I want to know the answer also. Sure it is possible. And there are many excellent and innovative ways to do so. But let’s put it this way: if you are asking this, most likely you are like me, clueless.
I believe it takes money to make money. Maybe other’s people money instead of from your own pocket, but even then you will spend some time finding the right connection and convince people people with the capital you need. One month is not very realistic.
The closest example to your question might be The Million Dollar Homepage ( http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com )which was started on August 26, 2005 and last pixel was sold on January 11,2006 on ebay. Alex Tew made $1,037,100 through one of the most innovative way ever. But even that takes roughly 4 and a half months, and some amount of capital for the web hosting.
Instead of looking for quick money, you will better equip yourself with good knowledge and ability (e.g. through heliumknowledge ) so when the opportunity arises, you are ready.
March 9th, 2006
Indeed! There are many excellent opportunities out there. They pay worldwide, using international cheques or to you Paypal account.
What you need is Internet access, and, depending on what you want to do, some amount of cash. And account at http://www.paypal.com to get your payment. Then, you’ll need to have patience. Lots of it.
But whether you’ll make your first million on the Internet or barely enough to cover your phone bill, that’s another question. Just like any thing on earth, there is no free lunch.
If you plan to get rich from Internet, you’ll have to work hard and smart, finding suitable ways to get income.
Here are just few ways for making money online, some can be combined:
1. Online store : create your own website to sell your products.
http://sbs.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/
Minimum Investment = $200
2. Online auction : put your items for others to bid
http://www.ebay.com
Minimum Investment = $0
3. Ad supported / affiliates:
create a website with some contents and put advertisement on it
https://www.google.com/adsense/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-2375284-9587133?node=3435371
Minimum Investment = $0 (if you use free sites, e.g. http://www.blogger.com )
4. Borrowed store : put your design on other people’s item
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/
Minimum Investment = $0
5. Answering questions: earn money by answering questions
http://www.heliumknowledge.com
http://answers.google.com/answers/
Minimum Investment = $0
* Below are other ways to earn income but are controversial, some people earn lots of money, some poeople get their investment burnt.
6. Autosurf :
While these websites promise fast returns without much work, be aware that they might close down any time without any warning. When they close, most likely you’ll lose your investment. Only play with money you can afford to lose.
http://www.studiotraffic.com
http://www.12dailypro.com
Here is a long list
http://www.autosurfmonitor.com/
7. Paid email : get paid for reading
http://www.a-get-paid-site.com/get-paid-to-read-email.htm
http://www.getpaidguides.com/email/companies.html
8. Paid survey : get paid for filling in surveys
http://www.surveypolice.com/ratings.php
Whatever you are doing, these are some good guides to read on:
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/
http://www.myownbusiness.org/
http://www.oncallgeeks.com/
http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/new-internet-business/
All the best !
March 9th, 2006
Get rich schemes are indeed very attractive for men and women regardless of who we are. It is the desire of everyone to be rewarded with the riches and abundance.
But does get rich schemes work? Yes, sometimes they really do. And you can really get a handsome reward for that. But many times, participants of the get rich schemes lost their money.
Get rich schemes can be in the form of ponzi schemes, autosurf, mlm, etc. They take money from you (they will call it investments), sometimes in exchange for a product or service that really doesn’t worth as much. But always, the selling point is that they will promise a good return for your investment.
Some of this schemes will take your money and just disappear. But the more organised ones will operate for quite some time, giving the investment returns for those asking to get back the investments, funding it with the money collected from new investments. When the confidence grows and more and more people are willing to put more money on the schemes, that is when the operator of the schemes disappear with the money.
So, do they work? Yes. As easy example. If today you put in $10,000 into a Studio Traffic ( http://www.studiotraffic.com ), your account level will be $100,000 after 9 months. After that, you can get $33,000 every months just surfing Internet. But as you can see, the risk here is that we don’t know how long studiotraffic will survive. If it survive forever, you get your money $33,000/month forever. If it closes down tommorrow, all your money go down the drain.
If you are more willing to learn, and go slowly, capturing opportunities around, working with other poeple to acquire the riches, I’ll suggest you to read around, looking for ideas, and gain knowledge along the way. But of course, that’s if you are willing to accept delayed gratification, which not everyone does.
March 10th, 2006
It depends on how you want to make your money. You might want to make your question clearer. What do you mean by “Internet business”? What do you mean by “web sites I can use for free” ?
1. Having your own website
If this is what you mean, you need a domain name and a web hosting.
