From the Times

Check out this informative article about 10 ways in which there is money to be had online.

Make Money Online - About

About.com has about a billion articles on how to make money online, but this one is by far the most informative.

Become a Bike Merchant

Seriously, if you have a car and a bike rack, then you are eligible for one of the greatest money-making schemes of all-time (slight exaggeration, of course).

Have you ever noticed how used bicycles never have consistent list prices in the classifieds? That’s because nobody knows how much a used bicycle will sell for. We only have a vague idea...somewhere between $0 and the price you paid for it. Best thing is that used bicycles work on the classic supply-and-demand system. The closer you are to an area where demand is high, the more you can get for a used bike.

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. When you went over the hills into the suburbs, used bicycles were relatively cheap. The same used bicycle would sell for double in areas close to the University of California or Stanford University. The same bike you buy for $50 in the ‘burbs would sell for $125 in the used bike shops in Berkeley. Do your own calculations, and if you can find an economical way to transport bikes from the suburbs to the university towns, make sure they’re ride-able, and sell them off to desperate students, then you have just opened up your own used bike service.

A tip...the crappier the bike, the better an idea this is. Why? Because good mountain and road bikes are bought and sold by discerning bicycle riders who are willing to pay $300 for a good used bike. These same people know more about the value of a used bicycle than your average student, so the profit margin is likely to be much lower (if there is one). On the other hand, if someone is trying to get rid of a run-of-the-mill street bike from the early Nineties, chances are good that it will sell at a very low price. You can then re-sell for an elevated price, but one that is still accessible to the majority of students looking to get from point A to point B on campus.

About Survey Sites

Read this helpful post about paid survey sites from Answers.com

Affiliate Marketing

Bartering

Remember the guy who pixels on his homepage? What about the guy who sold one square-inch portions of his beach-front property? If you have a ridiculous idea like this, it could be worth millions (well, maybe not quite millions).

Free Stuff

There are people who give away a lot of free stuff, and it’s easy to find. Individuals will use free classifieds like Craigslist to advertise free goods; the only catch is that usually you have to pick it up yourself. Mattresses, armoirs, boxes, toys, DVDs, you name it, it’s being given away for free. What’s to say that you couldn’t pick up an old dining room table, fix it up, and then sell it off for $50. This requires a little bit of work and perhaps basic carpentry skills, but if you have it, then you’ve got possibilities.

If old mattresses aren’t your cup of tea, maybe free samples of breakfast cereals or cosmetic products are more to your liking. Go to (About.com) for the “Free Stuff” blog.
It’s updated relatively frequently, and gives you advice on where to go to get these free samples. Walmart.com shows up pretty frequently.

Perhaps you would rather go for industrial quantities of free stuff. Have a need for mulch, scrapwood, manure? If you can believe it, many people just throw this stuff away. If you’re a gardener, picking up a truckload of organic refuse (provided you can verify that it’s not toxic for some reason) is a great way to avoid dishing out hundreds of dollars in topsoil and fertilizer. Gardening is also, by the way, a good way to avoid paying out 20% of more of your income in food bills.

Pay-per-Use

An addendum to the last post. Suppose you actually offer a product or a service...downloadable images, songs, videos, etc. You can ask your audience to pay what they believe to be a fair price for your goods and services. The band Radiohead pioneered this a few years ago by offering their entire album online in exchange for donations to be determined by the downloaders.

This technique evolved in response to the advent of free file sharing and “digital piracy” by services like Napster, Gnutella and Limewire. This is a way to avoid paying huge sums to the middleman (record company and film production company) and instead send your money directly to the artist. While sites like ITunes allow you to download content at a price that fits its relative market value (new as of February ’09), the “pay-per-use” technique allows the audience itself to determine market value. Sure, you’re not Radiohead, but if you have goods and services to offer with a low overhead, this may be a way to avoid giving it away for free.

"Your Donations Keep This Going"

How many times have you seen this on a blog? Do you imagine that sites with millions of hits per day actually need people to donate to keep their sites going? If you have a good product (website, blog, podcast, whatever) then you can enter the world of “pay-per-use” media. Public Radio and Television pioneered this seemingly ancient technology in the Fifties and Sixties, and the internet has certainly given new lease to this form of survival. Paypal is the easiest way to get this done. Here’s how:

Say, for example, you’ve got a great blog about Kittens, with tons of cute pictures and helpful advice on how to keep them from scratching your couch when they get claws. If you’re readership is active, and they care about what you are doing, you can consider going to Paypal.com and adding a donation button to your blog. Take the time to plead with your readers about your job, your family, and the time it takes to actually take care of your kittens, and ask them to support you by making a small donation. It might work, it might not, but there’s no harm in trying.

Start a Web Directory

Companies pay money (not always good money) to be listed in a web directory. If your web directory is good, comprehensive, and fills an “in-demand” niche, then you can ask for more money to be listed. The reason why companies would pay for such a service is that they are more specific than a search engine like Google. Although Google is very good at what it does, it still has to accommodate the interest of billions of different parties (like me, for example)...a directory that fills a good niche can eliminate 99.9% of the junk that your readers wouldn’t be interested in.

Guerilla Marketing

Got a good way to advertise a product or service? Websites will pay for you to get the word out...this is how collegehumor.com became big, and has afforded its creator the right to semi-retirement as a HuffingtonPost.com blogger and a celebrity with his own webisodes. He basically hired college students at a reasonably low rate to become marketing associates whose job was to get the word out. It worked, because within the span of one year, collegehumor.com was an international phenomenon. How will this work for you?

If you don’t have a site with potential like this, then become an associate for one or many sites. Webmaster will pay you to get the word out...the best way of doing this is link dropping. Webmasters will pay you to paste their link in forums, in social-networking sites, on people’s blogs, etc. The more links they can drop, the more likely that someone will see their website and the higher it will rank with search engines. Do a good job and you just might find yourself working in a more full-time capacity, making a salary (if that’s what you’re into).

A skeptic

This article from Newsweek talks about how it's not possible to make a fortune with a blog. Most realistic bloggers already know this to be the case, but the stats he wields can be instructive. I didn't really understand what he was blogging about, so maybe that's half his problem.

www.newsweek.com/id/183666

Facebook, MySpace, Blogging continued...

Search engines, advertisers and webmasters love to see popularity, which is why it pays to advertise your own stuff. Have you created a blog, an application, a website, etc. If you can show to the in-charges that your site has coverage, the money that people pay for these advertisements grows exponentially. So again, you can use your popularity as a social networker to try and advertise your site, to generate hits and visits, and most importantly, to get your link out there so people can see it. How many times have you clicked on a link just because it was there, or because its title vaguely interested you? Go to forums like Answers.com and post your link for people to see. If you’re lucky, someone will like your product so much that they’ll start posting and advertising your link for you, at which point you’re well on your way to a popular website.

Make Money Buying Lost Baggage

This isn't an online opportunity, but pretty enticing nonetheless:

http://www.moneymagpie.com/article/buying-lost-luggage/27

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