Some Knowledge

There are some people who make money with their blogs.  There are millions of people blogging.  If you relied on the odds of making money with a blog, you might as well just buy a lottery ticket.  The bottom line is that you will need some reason for people to come to your blog.  The reason anyone goes to a blog is to find something out.  I know that nobody reads my observations on life or the weather.  People don’t use the net to find out random things about the lives of people they do not know, usually.  People only read blogs to get information.  They do not read a blog to get enjoyment from following a fictional story, and very rarely read some random person’s poems.  People read blogs to learn stuff.

Look at some of the most popular blogs.  They are about new technology, politics, entertainment, or how to make money.  These are all things that give people some benefit.  There are a lot of blogs about how to make money blogging.  For some reason, this is a popular topic.  Some people make a decent living writing about how to use the net to make money.

If you want to actually make money with a blog, you will need an angle.  You need to have some information that people want to read.  They will have to be able to find your blog in the search engines.  This means you will have to do some promotion.  You can do some promotion just by writing articles about things that people are looking for online.  Check some of the search engine sites like Google Trends for what people are interested in reading about.  There are any number of things to write about online at any given time.  You are only limited by your imagination.

So far, I have made zero money blogging.  I have read tons of stuff about this subject online and in paper books.  Who knows, maybe some day I will figure it all out and make a decent living.  Until then, I am going to read about the people who are making it with blogs, and maybe I will learn something useful in my quest for wealth.

I’ve been doing some online research today.  I got a ridiculously low offer on my 1985 Mazda RX-7 yesterday.  I sent an email back to this person telling him $300 is too low for this vehicle, even if it is not running well.  I’m only asking $800 for this vehicle.  So today I did some looking around online for parts.  I found one rear window for sale at a junkyard.  This guy only wants $100 for the window.  I priced these out before.  When you can find a rear window for that model they go for $750.  There is quite a markup on parts in the auto business.

I priced out the alloy wheels for this car.  One place has them on sale for $179 each.  Normally they sell for $380, each.  Granted, my wheels are not brand spanking new, but I did polish them up a while ago and they are in reasonably good shape.  I found a used manual transmission.  These sell for $915.  The car comes with a working transmission.  Rear end, radiator, fenders, windows, seats, radio, speakers, carpet, door panels, starter, alternator, distributor, all these parts are good.  All these parts sell for a good deal of cash.

The money in an old car is not in the entire thing.  A whole car is a pain to cart around if the engine is not working well.  Take the thing apart and clean it up and it’s worth a lot of money, if you can find the people who are looking for the parts.  Sure, it takes some work to break down a car.  Still, it’s worth a lot more taken apart and cleaned up than it is in one piece.

I spent some time looking around at advertisements for cars that are similar to mine.  I found one without a title going for $100.  Most of the ones like mine with problems and not running were going for $700 on Craigslist.  I put a lot of cash into that vehicle.  Still, I did not spend $15,000 like one person did who is trying to get $3800 for his project car.  Parts are expensive.  If you had to put together a vehicle from replacement parts it might cost you $100,000.  The money is not in the car, it’s in the parts.  Anybody who wanted to make money from the automobile would only have to buy a bunch of junk cars and take them apart and sell the pieces.  This is how junkyards operate.

I read some book a while ago about making money in which the author described selling a junked semi truck for $500 to a yard, then going back the next day and buying the engine out of the same wreck for $1000.  He got the idea that he should be buying the wrecks and selling the parts for a profit.  Apparently, this person got out of the trucking business and set up a truck part company selling parts from old trucks they took apart.  Sure, it took some work.  They hired mechanics to take apart the trucks and wrote them off as a cost of doing business.  This person went on to make his fortune as a junk dealer, or as they call themselves, salvage auto parts dealers.

I mentally added up the price of all the parts I looked up on the net today for my car.  Just on the ones I found and allowing for a decent 50% discount over the retail price, my car could make me a couple grand if I took it apart and sold it piece by piece.  Of course, I would need buyers for all the parts, but that’s what the Internet is for, communication.  The principle does not just apply to cars.  You can, in a capitalist society, sell any kind of junk for a profit, provided you’re not breaking any laws.  I looked up a book I bought some years back at a discount store for $4.99.  This book is selling now for $50 because it is out of print and it’s a hardcover.  Even used it’s going for a good deal more than what I found it for.  Then there are all the other things lying around the house that I bought that I don’t need or use any more.  I have a copy of Lunar 2:Eternal Blue for the Playstation 1 that is going for $180 on Amazon right now that I paid less than $30 for some years ago.  Apparently, I had expensive taste in video games, because a lot of the titles I bought are going for $100 and more online now.

There is money to be made in this world if you want to work for it.  A lot of the work is in finding people to buy the stuff you find to sell.  You can have all the expensive junk in the world and it will do you no good at all if nobody wants what you have.  That’s why the car manufacturers are doing so poorly these days.  They all decided years ago to build big, gas-guzzling trucks, and the cost of gas went up.  Now they are scrambling to design efficient vehicles.  If nobody wants what you have, then it will not make you any cash.  Consider the junk business as a model for the capitalist system.  Maybe nobody wants your whole car, but if you take it apart, there is probably somebody somewhere who is missing a rear view mirror who will be willing to buy part of your car to fix his own.

CNBC was going nuts this morning when I switched on the TV.  They froze futures trading when the market dropped 550 points.  It seems people are cashing out of the stock market today.  This is not just an American phenomenon.  Markets have fallen all over the world.

Anybody who invests in the stock market gets what they deserve.  Stocks are just a legal way for everybody to gamble.  You buy a stock and supposedly you get a piece of the action from whatever company you invested in.  What you really get is a piece of paper that may go up or down in value depending on how many other people want to buy that piece of paper.

The stock market is all about raising capital for companies to operate with.  Public corporations issue stock so they can sell it to a lot of people and raise money to buy stuff for their business.  How it is supposed to work is that if the company makes money, they will pay profit dividends and the price of their stock will go up because they are successful.  How it really works is that people gamble on which stock is going to increase in value and the price of the stock depends on how many people want to buy it.  This is not a free market economy.  It is a free for all market economy.

A lot of people make money on the stock market.  A lot more people lose money.  This is how the system works.  The people who are really making money on the market are the brokers.  They get a fee for every trade they do.  The banks don’t have enough money to fund all businesses, so business turns to the people and sells them slips of paper.  Paper costs about a penny a sheet.  Paper is cheap.  The price of paper depends on who wants to buy this paper.  Governments do the same thing with paper money.  In reality you are trading one kind of paper for another.  Whether the paper you buy has any value is largely determined by a random process.  Random processes are how gambling operates.  If you invest in the market and lose money, you have made a losing bet.  Gambling is not a sound business principle, unless you are running the house.

I’m sure you could get as sound advice on investing from Homer Simpson as you could get from anyone.  “Stock goes up, stock goes down.”  If the whole industry of a society is based on a random process like people’s confidence in the value of pieces of paper, it should be no surprise if the whole mess comes crashing to the ground.  You would probably make more money if you invested in apples and sold them in the street than if you buy stock these days.  Maybe it’s time for people to stop believing in the lies told by the financial sector and find their own security in their own businesses.

First, you need some kind of product.  This is important.  If you don’t have a product all you have is a pyramid scheme, and that’s illegal.  So, you get a product.  The product should either be something expensive, like a travel club membership, or something that has a recurring charge, like diet food sales.  In general you will want the cheapest kind of product that can be distributed with minimal cost.  Perhaps some kind of ebook would be ideal.

Once you have your product, you will need to decide on a structure.  Most MLMs are based on a simple pyramid structure.  Those who enter early on the top of the pyramid have a lot of people under them.  Those who enter later have fewer people under them.  Perhaps divide the people under a person into several teams.  You should sort out the structure of your MLM before you publicize it.

Now you will have to set up a website.  This is the most cost-effective means of promoting your business.  Write a nice long sales letter and get accounts set up so you can start taking payments from the people who fall for your scheme.  You will want to set up a forum for your employees/customers so they can arrange themselves into teams and exchange information on how to make the most money from your MLM.  This is good for your business, because as the organization running the show you get a good cut out of every sale.

Now, you will want to really get the word out about your offering.  How you do this is for your customers/employees to set up their own websites selling your high profit product.  The more people you have trying to sell your product, the more money you will make selling your product.  Everyone who buys your product becomes a sales person for your product, so potential growth is exponential.  Be sure to capitalize on all the new websites your customers are going to set up by selling them hosting packages at an outrageous rate.

