Affluent beggars
February 8, 2007 | Filed Under Entrepreneurship, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
You can earn a great amount of money by begging. As long as you do not waste it on alcohol and drugs you can live a pretty nice life. This family makes $300 daily by begging and sometimes as much as $800, they refer to themselves as “affluent beggars.”
Golden Rules for Making Money
August 11, 2006 | Filed Under essence of e-books, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Money making as young | 4 Comments
When a book is more than 100 years old the copyright expires. That is why P.T Barnum’s masterpiece from 1880 is freely available for reading online. The book is known under two names: “Art of Money Getting” and “Golden Rules for Making Money.”
I’ve browsed through some of the chapters and this is really good stuff. 126 years old and it is basically the same advice as Donald Trump gave me in his “How to get rich.”
A few good chapters are:
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT
LEARN SOMETHING USEFUL
READ THE NEWSPAPERS
BE POLITE AND KIND TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
DON’T BLAB
PRESERVE YOUR INTEGRITY
Have a look at it and enjoy the basic, common sense advice that clearly stood the test of time and inspired countless of later “how to get rich” books.
Good to Great: 5 reasons why some beggars earn more money than you
July 26, 2006 | Filed Under money, short term profits, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | 16 Comments
Get something for doing nothing. After walking around in big cities in Europe I have discovered the 5 habits of successful beggars.
1. Keep your voice down
Ask for some change, but do not be loud! Be soft spoken, almost silent. By keeping your voice down you force the unlucky by-passer to stop to hear what you have to say. Once they stop, your chance for success increases!
2. Be “honest”
They know you are not going to use their change to buy a bus-ticket. Try to give them a likable reason to give you money.
This works: ”Yo, I’ve been doing drugs for 2 days and really need to eat something, can you spare some change so I can buy me some bread?”
This fails: “Yo, can you spare some change, I need to take the bus”
In the first example you are undressing your soul in front of them, who can resist giving you money? In the latter example you are just lying and they walk away.
3. Be clean and nicely dressed
All great salesmen try to imitate the prospective buyer. By dressing similar to the ones you beg from you are bridging the gap between you and them. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it is easier to give to your own type! If they meet someone very different from themselves it is easier to just walk away.
4. Remember a sucker
If someone gives you money you better remember their face. Then you need to acknowledge them every day you see them by greeting them with “Good Morning Sir!”, “Lovely day, eh?” This will remind them about the day they gave you money, and they know you hope that they will give you more. It is painful to walk away from you after you have been nice to them by remembering their face. Two things happen, either they walk another way to work, or they will give you money to ease the tension they feel inside!
5. Learn to love rejection
95% will not give you money. Love it! You get the opportunity to show how good and clever you are. Shout after them “Have a nice day!”, “Thank you, bye”, “No problem, thank you very much Miss”, “Enjoy the rest of your day Sir!”
The result is that they will think: “Oh.. he was pretty nice.. maybe next time..”
Got more tricks used by beggars? Please feel free to share them.
Money making idea for a waiter with a $170 monthly webhosting bill
July 22, 2006 | Filed Under Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | 1 Comment
WaiterRant is probably the best place for inside stories from the restaurant business. He writes exciting and (at least it seems so!) true stories about his life as a waiter in a bistro. If you don’t believe me, just read this piece about “Daddy’s Little Girl.”
Strenghts of the blog:
Really good stories from a real waiter.
We all have a good idea of the restaurant business. We all think we know it. It is a topic that it’s easy for people to relate to.
Weaknesses and threats
The stories he writes are really looooong… it is well written, but it’s a bit tiring to read in front of the screen. People generally like quick stuff.
The blog is really popular and the dedicated server costs $170 a month. He now had to ask for donations to avoid losing money on his blog.
The opportunity
I thought of this when I was thinking of what books to bring for my beach holiday this year. Last year I read “Hotel Babylon” about the life on a luxury hotel in London. This year I wished I had a book of some of the Waiter’s best stories.