Domain name is your Internet address, e.g. www.my-own-web-site.com
Some web hosting companies will include free domain name if you buy their hosting package, but don’t count on that. Domain name is cheap. You can get one for less than 10$ per year at http://www.godaddy.com . Good selection of a web hosting provider is more important.
Web hosting is where you store your files.
There are many websites providing free hosting, some will give you a sub-domain name, i.e. http://your-name-blah-blah-blah.freewebs.com .
These free hostings provide free hosting in exchange for exposure to their own website.
Some of the more popular ones are http://members.freewebs.com/ or http://www.bravenet.com/
For a good list of free web hosting providers, you can see
http://www.free-webhosts.com/best-free-webhosts.php
If you are serious about making money, I strongly recommend putting some investment. Paid hostings are more reliable, more presentable, easier to maintain, have less restriction, and load faster.
Addaction ( http://www.addaction.net )is a good start. If you are not expecting a lot of traffic (especially in starting months), you can use a starter package for less than 50$ /year. Their technical support is superb, and it comes with many good scripts built-in.
For example, if you are looking to have online store to sell things, you can install oscommerce in few clicks. After that, you need only enter your products details.
If you have good contents, you might consider putting Google advertisements ( https://www.google.com/adsense/ ) on your website to generate income.
2. Use other people’s website to sell your products/ services
Ebay ( http://www.ebay.com ) is the choice for many others selling in the Internet. You can create an account for free and start posting your items for sale immediately.
If you don’t have your own products but want your design to be included with other people’s product, you can try Cafepress ( http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/ ).
3. Others
There are thousands other ways to make money in the Internet.
Whatever you are doing, there are good guides to read on:
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/
http://www.myownbusiness.org/
http://www.oncallgeeks.com/
http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/new-internet-business/
Wish you all the best
March 10th, 2006
Here are good important factor you need to consider when getting a loan :
- Loan Amount : How much do you need, and what are they for. Remember, you need to pay for Interest, so don’t borrow more than what you need.
- Collateral : What asset do you have for getting the loan? Or is it collateral free?
- Interest Rate : How much Interest do you need to pay for the loan? Is it worth taking? For example, if your business gives 5% annual return, while the interest rate is more than that, don’t take the loan.
- Payment Term : When do need to make payment back? How long until you finish repaying? What if you default the payment?
March 11th, 2006
Selling business plan generally involve doing these 2 things well:
- do up a good business plan
- sell the plan to a partner / capitalist / loan provider
To do up a good business plan, have a look at these sites. They tell you how to form a business, from idea creation, writing proposal, to setup and operation.
- Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/
- From the same publisher as the Entrepreneur magazine
http://www.entrepreneur.com/
- United States Small Business Administration
http://www.sba.gov/
- Small-business articles from the Microsoft Small Business Center
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/articles.mspx
- Starting a Business: Advice from the Trenches
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/startingabusiness/
- Business Plan Software, Samples, and Strategy
http://www.businessplans.org/
- UK Small Business
http://www.smallbusiness.co.uk/
- Small Business Resources, Business Advice and Forms
http://www.allbusiness.com/
- Rich Dad Investment & Business : Read the articles & join the forum
http://richdad.com/
- Join Meetup.com and find your local entrepreneur/business group
http://www.meetup.com/
- For online business
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/
http://www.myownbusiness.org/
http://www.oncallgeeks.com/
http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/new-internet-business/
While some of the above links will give you methods for selling the business plan, general sales techniques applies too.
A master salesman is the salesman that has perfected his/her sales techniques so well that the buyer will have no problem granting him/her the deal.
Well-known sales techniques includes:
- Asking questions you know that your prospect buyers will say “yes” to. The more “yes” they say, the easier it is for them to say yes when asked to buy.
- Comparing two options, where buying your product is the superior one.
- Never argue with your client, always agree with them, even if you are absolutely sure they are wrong. Find a way to twist to your benefit if it really matters.
- Make your product seems to be worth more than it really is, then discount the price if you need to.
- Good packaging/ presentation/ store design/ website layout all makes difference to whether or not your prospect buyer will say “Yes!”
March 11th, 2006
I started using Gmail, the email service from Google about two years back. Since then, it has well replaced Yahoo mail as my main mail account. Gmail has plenty of nice features, including the 2 gigabyte storage, free pop server, friendly and fast user interface, and great search function.
It works so well for me that I wonder why there are still people who don’t use gmail. No doubt you need to get invite from current users instead of just registering at their website, but there are lots of people giving the invites in exhange for a very small amount of money.
As appreciation for the gmail, here I dedicate this post for giving free gmail invite for you.
