Here are some really good ways that you can guarantee to make some money on-line and off-line if you are prepared to put some effort in. If you have ideas and experiences to share, write them as a comments below. You will need to register first.
(1) Work as a free lancer on oDesk
I have not personally signed up to oDesk as a freelance worker but I know someone who has. I gave Andrey 140 hours of English lesson so he could earn his living on oDesk and he has achieved that. During the time he was taking lessons he told me about a number of contacts who had given him business. Now he just works for one firm full time through oDesk. He earns about $75 per hour and is occupied full time. However he is a top class programmer. If your skills are good and your output can be transferred by wire then you may want to seriously consider signing up here:?Hire me on oDesk . I placed an ad on oDesk for some programming help recently and within about 2 hours I got a number of top class applicants applying. This is a very serious and good way of making a living if your want to boost your business Find Salesforce Developers on oDesk of perhaps Find iPhone Developers on oDesk
(2) Sell local ads.
This is a way of making money that I have used?effectively on?several?occasions. This really works, you can start today and it has the potential to grow into a cracking business. ?All you need is and A4 sheet of paper and some courage! The first step is to find a sponsor to take the lead. You can do this yourself if you like but you need to be promoting a business idea.
You are looking for an activity that needs to attract visitors to a physical location or a website (You can use this method to fund advertising too). Here is an example that I am doing at the moment with an art gallery that I have recently helped with a website. ?Although the objective is to get visitors to the physical gallery, the ads will also carry links to the gallery website. ?My gallery owner knows there are lots of tourists that visit the area, however most of them visit the lake about 2 miles from his gallery (see the picture above). The aim therefore is to attract the visitors to the gallery who will hopefully buy the gallery’s stock. ?We could just print a leaflet and?distribute?it to the tourists and this would probably work quite well but we believe that the bulk of the tourists will need more attractions to motivate them to make the journey. After all, a gallery visit will probably be finished in a few minutes. In order to make the gallery experience more appealing, I have gone to other traders in the area, even direct competitors, to ask then to join the effort to move the tourists. All the other traders in the area have also identified the problem and most of them are open to listening and buying advertising space for their businesses on the leaflet that will be printed. It is best to have some artwork printed up at this stage as it makes sales much easier. You could also offer some?complementary advertising and ‘back links’ from the leaflet’s website to sweeten the deal.
Once you have made all the sales you can, you have the leaflet printed and then distribute them. 20,000 is a good number to start with. The leaflets will be left in hotels and guest houses or can be handed out in the street. If you are interested in attracting local trade, you can send them by un-addressed?bulk post. In the UK, the Royal Mail offers this service and will deliver one leaflet to every household and business by postcode. Make sure you allow for the extra costs if you do this. If you get your calculations correct, you will make a good profit. If you can, have another products to make ‘up’ sales, these can make all the difference. For example, while you are selling the local ads you may find that your customer needs a website update or needs some business cards printing or perhaps has some ‘stuff’ that you can sell for him on Ebay or Ebid. It is worth remembering that money you earn doesn’t originate from having a business, it comes from people. Think about it.
(3) Create a design company
If you are the sort of person who can manage a team and is good at direct sales, you could create business in you local area and hire your work force on oDesk to do the work. For example, you could sell custom websites and hire your team on-line. For this you will need graphic designers, programmers and content writers. Another possible concept would be to create sales leads for your clients and hire your telephone sales team on-line. We are only limited by imagination as to things we could do with a team of eager beavers! This is of course higher risk. You will need to have a water tight contract worked out to make sure you get paid from your customers. If this appeals register here:?Find Web Developers on oDesk
New concepts
Perhaps better still there is an interesting website offering ‘crowd sourcing’. In short, you run a competition for a design whether that be a business card, a brochure or a website. ?www.99designs.com offers you the chance to do this quickly and easily from their website so that you can come up with great designs to offer your clients. You offer a fixed fee and designers send you their ideas. If you don’t like the?designs, you don’t pay. This means you can take a selection of designs to your client and only pay if your client places an order. www.99designs.com explain their concepts quickly and easily in a short video. It is worth a few moments to take a look: www.99designs.com
I have tried this website for myself and it is good fun. I placed an order for ?96 (about $150) and I received around 10 design ideas from a number of designers. Next I had to eliminate the designs and pick the finalists. At all stages I could add my comments and ask for changes and suggest ideas. The designers worked really hard and by the end they had uploaded over 50 designs until I was satisfied. Highly recommended www.99designs.com.
(4) Buy on Ebay sell on Ebid
Ebay is very good for sourcing quality cheap products. I bought two watches for my children last Christmas that came by post from Hong Kong and they were really good and for a fraction of the cost I would have had to pay on the high street. The problem I find with Ebay is that if you put items on for sale, you can loose money. A couple of years ago, I put 3 paintings on Ebay to test to see if they would sell. I had painted these myself and I had put a lot of effort into doing them and also money into the framing, so naturally, I didn?t just want them to be sold in the last few seconds for the minimum bid. As a result I had to put a reserve price on the items. For me this story had a bad ending, although not for Ebay! The items didn?t sell and I had to pay ?25.00 in charges which is about $45.00. Quite a significant amount of money. Recently I came across an alternative website to Ebay offering a life time membership of free listings and 0% final value fees. This site is Ebid.net. I checked out the site on Alexa and it is clear that it is a serious operation. My plan now is to do my selling on this site where there is no risk of losing money and do my sourcing mainly on Ebay (or at least my wife will be doing that). I bought buy a life time membership for Ebid while the offer was still on I suggest that you give it a try. |
Having said all that, my wife still tells me that stuff on Ebay sells better. Something that you may not know is that you can sign up to being an affiliate and get paid to drive traffic to your own products and it is totally OK with Ebay Click here to go to ebay
This is an affiliate link to My wife’s Ebay Store
(5) Fiverr
This is a website where you can sell a service for $5, or about ?3.50 for us in the UK. Not a lot, and can sometimes produce very good results (I have bought several gigs). If you can think of an idea where you can do something easily that others find hard, you could sell this service on here. You should note that you are not just restricted to $5, as you can include up sells at any price as far as I know. I think people use this site to help pay for special software that can automate a process. Here is one that you could try. Your “gig” could be to?submit someone’s website to a large number of search engines and directories and do it with this tool that I first used back in 1995 and still works very well: ?http://www.exploit.net/wizard/keyreg.html. This is an old school product that was out even before Google was launched and as a result can get really good results just because it has been around so long. ?As far as I know this was the original submission tool, it certainly was?amongst?the first. You could start your gig by offering say 200 submissions for $5 or 800+ for $15, this could be potentially a pretty good money spinner. I’ll have to give it a try myself!
More to follow …