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's overlap in everything so 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?
No, 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 show people 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, I do intend
expanding - in due course - 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 and start your own business. Or use a search engine to find ways
to make money online. It seems to be 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 use just one SE like Google, don't have the vaguest of ideas of the
advanced search features available, and don't know the benefits to be had using
specialised SEs, local SEs etc. )
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. I obviously don't have a clue as I'm giving it all away. You
can now ignore everything else I say. But don't go spending money on internet
cons promising to make you a millionaire and 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. Do you live near a sea or
river? Or 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 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. 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 myspace.com/theircompanyname
or the equivalent at blogger, mybloglog, or other big destinations. 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 (+ <brandname>sucks.com)
are taken and which do they need to buy? With a few of the free domain tools
discussed on this page 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!
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.
The rest of the 101 to come later.
101 Ways to make money online
