Make Money From Offering a Service or Skill

Fiverr.com is a website where anyone can offer nearly anything for the price of five dollars. Fiverr takes one dollar as commission, and pays out four dollars. Nearly anything can be offered on the website, from services such as web design, article writing, and translation, to physical goods such as sculptures, paintings, drawings, clothing, and jewelry. Fiverr offers access to a marketplace full of potential customers, making it easy for anyone to make money online.

Make Money Designing and Selling Things

Websites such as CafePress.com and Zazzle.com offer everyone the ability to get creative and design their own t-shirts, sweatshirts, or other types of clothing, as well as items like coffee mugs, tote bags, stationery, art, and more. These items can be sold on the CafePress or Zazzle website, or they can be sold on people’s own personal websites. Personalized items can be completely unique, or they can be personalized for something simple, such as family reunions, class reunions, school mascots, churches, or any other organization’s logo. The possibilities are endless.

Start A Website and Use Google Adsense

For anyone who wants to make money in their sleep, setting up a personal website and then putting Google Adsense advertisements on it is one way to do that. This kind of money isn’t instantaneous, so it’s not for someone who wants or needs money right away; however, a person can do some initial work upfront on their website, put a few ads on it, and leave it alone, and it will most likely make them some money eventually. This is a great strategy for people who have a lot of knowledge about a particular area that they would like to share with the world, be it fishing, knitting, football, fashion, or any other topic, and don’t mind putting in some work upfront and reaping the financial rewards later.

Sell Magazine Subscriptions

Selling magazine subscriptions is a great way to make easy money online. Anyone can do it, and most people have at least a few friends and family members who purchase magazine subscriptions, so it’s not hard to make at least a few sales. The way it works is through a website called AcclaimSubscriptions.com. Anyone can sign up through their affiliate program on their website. After signing up for free, a person can put a referral link on any of their personal websites or social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. Each time someone clicks on the link and purchases a magazine subscription from one of the over 200,000 magazines AcclaimSubscriptions.com offers, the owner of the referral link gets a percentage of the sale.

Francine Gomez is a career consultant and loves giving clients new ways to make money online from home. There are many opportunities to bring needed funds into the home – from doing paid surveys to writing articles for blogs.

What does it mean to have a constant income stream? First let us establish what it does not include. A constant income stream does not include stock investments; those only provide you capital once you choose to sell. It also does not include people who get a yearly paid vacation, and thus are technically still making money as they sit on the beach. No, the person who can constantly have money added to his bank account – even if he is thousands of miles away – is one who pursues a certain type of investment. It is the person who can go on a vacation to a warm Caribbean island, sit on the beach while sipping pina coladas, and still be growing their bank account while doing so.

So what are some investments of this sort? Specifically, where should someone with a decent yet unspectacular amount of capital invest if they want to insure a regular income stream? Here are a few of the best options:

Minimal Capital Required: Vending Machines and ATMs

Yes, the vending machines you see in public places, schools, and office buildings are often owned by an outside investor. This investor provides the capital and then receives any surplus income once supplies, maintenance, and institutional fees have been paid. It is a great starting point for those with more limited amounts to invest. If you are interested, checking out a website such as www.1800Vending.com provides a great place to start. Owning an ATM is another possibility that works on a similar level.

Maximum Capital Required: Commercial Properties

Those with slightly more capital can be landlords on a larger level. Certainly, this could entail buying and renting out apartment complexes, but being an apartment landlord usually involves higher turnover rates, more difficult tenants, and dealing with kitchen and bathroom items that regularly need maintenance. In short, owning a residential property may not afford you the ability to earn money regularly with a minimal time investment. Owning and operating a strip mall or other commercial parcel, on the other hand, can be incredibly easy and profitable.

Moderate Capital Required: Boat Slips

Let’s say that you want an investment more profitable than a vending machine, but less expensive than a commercial property. Certainly, there are many opportunities that fall into this range. But we’re going to focus on one that is often reliable and hassle free: owning and renting out a boat slip in a river or harbor. People who own boats usually have money, but due to high demand many of them don’t own a place to dock their boats. As a result they rent out a space for their boat and pay the owner a regular rental fee. This demographic can be counted on to pay without problem and to accept higher rates and fees. Even if you don’t live near a body of water, you can still do some research and invest in a boat slip in a place that is.