Once you have several hundred people actively promoting your ebook or travel club or diet food on the net, the money will start rolling in.  You will have to keep track of your profits and of your payouts to your MLM customers so be sure to take some of your profits and hire a good accountant.  As long as you pay your taxes and report anyone who makes more than $600 to the IRS you should be OK with the law.  Soon you will have an empire of moneymaking websites pulling in a constant stream of cash for you and your family.

I went to a free seminar yesterday afternoon at Washtenaw Community College.  I saw a flyer for this meeting posted on a bulletin in the cafeteria on Wednesday.  It said something about come and see how to start a business.  Since I spend so much time online reading about different business things, I thought it would be worth my time to see what this was about.

When I got to the classroom they had cookies and pop set out.  About 15 people, mostly students, showed up for this seminar.  There were four faculty members leading the seminar.  There was a presentation on some very basic business topics.  The seminar was about a contest they were running for students to set up their own businesses.  There was a $500 prize.  I took classes at WCC there for 16 years, but I never heard of this contest.  In any case, I wasn’t eligible to compete in this contest, but it was interesting to find out about this opportunity.

There was a speaker who talked about getting ideas for a business.  The seminar lasted an hour and a half.  I talked to the leader of the club after the presentation and thanked her for the information.  I have been thinking of going into business for myself.  In a way, this blog is my attempt at a writing business.  So, I got some free information out of this meeting and a free cookie.  All it cost me was the gallon of gas it took to drive into school.  I might look into taking some business classes next term, but I might also get my own ideas for starting a business and just start making money.

If you take classes at Washtenaw Community College or are just interested in reading more about the Student Enterprise Club there, you can find more information on their website at the SEZ Club on Google.  There is some information posted there about what it takes to start a business and compete in this contest.  If you are a WCC student, the entry fee for the contest is $10.  In any case, the website is free and has a bit of helpful information.

The market is way down this morning.  Merrill Lynch has been sold.  Lehman is filing for bankruptcy.  And on top of everything, the price of crude dropped over five dollars a barrel.  There are some problems with the economy, it seems.

All I know about finance is what I read in a Barron’s book by that name, and some random stuff I watch on CNBC.  Stock prices and the economy seem to me to be a lot like thermodynamics in that both are determined by random processes.  The random motions of atoms determines temperature and pressure in a gas.  The random buying and selling of stock determines prices and available capital.  Just how smart is it to fund a business with a random process like selling stock to the highest bidder?

The stock market is how people raise money for their corporations by appealing to people’s urge to gamble.  You invest in buying a stock hoping the price will go up and you can make money by selling it to somebody else.  The only thing driving the price of stock is new people wanting to buy in to the investment.  If people think things are going bad for a company, they will bail out like rats leaving a sinking ship.  If nobody wants to buy, prices go down.  What a wonderful system a stock market is.  Appeal to people’s greed to get your hands on some of their cash.

The problems in the market are a reflection of the problems in the greater society.  People lose their jobs, because companies switch over to cheap foreign labor.  People without jobs can’t pay their mortgage.  Mortgage companies lose money because people can’t pay their bills.  Mortgage companies lose money so nobody wants to own their stock.  Stock prices take a nosedive, and companies go bankrupt.  What is the cause of the problem?  Greedy companies trying to make more money.

The market is very complex and there are a lot of factors that affect it.  Any time you have more than three bodies in a physics problem, you have random solutions to the paths of those bodies.  There are many factors in economic equations, and a lot of those factors are pretty much best guesses.  Thus, the price of stocks will fluctuate randomly.  You have two possibilities when you buy stock.  Stock goes up, or stock goes down.  You can blame what happens to the price of stock on any number of things, but the bottom line is if nobody wants to buy and everybody wants to sell, the price will drop.  All a drop in the market says is that people are cashing out their investments.  Because of the cause-effect relationship of buying and selling on price, people will lose money today.  This is how the market operates.  It harvests money from the many to make the few wealthy.

The key phrase for a million hucksters.  No, I will not tell you how to make millions on the net with no money down.  First, you will have to make dollars, then hundreds, then thousands, and finally millions.  What you need is popularity.  You can buy popularity, or just generate it with your own original usefulness.  To make a lot of money, you will have to get a lot of people to buy something from you.

