About Entrepreneurs: Here’s the thing about making money online..
Simply put, there’s no magic bullet. The ways you can make “big money”, i.e., more than, say, about $10-$15 an hour, typically require at least two of the following three things:
Investment – Free tools are typically advertiser supported, which means you can’t run as much advertising yourself and can’t make as much money. Or they’re open source software (like the WordPress blogging tool I described in the article you referred to), which require some degree of skill to use. You could build your own full-fledged e-commerce site, selling affiliate products, running advertising, blogging, and so on, for just the cost of very cheap hosting (less than $20 a year). But if you want to do that with no technical knowledge, no HTML knowledge, you’re going to spend more like $20-$30 a month or more.
Skill – If you know what you’re doing, there are a lot of free tools available. There’s also a whole genre of ways to make money by doing free trial offers and then canceling them. While that doesn’t take a great deal of skill, you have to be extremely organized in order to stay on top of them and do all the steps required to get the prize. People aren’t really going to give you a free XBox 360 or iPhone just for answering one little survey. Come on — think about it — the economics just don’t work.
Risk – There’s no absolutely sure, easy way to make money online at more than about $10-$12 an hour. To make more than that, you run the risk of making less than that, or even of losing money if you’re investing in tools (remember – I said you need two of these three).
Making Money Online [About Entrepreneurs]
Categories
BusinessWeek: Just because there is no one selling a particular product or service doesn’t mean it’s automatically a good idea to try. Conversely, a competitively crowded industry shows that demand exists, as well as a viable market. The key to business success isn’t finding an empty field, but defining your company narrowly—no matter how crowded a marketplace you’re entering.
The Closet Entrepreneur: Identical twins Amal and Juan graduate with Bachelors degrees and receive the same job offer. Amal passes up the job offer to pursue a Masters degree while Juan takes the job offer and begins working. Two years pass and Amal graduates and begins working. By this time Juan has been promoted to a position that is comparable to Amal’s starting position, and Juan’s salary has increased to an amount that is comparable to Amal’s starting salary. So who made the better decision, Amal or Juan?