Why not look into self-publishing your own book? It seems like an ideal candidate. Successful blog, thousand of readers. Publish a “best of collection”, the initial spark of interest generated from your blog makes the title fly up the chart at Amazon and then the wheels start turning.. By searching in Google for “how to publish your own book” and “publish my own book” I found several companies specializing in it. You can print a paperback version from a few $ if you buy in bulk.
With such a talent for writing it would be very nice to see him cash in on it. What do you think about this idea? Does it have potential? Or is it better to focus on the PayPal tip jar?
Hmm.. this publishing thing? Here are some blogosphere links about publishing books:
An literary agent in stilettos throw in some advice for “Publish On Demand” people.
Bookseller chick explains how a book ends up in her book store
Big important person complains about peole who can not accept their novel being rejected
Get rich mumbo jumbo?
July 19, 2006 | Filed Under money, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, hard labour, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
Get rich quick schemes is one thing, to think yourself rich is another. There are countless variations out there. The owner of the blog Towards Better Life has recently jumped on a new idea:
“Recently I have come a cross four very important words: Easy, Relax, Healthy, Positive. I encounter these words in Steve Pavlina is Million Dollar Experiment. I have participate in this experiment and I’m currently holding the following intention:
In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all, I intend $1,000,000 to come into my life and into the lives of everyone who holds this intention.”
I wish him all the success, but to be frank, to me, this sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo. But that is just me. I would rather read Golden Rules for Making Money (P. T. Barnum 1880) one more time. It contains genuine no bullshit advice for any aspiring entrepreneur.
Opportunity for bloggers with a long term horizon, short term profits suicides can sign up at PayPerPost
July 18, 2006 | Filed Under short term profits, money, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips | 3 Comments
Yaro Starak is recruiting two bloggers for his Small Business Branding blog. The recruits will not get paid anything to start with, but if they prove their value he is willing to share the profits of the blog with them. The blog has a page rank of 6 and good authority within its niche. By taking the job Yaro tempts:
“Your public profile will be enhanced as will your personal brand, being exposed to the nearly 1000 daily readers who come to SmallBusinessBranding.com through the web and RSS readers. If our relationship proves successful SmallBusinessBranding.com will be re-branded to include your photographs, biographical and contact details.”
This is an opportunity to lay down some work now and milk the profits later. Do you have a brain? Do you want to raise your profile and know what to do with your increased reputation afterwards? Then go ahead and do it. The other way around is to make a few dollars short term and kill your own brand on the way by working for Pay Per Post.
Blogosphere links:
First impressions of Pay Per Post
Personal finance blogger considers making the suicide
My blog is now available through bloglines and all these other RSS things. Sign up via Feedburner and become the 2nd person to subscribe.
Make some money on Sunday’s World Cup final
July 6, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, rich on eBay, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
I surf around the money making sites of the blogosphere and found this little piece of gold: sell shirts that you make at a CafePress store on eBay.
Sunday is world cup final. Italy - France. Using this scheme you can make some money on Sunday. After the match is over you can sell shirts with the following slogans, sold on eBay (depending on the match incidents):
Italy - France: 2-1
Thierre Henry and Cristiano Ronaldo: The jokes of the Premiership.
It was not offside!
I am sure you can come up with your own suggestions.
The risks of selling your blog
July 6, 2006 | Filed Under Art of the Deal, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, How to create a successful blog, Money making as young | 1 Comment
College-Startup.com is a damn good blog with a great positioning in the blogosphere: One college student, on a quest, to make money.
Now it is put up for sale. Starting bid $1000. The price includes a Google PR rank of 5, unique design, pages indexed in Google, all the posts, a high technorati rank, links from high profile sites like ProBlogger and a monthly income of about $100 if I remember correctly.
The minute after I read the news, I removed my permanent link to College Startup.
But why Money Matador? Why are you removing the link to such a jolly fine blog?