There are certainly countless more ways to make money consistently, do so on the side, and put in minimal work in the process. These three are some of the best options at their respective capital levels. Next time you want to be able to grow your bank account while sitting on the beach, you may want to explore making one of the above investments.

I wasn’t half surprised when I searched on “Groupon clone” to find several companies selling website clones of the popular site.

A company called Agriya have a script that looks promising. I emailed the company for a quote and they said it would cost around $1200. A little out of my budget for what I would want to spend.

Grouponclone.biz has a script for just $200 and the site has an online demo, although it is difficult to know if the script operates as expected. When buying these kinds of scripts, I like to see if the site has a support forum, which gives you some idea of the install base and the level of support from the programmers. In this case there is no forum.

Grouponclone.com looks like another promising script. It still looks fairly new and is priced at $399.

If you aren’t familiar with how Groupon works, they have some good videos on their website explaining in detail how their website helps businesses.

One of the problems of launching such a site, is the classic chicken before the egg dilemma. How can you convince companies to use your service if you don’t have traffic going to the site and how to get people to subscribe to your site if you don’t have some great deals already going.

Groupon collects the money when people buy an offer and then distributes it to the company if the offer becomes valid. It’s something that I think would be difficult to get going without having some kind of trust happening already between your customers and advertisers.

My thought to get a site going was to just set up a site where companies could create printable coupons and you could make it free initially and then charge later if the site became successful. At the same time you could also build up an email list where people would get automatic emails of new coupons available.

I thought it would be easy to find such a script, but most of the scripts seem to be suited for online coupons. I wanted to create something that people would print out and take to a store as I would be operating a site where internet is not so widely used in business.

After spending a few hours searching, Coupon Press which works with WordPress seems to offer one of the better valued solutions. It’s $79 and it looks to have a good install base and support, judging from the activity on their forum.

There is a free extension available for Joomla which I did try, but it just looks too basic.

So while it might seem fairly easy to set up your own group on type business, you still have to think how you plan to get traffic and people to actually using your service.

Also, I want to have 80 hubs done by the end of the month, of which I have written 59 hubs of various degrees in quality, so that leaves 21 hubs to go. Finally I want to have 10 Ezine articles done, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is getting harder to get articles published there.

I know this doesn’t sound like a lot of work. I don’t have a job, so this is my full-time business. Actually I think I worked hard on my websites when I did have a regular full-time job.

I know it’s a tough life, but there are a lot more interesting things to do here in Bali, than sitting at my computer all day! I did spend quite a bit of time today, putting together a property website. My girlfriend is getting into the property business here in Bali and I helped get a website up online, listing properties in Lovina.

It is the first time I have used Open Realty on a website and it was pretty simple to get going. There were a couple of bugs in it, but I found the solution just by searching Google for a fix.

When I started this blog, I wrote more about property investing than making money online. So if things go well, hopefully I will be also writing about this new business venture. I love looking at land and houses and trying to get a handle on a particular market. I am also following the build of one of my friend’s here in Lovina, Bali. You can see the pictures here: Lovina villa for sale.

I suppose the Olympics and spending 6 months in China was the high(low?)light for me in 2008. It was an unforgettable experience in so many different ways. One thing is for sure, I won’t be going back to China for a long while.

The past few months have also been fun and interesting. Two months in Thailand, a bit of time in Malaysia and the past couple of weeks in Sumatra, Indonesia. I had another bad experience in Indonesia a few days ago, losing my passport on a bus. Long story, but I manage to track it down and recover it, along with some cash and my valuable ATM/credit cards, but it was a harrowing few hours wondering if it had been stolen or if I would even be able to get it back.

At least it had made me to be me careful again for a while.

The Olympic site wasn’t so much of a success and although I love blogging and building websites, perhaps I need to sit back and have a hard think about what I am currently doing and what I want to from now. My family also miss me terribly and I have to admit that it is hard not seeing my sister’s children grow up. I also read about so many people actually wanting to move to Australia that it sometimes makes me think, maybe it is not such a bad place to live.

