Archive for March, 2006
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