The success and quality of blogs are heavily correlated to the inputs of the owner. A new owner may continue what was already started, he may even improve on the “product.” Or he may just put up lots of spam pages and monetize it with adsense to milk the juice of the site. Even though, there are probably cheaper domains to buy if you want to go that down that route.
Either way, I take down the link and wait for the outcome.
Hah! Nobody cares if your little pimple blog removes the link
Probably very true! But, if some other more influential blog owners think like me..
Another issue is the damage to the blog if it is not sold. Will the readers of the blog have the same relationship to it when they know the owner tried to sell it and was unsuccessful?
Let’s finish with a conspiracy theory
I am just writing this post to negotiate a lower price than the “buy now” price of $6500.
Edit:
He has already received a bid of $1200 and a blog real estate expert claims it is worth at least $1600.
Money making idea: Authors sign their books, you sell them on eBay for a nasty profit
July 3, 2006 | Filed Under rich on eBay, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | 2 Comments
We know that books that famous people have signed fetch good prices on eBay. They know that if you come to their book signing with more than 2-3 books, something fishy is going on and they will be unwilling to sign it. Or, a more common hurdle, the book shop are restricting the amount of books you can buy. For example: “Max 2 signed copies per person.”
Here are the 4 steps you need to go through to cash in on the demand for signed books.
Step 1: A celebrity is visiting
Read the local papers and ask the local book stores about upcoming “book signing events.” When a famous writer/person is coming to town to sign copies of his/her latest book or autobiography, you better be prepared.
Step 2: Buy 100 copies of the book
Buy the book in advance through various stores in your community or online.
Step 3: Recruit 100 teenagers/children
Oh, the delight of using child labour. Recruit young people through your local school or sports club. Give them one copy each and tell them to go to the local shopping mall at the time of the book signing to get it signed.
Agree to give them $10 when they return to you with the book signed.
Step 4: Cash in
Now is the time to go to eBay and start selling the product. If you indeed did this with 100 books it will be wise to not put everything up for sale at the same time, slowly milk the cow to limit supply.
This scheme should have the potential to give you several 100% ROI. I have only tested it myself on a limited scale(4 books!). Add your comments, I am happy to receive input from others on the feasibility of the idea.
How to get rich with credit card debt
July 2, 2006 | Filed Under credit cards, You've gone to the finest schools allright, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips | 10 Comments
I attended a class of “Entrepreneurship” a few years ago. The lecturer mentioned some untraditional ways of funding your start-up. When traditional ways of acquiring capital like bank loans, angel investors or venture capital failed there are always opportunities for the creative entrepreneur. He told us that he knew a few entrepreneurs that started their companies with the help of credit card debt.
Examples of credit card money making ideas you can use straight away
Get started in the world of credit card debt start ups with these examples:
Idea #1: Selling on E-bay
Buy cheap goods from China. Pay with your credit card. Get the goods. Unload it on eBay. Pay credit card debt. Repeat.
Idea #2: Early bird, buy airline tickets from low cost airlines
There are a few times every year when low cost airlines release new routes and tickets. Subscribe to their e-mail lists and you will get informed when this is happening. Then you pull out your card, buy all the cheap tickets available. You wait a few weeks or months and start selling them with a healthy profit. A ticket that costs £10/$18 6 months in advance may cost £50/$90 a few weeks before departure. Your price must be a bit below the cost of buying it directly from the airline in order to attract buyers to “unknown you” instead of big safe low cost airline. It is a matter of trust, but price can compensate.
The window of opportunity for this idea is closing fast due to increasingly hefty fees from airlines for changing the names on the tickets.
Word of warning: Only use credit cards to buy money making assets
If you are using credit cards you are likely to get an annual interest on the debt of 15-25%. It is essential to buy money making assets that have the potential to create a profit, so that you can pay back your debt as fast as possible. Keep the fancy cars or computers to a minimum.