If you know how to do network programming, you might consider designing a search engine.  Search engines are popular.  You need some such program to sort through all the garbage that has been posted online.  Look at all the useless millions of websites about making money.  Notice how all these sites have one thing in common.  To make money, you will have to give them money.  Of course what they are really selling is information.  Most of this information you can get for free.  If you are smart, you can build a search engine that finds the free information and weeds out the scammers.

Once you have your beautiful search engine, you will need a place to host it.  Be prepared to buy a lot of hosting, because indexing the entire Internet will take a lot of storage space.  Perhaps you have come up with some way to shrink the storage requirement.  Perhaps you are ultra-smart and designed your search engine to look for sites only when a user types in a search query.  Perhaps your search engine sorts through search results from other search engines.  You have to have some trick up your sleeve when dealing with more words than any library can hold.

You have your search engine and you have it on a site where people can get at it.  How are you going to make any money from that?  It’s costing you money to host your site and your database.  Now you need to sell something.  You need to sell advertising on your search results.  Of course there is a lot of competition.  You will have to compete with multi-billion dollar corporations.  So, you start small and sell advertising for a penny an ad.  It costs you less than this for storage and bandwidth on your server farm that hosts the engine.  Soon, millions of companies buy ads on your page.  You make more money than it costs to support your operation and you start accumulating profit.

Suppose you realize that you don’t know how to code anything like a search engine.  Suppose you don’t have anything like the capital it would require to host such a thing.  What are you supposed to do?  Write a book and crunch it into a PDF file.  This is your product.  For good effect, make it short.  Make it a book about how to write a book and sell it on the net.  You can call it “Make Millions Online.”  Set up a free website to take payments for a download of your interesting ebook.  Do some free marketing of your website and make it popular.  For good effect, offer a few different books.  If all goes well, millions of people will be interested in your ebook and you will make tens of millions of dollars from selling your own work.  Too lazy to write a book?  No problem, get resale rights to some random person’s book online somewhere and sell that.  Good luck.

Of course, you can always follow what I call the “Blog Your Way to Millions” method of online wealth production.  Quit your job and set up a free blog somewhere.  Now write hundreds of interesting articles on a lot of different subjects.  Take a year or two and build up your organic web traffic.  When you get hundreds, then thousands, then finally millions of page views a day, sell advertising on your blog.  Of course, you will need to write articles that people are actually interested in.  Perhaps you can write things about popular celebrities.  Perhaps you can make up some horrible long-running joke that you add to day after day.  There really is no explaining what gets popular.  Once you have your article base, it’s just a job of selling advertising links you will place in your various posts.  Have a thousand posts?  No problem, that’s space for a thousand advertisements.

It’s not overly simple to make a lot of money online.  You will need to set up a business to pay out and take in money.  You will need to account for every penny.  You will have to pay the tax man.  You will be concerned with getting new customers for your product.  All these different things you have to do is why businesses tend to be organizations of many different people with specialized skills.  If you feel like driving yourself crazy, by all means set up a business online and attempt to sell enough stuff to pay the bills.

Glassdoor.com is a website where people can post information on their salaries and work environment free and anonymously.  After you post your information you can look around the site and see what other people make working at various companies.

I guess the concept of this database is pretty interesting.  Salary information is not something a lot of people share with their fellow employees.  I can see where some companies might get upset if people post bad reviews of their operations.  Of course, it’s also nice that the information is submitted anonymously because your boss can not hold it against you personally for posting something unsavory about your job.  Then again, the anonymous thing could be bad because people might just post bogus information to make somebody look bad.

It might be interesting to look around this database to find good places to apply for a job, or to check out prospective employers.  A person does not really have access to a lot of candid information about various person’s bosses or company policies.  If you are in the market for a job and want to see what it might be like to work at different places, and if anyone from these places has filled out the anonymous information, and if they were telling the truth, this might be a helpful place to look into.

In order to succeed at affiliate marketing, you will have to make money selling stuff.  You will either need a website to post your advertising copy, or a blog, which is a website but is easier to manage.  Once you make your choice of venue for your marketing efforts it is time to get to work.

What you write affects people.  In marketing, you are trying to get people to purchase something.  Most of the things people buy on the Internet are not necessarily essential.  People tend to buy food at local outlets.  You might be able to sell vitamins or prescriptions, but these organizations who handle such things tend not to have affiliate programs.  In any case, what you are trying to sell will determine what you are going to write about.

Suppose for instance that you have signed up with a program to sell jet skis online as an affiliate.  You go to your blog and wonder what to write about.  You might have visited your Aunt Milli last week and had a great time.  You can write all about your visit, and in no way will you influence anyone that they want a jet ski.  On the other hand, you might write about what a great time you had at the lake with Aunt Milli on her jet ski, and how you really had fun and how you want to buy one yourself now.  Now, that jet ski advertisement at the bottom of your page makes sense.  You have made owning such a contraption seem appealing, and provided your reader with a convenient means of obtaining one.

In order to sell things to people, you will have to appeal to them on a gut level.  Logically, there is no reason to buy one of these jet skis that a person will only use three times a year.  If you convey to your readers what a thrill it is to ride such a device, you will influence their desire to buy one.  It is a very simple thing.  Salesmen have been appealing to people’s pride, sense of excitement, desire for comfort, security, and convenience since advertising was invented.  People tend to see through a direct appeal though, and might develop a resistance to being sold.  This is where you come in.  You would not necessarily mislead people into making a purchase, but you might trick them into one by exaggerating the benefits of this purchase somewhat.

You can have all the skill in the world at convincing people to buy, but it will make no difference at all to your wallet if nobody hears your pitch.  In affiliate marketing you will need a high volume of traffic to make any money.  200 visitors a day to your website or blog might only result on one click on an advertisement, and it might take a hundred clicks to result in one sale.  As an affiliate you get paid on sales.  You will want thousands of people to see and read your pitch every day.  In order to get this amount of web traffic, you may have to do some advertising.  Advertising costs money.  You can easily lose money buying advertising.  You might want to spend some time looking into free methods of promoting your site.  Of course, if you are already famous you can use the appeal of your celebrity to generate traffic.

It’s a long hard road making a living as an affiliate marketer.  The upside is that you will not have to dress up and go door to door, or cold call people on the phone.  Work on coming up with convincing, honest stories about the things you are trying to sell, and try to get people the best deals on their purchases.  Once your site becomes popular, as it might if it contains useful, practical articles, it will only be a matter of time before you can cash in on some of the $204 billion that will change hands in 2008 on the net.

The car has to be a prime example of capitalizing on people’s laziness.  What could be simpler than sitting in a box with wheels, turning a wheel and pressing pedals to get where you are going?  Sure, it has changed the geography of society.  People can now live many miles from where they work.  It would be impossible to commute to a job that was a good distance away if you did not have some kind of car.  In this way, the automobile has provided incentive and security for consumption of vehicles as a commodity.  If people had to walk, ride bikes, or drive horse carriages to where they were going the world would be a very different place.

Another way to capitalize on people’s laziness is to sell prepared food.  There is a vast restaurant industry in the modern world.  People think they are so busy working and commuting and watching TV that they think they do not have the time to cook their own meals.  You can generally mark up the price of a meal three to five times and people will still buy it from you.  Sure, you need to cover some expenses, like building rent, worker salaries, insurance, but still, it is a way to make money.  There is a long history of people making money selling prepared food.  If a person was in need of saving cash, there is nothing simpler than stocking up on peanut butter, jelly, and bread and making your own meals.

The whole TV-advertising industry capitalizes on people’s laziness.  If they were being productive, they would not be sitting around watching the tube.  So, all these consumers of programming are not just sitting there, they are being programmed to buy chips and pop and cars and Disney vacations.  Sure, they have jobs and probably spend many hours a day sitting in an office to make money, but at the end of the day, while resting from all that effort and being lazy, people are highly susceptible to being tricked into spending more of their hard-earned money.

If there was a poster product for marketing to laziness, it would have to be the reclining easy chair.  How else is a person supposed to be comfortable watching the game and swilling a few beers?  There is of course a brand of easy chair called Lazyboy.  People enjoy being lazy.  It is important to get enough rest.  Relaxing is something you can do every day.  If you are a savvy marketer or manufacturer you can cash in on this common tendency of humans and make products that cater to the inherent drive of man to do less and less.  Look at all the automatic shower cleaning products and bathroom cleansers.  If there is a way to get some job done with less effort, people will be willing to spend money on that idea.  Think up your own labor-saving invention and you may become rich in this lazy old world.