If you need the invite, just leave your email address below and I’ll give the invite in a few days time. I can’t promise though, because there are times I don’t have Internet access for days, but I’ll try my best.
Don’t worry about spammer’s crawler, your email is not visible to other visitors.
March 14th, 2006
Autosurf programmes promise a good return with very little work. Most of the times, this is a charateristic of a ponzi scheme. So you put some money, you will get paid with money put in by other people, and these people will be paid with money paid by the next “investors”.
As such, when there are no more enough new “investor” to support the payout, these schemes are doomed.
The wildly popular autosurf programme 12dailypro (http://12dailypro.com) closed down last month (February 2006). Recently, Studio Traffic, another very popular one, is in a very serious problem over stormpay hooha and resignation of top management (read below).
So, to invest or not to invest in these schemes, the choice is yours. You may be able to make your fortune before it goes bust, or you may lose all the money you put in if it closes down the next day. Personally, I’d say, play only with money you can afford to lose.
From http://www.studiotraffic.org/forum/showthread.php?t=43489
Hello,
I received this news few hours back. Our top management has resigned. This means that offices in US, Canada and Spain will be closed.
With this shocking news and with recent problems with stormpay, I am sad to inform some changes which will affect members.
Members, who are in profit, please stop surfing as we can no longer afford it. We hope you will understand that we have done our best and this is something similar to natural disaster which is beyond our control. If you have funds in studiopay or in your studiotraffic account, please take note that in our TOS, we have never guaranteed payout. Your payout is determined based on our advertising revenue. Less advertiser revenue means that we need less people surfing. You can, however, still use your account for advertising purposes.
I am sure there are people who lost money with stormpay. We are victims too. Stormpay is still taking money from us everyday, we are not sure when they will stop and have expected that we lost our reserves (hundreds of thousands) we have with stormpay.
All is not lost as we can still depend on local funding from our offices worldwide. However, with top management resigning and offices closing down, we will lose almost 90% of funding.
Members who are not in profit, please send email to notinprofit@studiotraffic.com. What we will do is that in the coming months, we will seek venture capital and raise funds. Once we raised these funds, we will send it to you. Do take note that we are not obligated to do refunds or to send you back what you sent in. When you upgrade, you are getting accesses set with different account level so you can advertise your products or services better. When you upgrade, we have a refund policy where we will return you what you sent in, in the first 7 days. After the initial cooling period of 7 days, we are not obligated to do any refund as it is assumed that you accepted what you received.
We are doing this because we want nobody to lose any money with us. Please give us a reasonable time to do this as we need time to get it arranged. You can, however, still continue to use your account for advertising purposes which you have paid for. There is no need for you to continue surfing. All of you will automatically receive shares to all studio programs. If we cannot manage to raise venture funds, we will sell your shares in all studio programs and pay you back so it is the same.
We will close down studiopay website for a couple of months because with Studiopay staff resigning, we do not have enough manpower to handle it. We will do a complete restructuring with a new management team in it. Once ready, we will bring studiopay to public.
I hope all members will understand that we have done our best and what happened is something beyond our control. All studio programs will continue to run. We will continue to allow signups to basic accounts. Most of our current advertisers have mentioned that they do not need high level account holders to surf. As long as we can get a lot of people to see their ads, they are willing to continue to advertise with us. Our expenditure will be reset to the lowest because we will be getting only basic accounts members to surf.
After this, we will, most likely, have less than 15 staff working on this. Due to shortage of manpower, we can only attend to non profit members for the time being. Please send to notinprofit@studiotraffic.com.
As for other members, once we get everything back, we will continue to get you back to surf. Please give us some time to work things out. Please do not send emails because we do not have enough manpower to handle it.
Members please do not worry. As long as we start afresh, we are confident to turn things around and it will be better than before. Many of our staff has indicated that they would like to continue to help out without any payout. If you like to help us further, please email to support@studiotraffic.com.
I hope all members will understand that we are doing the best we can. We will continue to work hard and make sure no one loses money with us.
Sincerely,
John
March 15th, 2006
Starting Your Own Business
- by Rick Hendershot
Once you make up your mind you want to go into business for yourself, that leads to a number of important decisions. You know you want to be your own boss, but you’re not sure what kind of business to go into. Here are two different ways of addressing this question.
The “Production Model” of Doing Business
Most of us start out in business by applying what we might call the “production model”. We are all capable of doing certain things — cutting hair, cooking food, framing houses, fixing teeth, designing buildings, etc. — and we set about to sell these services. We ask ourselves “What can I do? What are my skills?”, and then we ask “How can I sell these skills? What products can I produce that take advantage of these skills?”