The essence of e-books: “How to get rich on eBay”
July 2, 2006 | Filed Under rich on eBay, essence of e-books, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips | 1 Comment
After buying and reading 2 “get rich on eBay” e-books I am a bit disappointed. In order to save you money and time, I have made an executive summary.
Save $10-75 by getting the e-book insight for free. Here’s the information you will be getting from “rich on eBay e-books:”
Rich on eBay chapter 1: Mental prepareness crap + money
A few pages are dedicated to being prepared to get started and having money to invest.
Rich on eBay chapter 2: The links
You will get links to portals where Chinese manufacturers advertise their products. Two sites that are likely to be featured are http://www.alibaba.com/ and http://www.globalsources.com/ .
Rich on eBay chapter 3: How to interact with manufacturers
A few examples of how to write an e-mail asking for price of the products. Remember to finish off by “Yours Sincerely”
Rich on eBay chapter 4: How to sell your products
If you are honest you will get good feedback ratings on e-bay. Feedback ratings secures trust between seller and buyer.
What you will not get by reading a rich on eBay book:
No one will tell you which products to sell. All the information is about the little bits surrounding the sale. You got to come up with the idea of a good product by yourself.
Did you know?
June 27, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment
You can start a business in one day. Just remember to not start promoting it until the DNS have properly propagated.
Make money on commuting
June 23, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | 1 Comment
A guy earns $100 - $300 a day by helping people to drive in the car commuter lane. The best part of it is that he doubles the price if there has been an accident and the traffic is particular bad that day.
Capitalism at its finest.
Photos: “My icecream business failed”
June 22, 2006 | Filed Under learning from failure, Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment
You would think that selling icecream from your van would be a good earner in a beach resort huh?
Business idea from Dane Morgan: Songversations
June 22, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | Leave a Comment
My comment on the opportunity: Pretty nice idea, I think it could catch on and go viral. Just wondering if there is an open source script already that you can use or if you need to develop the solution from scratch?
A downside of the idea is that the site will probably generate low value adsense ads so you need other ways like eg. Allposter to monetize it.
10 reasons your great start-up is gonna fail
June 21, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Money making as young | 1 Comment
When discussing entrepreneurship, starting your own company, making money on your own and so on with friends and acquintances, a lot of people seem to have a very pessimistic outlook on their opportunities to create wealth for themselves.
The law of Jante
This is of course written from a North European standpoint where the “Jante Law” often comes into play. Allow me to quote the law, from Wikipedia:
“There are 10 different rules in the law, but they are all variations on a single theme and are usually referred to as a homogeneous unit: Don’t think you’re anyone special or that you’re better than us. The 10 rules are:
- You shall not think that you are special.
- You shall not think that you are of the same standing as us.
- You shall not think that you are smarter than us.
- Don’t fancy yourself as being better than us.
- You shall not think that you know more than us.
- You shall not think that you are more important than us.
- You shall not think that you are good at anything.
- You shall not laugh at us.
- You shall not think that anyone cares about you.
- You shall not think that you can teach us anything. “
It is damn difficult to make serious money if laws like this keep you down.
Using services like Scriptlance, Getafreelancer and RentACoder to get work done cheaply
June 19, 2006 | Filed Under Services like Scriptlance and Getafreelancer, Outsourcing, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips | 8 Comments
This type of service is facilitating buyers of services like coding, programming, website design to get in contact with sellers/providers of this type of work. The buyer post a project outline together with a maximum budget and sellers outbid each other in order to get awarded the job.
There are a lot of Indian and Russian programmers bidding for the projects available. These are countries known for cheap hourly wages. “Yes! Cheap labour to do my projects! I wil stop using my fellow countrymen’s expensive services!”
If the project management and selection process is done right, it is no doubt that these services may give you a cost efficient way to build and launch your online enterprise. In a few days, I will return with some posts about my experiences in this area. Until then, check out the services: