Some Knowledge

I spent a good hour this morning looking at different websites that promise to show you how to make endless amounts of money.  There was one site that said I could make $250 a day giving away free websites.  If they are free sites, where does the money come from?  Apparently, it comes from my credit card, which this person needs to set me up in business.

Then there were the sites that offered me free information for my email address.  What the heck, more interesting email and free useless ebooks.  The last place had an ebook called the secret of magical moneymaking or some such nonsense.  This site was all about selling information.  At least this is partially honest.  You get information and they get money.  They sell you information on how to make money selling information.  They even sell you the information to sell to others.  How convenient.

Even looking for something like “blog traffic” leads to sites selling information products on how to generate more traffic for your blog.  The Internet is full of these long sales pitches for vaporous products telling people how to make money.  Making money is the bottom line in everything.  I look at these sites because I am trying to find one that is actually a real way to make money with the Internet.  It amazes me that there can be so much completely useless information lying around on servers.

I used to spend all my time playing games.  Games have a limited appeal to me now.  Most games are really similar to other games.  You always end up going nowhere in games.  Games are a lot like moneymaking websites, lots of promise and no delivery.

It was only a matter of time before the entire Internet went commercial.  I’m sure if I look hard enough I will find software that sets up advertising websites and promotes them automatically.  The whole net could become a product of robots written by robots for robots.  But there are people behind the robots.  People telling the robots what to do and who to get money from.  There must also be a lot of really gullible people online if so many of these useless non-business sites are making as much money as they claim to be making.

I seldom buy anything online.  If you look hard enough you can usually find lots of free stuff that people claim to be selling elsewhere.  I find this stuff all the time by signing up for the mailing lists that these different operations have.  It’s the old “here’s something for free, now feel guilty and buy something” trick.

My eventual goal is to turn this blog into a multi-million dollar corporation.  I want to have this run on autopilot with content generated by freelance writers in Pakistan.  Then, when I get about a million visitors a day, I will sell advertising for about ten grand a banner and totally capitalize on the free market economy.  Maybe in a hundred years I will have something running that pays the bills.  Maybe sooner.  I wouldn’t ask people to buy anything from me.  I might post free stuff that they can read, like I do now.

Does everything on planet earth have to revolve around money?  You look for any scientific article online and they give you an abstract and ask you for $40 to read the whole paper.  Why would I pay some place that kind of money when I can go to the library and use their Lexus/Nexus database for free?  Most of the stuff you will find in these fly-by-night moneymaking ebooks you can look up online for free.  I don’t understand how people can actually be making money off a system like this.

I did see one blog today that was monetized in a somewhat honest way.  He had paypal links posted at the bottom of all his entries with a “Buy me a beer” caption on them suggesting you donate $3 or $7.50.  What an optimistic person.  Why not just get a graphic of a hand reaching out for a donation?  Why not show a picture of some emaciated child saying “feed me” or some other ploy to the sympathies?  The begging thing is just not for me.

What I haven’t seen yet is cyber-busking, unless you count iTunes.  Have a picture of you standing there with your guitar and when you click on it a song plays, then a hat pops up below the picture with a link to a paypal donation site.  I’m surprised that something so obvious hasn’t been done yet.  There could be a whole slew of cyber-busking sites appear overnight after people start reading this blog.

I am just surprised that there are so many people trying to sell information on how to make money from the Internet.  Looking through the book store shelves there are even books in the business section on how to set up million dollar cash machines with a website and Adsense.  Do you need to read a book to do that?  I guess if the book promises you a million you might be tempted to spend the $25 for the book.  Is it useful information?  Not if you can’t implement it.  There’s a certain amount of luck involved in any business venture.  You can set up all the websites you want but it will do you no good if nobody visits them and buys stuff from you or your advertisers.  I wonder if there’s a Wikipedia entry on internet business scams.  I haven’t seen one yet.

I will probably continue to look at these different sites, just because I enjoy reading about hare-brained methods to make money.  It may be a waste of time, but who knows, maybe someday I will read something that might work.  In future, we might live in a society of people who all sell information on how to make money to each other.  Wouldn’t that be strange.