I have thought about running some kind of guesthouse on a nice beach in Asia, but I sometimes wonder if that would be sustainable, with constant threats of terrorism and political instability. Perhaps I should look to my home country where at least I will have full legal rights to own and run my own business.

Some of the things I have thought of doing include:

- getting a job in SEO/SEM for a company in Australia
- becoming a migration agent and leveraging my Australia Forum site to find customers
- starting my own SEO/SEM company and taking on real clients
- starting a website targeted for Australia based on successful models I have seen overseas

Or a combination of any of the above.

Of course I don’t plan on doing any of this right now, with the economy the way it is.

Most of those publications are pretty dry reading and are published about once a month. If you need an idea for a website, why not create a blog on that particular industry. You could spice it up a little with lots of industry gossip and news. I would probably restrict it to an industry in just one country or region. You aren’t going to get a huge amount of traffic, but it would be easy to become the online authority for that particular industry.

I imagine you would have to start with doing fairly boring news, but you could then start doing interviews with CEOs and key players in the industry. Most executives love seeing their name in print, so they will send interviews to all of their colleagues and friends. Eventually I think you would get people sending you anonymous tips, which you could then break news and regular business newspapers and magazines might pick up on. Of course, you would need to be careful not to publish anything defaming.

I doubt that Adsense or affiliate links would work. You would probably need to sell advertising directly like what magazines do. Since your costs would be much lower than a printed magazine, I think advertisers would see this as a good deal. Most executives have email and internet now, so I don’t think it would take too long to get recognized in the industry.

Adding a job board could be another source of revenue. Make friends with recruiters and I am should you could pick up on some great gossip.

The tech industry is already so well covered, I would target an industry that is traditionally not so tech savy. Hotel, airlines, mining are some ideas.

I never liked using a mobile phone to browse the internet, but I know it can be useful particularly if you are out and looking for a bar/restaurant. I just checked my .mobi domains and it looks as though they are getting some traffic, which is always a good start.

Google has also released Adsense for mobile phones, so I think this could be something worth looking into, particularly as the market won’t be as competitive as the www.

I can remember the time I was reading a post on a Japan forum, by a guy who was boasting how he had just made $3000 selling a Japanese antique on ebay. Just that one post turned on a light for me and I got into buying and selling Japanese antiques. I had never given it a thought up until that day.

I remember just after I had started this blog, I did a search on “make money blog” and I found Probogger.net

I have lots of different ideas every day for new businesses and the last few days I have been thinking a lot about this one idea. I have had the idea for quite a while, but I came up with something related, while I was reading the 4 Hour Work Week. If I go through with the idea, I could say that was the A-Ha moment. The more I think about it, the more I can see the potential.

I have registered a couple of domains that I could use and have started doing more research.

I enjoy travelling, but it would be nice to settle down in one place for a while.

He is a solicitor by trade, so he has no technical skills. He is good evidence that anyone with a good idea for an internet business can successfully set it up and get it running without needing the technical knowledge. Sometimes I get the feeling that people who have great technical skills are actually the worst people to start an internet business. They generally have too much pride and want to do all of the design and programming of the website.

This results in the project getting delayed and by the time it is complete they don’t have the energy or possibly the finances to market it properly. I don’t want to downgrade people who have great technical skills, but with the ability to outsource website design and programming functionality it hardly seems worth the trouble of trying to do it yourself or employing an individual to do it.

A payment processor seems like a great business to run. Once it is set up, you basically just receive a commission for every transfer completed. Get a few big ecommerce websites using your service and you have the perfect cash generating system. Paypal doesn’t cover every country around the world, so I believe the market is still pretty much open.

I am sure that there are a few cafes that would like to offer Wifi, but don’t want the hassle of setting it up or maintaining it. I believe there could be a good business opportunity to start a Wifi outsourcing business to restaurants/hotels and coffee shops.

There are probably some cafe owners that would be worried that their business could suffer from offering free Wifi. You could find that people come in with their laptops, order a single drink and take up the seat of a potentially higher paying customer. To get around this, cafe owners could make a Wifi corner or only offer the service outside of busy times.

Once you have installed and set up the modem for the business, there wouldn’t be too much else to take care of, but you could still charge them a monthly rental fee.