Many, many people believe the production model is the only way to do business. They believe Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams” was uttering an important truth when he said “If you build it, they will come.” They just change the words around a bit:
“If I set up my restaurant, people will come.” “If I start building bird houses, people will flock to my store.” “If I set up a lemonade stand, the neighbours will buy some.” “If I learn to be an airline pilot, surely someone will hire me.”
And generally, this works. People go to school to become dentists or engineers or teachers, and they actually end up being dentists, engineers, and teachers. Other people love to cook or make bird houses, so they set up restaurants and craft shops, and miracle of miracles, their restaurants and craft shops are actually successful.
But this is an oversimplification of the marketing process, and distorts what actually happens “on the ground” when a new business is started.
One important reason trained dentists end up with successful practices is because the dental market is tightly controlled to allow only the right number of dentists to graduate every year.
And the reason we can point to successful restaurants and bird house companies, is because we are looking at them after they have been successful. What about all the restaurants, construction companies, and land development conglomerates that were not successful? Their owners were probably equally skilled, and enjoyed cooking and serving the public as much as the next guy. They built it, and nobody — or at least, not enough people — came.
So obviously going into business is not as simple as “If you build it, they will come.” There are factors we cannot control, variables we cannot predict. And once we acknowledge this, we are forced to begin looking for an alternative to the “production model”.
A Real Life Example
Let me give you another example. Many years ago, long before the internet even existed, I had a client involved in the music business. This company had been around for many years, and had grown to become one of the country’s major publishers of certain niche music products. These were aimed mostly at the music-in-schools market, and included things like sheet music, children’s music, and specialty record albums, featuring a stable of relatively low profile artists.
Like most companies, this one had built up a set of “skills”, and had developed specific products and services in response to market demand. There was just one problem. The market was changing and the company was now losing money. My job was to help them sell more of their products.
Sometimes being an “outsider” is not a good thing. It seemed obvious to me that the market was changing, that sales of the old faithful products were doomed to decrease rather than increase, and that the long term answer to their problem was to develop new products in response to new demands, rather then try to flog the old ones. It was hard for me to be a “true believer” in the long term success of the company. It looked to me as though we were fighting a losing battle.
Of course, this was the beginning of the end of our relationship. As I’ve said, my job was to help them sell stuff, not reorganize their company. Most companies have a very difficult time shifting gears, and they certainly don’t want to hear about it from some young whipper snapper who knows virtually nothing about their business. Within a few months we lost the account. And within a year or so the former client declared bankruptcy, and was forced to contract to about 25% of its former size.
I don’t think this is very unusual. Lots of companies — probably most — are successful for a while, and then fall on harder times and are forced to change. My point is that eventually the “production model” stops working, and we are forced to consider alternatives.
The Most Obvious Alternative is the “Marketing Model”
When confronted with these obvious facts of business life, most marketers trot out the theory they learned in Marketing 101. “You must begin with an analysis of your market, determine what people are likely to buy, and then develop products accordingly.”
In other words, the marketing guy (predictably) advocates that the marketing / production process be inverted. Marketing should be used to determine which products are likely to be successful in the market place, not brought in after the horse has left the barn. Marketing should come before production, not after. Don’t worry about what skills you have. Skills can be bought or rented. Worry about what products you can sell. And then figure out how to make them.
The purest application of the marketing model these days is in internet marketing. For example, take Ken Evoy’s instructions in the Site Build It manual where he details how to choose your marketing “niche”. The process goes more or less like this:
1. Choose four or five possible areas of interest you might enjoy. These are your “website concept” candidates ΓΆ?? the type of businesses you should consider going into.
2. Then analyze each of these website concept candidates in terms of the potential traffic you can generate, products you can sell, etc.
3. Choose the one with the best sales potential.
This sounds like a perfectly reasonable procedure. But in fact it is rather revolutionary for most non-marketing people. They are being told “Don’t get “production” underway until you make some important decisions about what people are likely to buy.” This is the “marketing model” in a nutshell.
Problems with the Marketing Model
The “pure” marketing model has one obvious problem. It assumes we are all sitting around a table as consultants with unlimited options and infallible information about all of them. The model seems to assume we can just feed the information into our decision-making machine and have the answer to the question “What should I do?” pop out the other end.
Even committed marketers know it does not work this way. Every person or organization has their own special likes and dislikes, and generally are good at doing some things, and not so good at doing others. Ken Evoy’s procedure addresses this by saying “Be sure to choose something you feel passionate about.” He should probably add “…and make sure you’re good at it too.”
Think of it like one of those industrial food processing units where you put a variety of things in the funnel at the top, and it spits out products at the bottom. What we feed into our business idea processor is not just a bunch of statistics about products and markets and prices, but also information about our own preferences, skills, habits, and experiences.
And we must keep all the ingredients going into the top of the machine in their proper proportion. It’s not just about what people will buy. And it’s not just about what we are good at or what we enjoy. It’s about all of these things at the same time.
About author
Rick Hendershot publishes Linknet News | Get Links to boost your Link Popularity | Cheap hosting - Cheap Personal and Business Web Hosting
April 11th, 2006
Starting an Online Business? Got an Online Business? Get your Thinking Right
- by Penny Shellswell
Have you ever found yourself thinking any of the following: ‘I’m not sure I can do this. I’m putting a lot in and not getting much out. Who’s to say I’ll succeed. After all, most online businesses fail. But I’m a determined person, so I’ll press on with what I’ve been doing and maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones. Mind you there is so much competition. If I don’t give it a shot, I’ll never know’.
I would like to act as a frank, plain~speaking good friend. My aim is to help you clarify your thinking. This is an essential step, I assure you, that can not only be a new springboard for your online home business but also can save you a lot of soul~searching anguish later.
Having a vision of where you want to go and what you want to achieve will play a crucial part in keeping you focussed.
Jonathan Swift said, ‘Vision is the art of seeing things invisible to others’.
Your vision would perhaps be to have time with your family, may be more than one home, several holidays a year, to play golf regularly and not be at the beck and call of a ‘boss’. Vision is being able to see the kind of lifestyle that you are prepared to commit work to in order to achieve. Your vision is delivered by achieving your goal which might be creating a highly profitable online business.
Albert Einstein said ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’.
Imagine driving the car of your dreams, travelling to exotic places, owning a boat or achieving whatever it is that excites you. Get some pictures stuck up around where you live. Get some holiday brochures, real estate details, go test~drive that dream car. Get excited about the kind of life you would like to lead.
So success begins in the mind. Henry Ford said ‘If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right’. Our thoughts determine the quality of our lives. The mind is always the battleground. It’s where we discuss with ourselves the pro’s and con’s of various situations and ideas. Our emotions and will play a big part too. Doubts, fears and problems can often loom bigger than the advantages. We seek information to help us come to the right decisions.
The kind of people we are will determine how our mind processes all these thoughts directing us towards a decision. The decisions we come to direct us towards our destiny.
We are what we think about. You are now the kind of person you are because of what you have thought about over the years. You have got into a routine of thinking. So, how do you tackle situations? How do you think? How do you arrive at decisions?
Let’s answer a mini questionnaire. Your honest answers to the following questions will help you decide what action you need to take.
1. Are you an optimist? 2. Do you see problems as challenges? 3. Do you face your fears? 4. Do you like your own company? 5. Are you glad to be alive?
The answers to the above questions are indicators of your attitudes. Right attitudes are essential for success. They are an aspect of how your thinking responds to situations, opportunities and challenges.
If you respond positively to the above questions, then you display strong personality attitudes as a potentially successful business owner. If there were some ‘no’s in your answers, then I would strongly recommend reading some books that will help your development.
Dr. Joyce Brothers said ‘Success is a state of mind’.
If success is a state of mind then we need to re~program our mind accordingly. There are a couple of aspects to this. Re~programming our attitudes and Jeff Keller has written an excellent book to help you called ‘Attitude is Everything’. The second re~programming involves the words we use.
Words are powerful. They are literally life or death.
Don Gossett’s book ‘What you Say is What You Get’ provides excellent direction. Listen carefully to the way you speak and the content of what you say. A keen listening ear will quickly see ways to improve. Plutarch, the Greek historian, biographer and essayist who lived in the first century BC said ‘In words are seen the state of mind, character and disposition of the speaker’. 2000 years later his words still ring true.
So, what does all this mean?
1. Have a vision. Set your goals. Write them down. 2. Extract what you need from the recommended instructive books.
Then at the start of every day, and during every day, for the next 30 daysand regularly thereafter, without fail: 3. Look at your vision. Imagine the results of achieving your goals. 4. Practise your new attitudes. Practise the new way you say things and how you say them.
Create New Habits. The upshot? You have the mindset of a winner and your success starts here.
About author
© 2006 Penny Shellswell Helping you develop successful internet work at home business opportunities. Download Free 325 page ebook “Dotcomology - The Science of Making Money Online” and sign up for my Free “Marketing Gazette” at www.LotsMoreComingIn.com
April 11th, 2006
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