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The Fast Buck Myth by Quentin Brooks Fast bucks are hard to catch, so the story goes. Einstein said, according to the laws of relativity, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a Universe dominated by the fundamental laws of physics. Einstein clearly never caught some of the bull crap that flows from the fingers of all those SPAM marketing artists on the net who seem capable of churning out scam after scam at speeds not only in excess of light but intelligence too. So. Is it possible, relatively speaking, to make a fast buck from the Internet? Are there really vast seams of electronic gold out there, waiting to be tapped into, or are we simply chasing rainbows when we type HOW TO MAKE MONEY into our favourite search engine? Here's an experiment you won't want to try. Make a website. Surf over to any multi-link submission site on the Internet, The Promoter for example, and submit your URL. Sit back and have a coffee then a few minutes later check your Email. Out of the few hundred confirmation Emails you then receive informing you your URL has joined their service, at least 100% of them will also be informing you of some unique and unmissable way in which you can make easy money from your very own PC with an absolute minimum of effort required on your part and hardly any money up front atall really, honest. Out of those few hundred mails (let's call a spade a spade here, SPAMs) approximately none of them will be of any real value to you. But it does go to show just how many people there are out there chasing pots of gold with their own particular schemes and putting effort into a pretty fruitless endeavour. Marketing can work. Don't get me wrong. If you have a few thousand pounds going spare, some programming skill, a tongue that could talk the hind legs off a donkey then persuade it to go for a walk afterwards and an absolute void of nothingness where most people have scruples, you could probably make a go of Internet marketing. After all you don't need a product because in real marketing product doesn't matter, so you don't need that particular outlay. In fact all you do need is a ruthless promotional machine and that's where the majority of your costs are likely to lie. But there are already far too many ruthless promotional machines stalking the web, praying on unsuspecting webmasters and naive newbie surfers. One more and I suspect the World Wide Web will collapse under its own weight leaving us all living on the event horizon of some dirty great walloping black hole, an eventuallity I'm sure nobody wants. OK - what about affiliations? Now, there's a way to make a fast buck surely. Stick a banner on your website, link it up to your friendly neighbourhood bookstore or electrical retailer or - yes - your affiliated marketing site and watch the commissions roll in! Nope. Big web businesses know banner advertising works on the same scale as real world mailshots. For every 10,000 you send expect 100 enquiries and 10 sales. That means 1 in 100 people who see the banner may click on it and 1 in 1000 people will actually buy something as a result. And this is an optimistic forecast. Consider your own website and its meagre traffic. If you get 10 visitors a day (which is average for an amateur site) your affiliate banner may get clicked on once every 10 days. Over the course of 100 days (in theory only) you may make one commission based sale. If that sale is for a £6.99 book, you will probably earn a maximum 10% in commission. That's 69p every 3.5 months. Hardly a second income. Advertising then. That has to be a real earner, right? Well, in some cases yes. If you have a decent enough website with a decent following and regular click throughs from interested visitors (we're looking at at least 100 visitors every day) then you have every right to try and sell space on your homepage to a sponsor. How you go about this is the key to earning money from it. Don't SPAM people informing them of your advertising space. Your ISP will probably boot you and nobody will be interested anyway. Don't post a message in the proposed banner space on your site saying "this space for your ad" because that's naff and you want to attract serious sponsors. Do cold call businesses in your area and let them know the space is there if they want it, send them a pricelist of advertising rates (not too steep) and a few examples of banners available to them (expect the cold shoulder 90% of the time though). Do post messages on business related newsgroups offering your advertising space at a very reasonable rate. If you talk to a small business advisor they'll tell you never to use low price as your selling point. What do they know. People want cheap, fact of life - give them what they want! If you don't have at least 100 genuine visitors a day, forget it. You'll probably be required to offer proof of your claimed 100 visitors in the form of web stats. Using a free web tracking service like Sitetracker is a good idea for this. Just give any potential sponsor your Sitetracker password and user name then let them monitor your traffic on a daily basis themselves. Never make up stats, getting sued is no day at the beach. So we have sorted out one genuine way to make money on the net at least. Its no walkover, however. You'll need to sweat blood to get 100 visitors to your site every day, or at the very least grow a nice money tree in your garden to pay for all the search engine promoting. Your site will need to be on top form too and you won't want to undertake anything serious if you have a day job, a family or a moviestar lifestyle. So before you leap onto the money making bandwagon and settle down with the A-Z of dodgy marketing ploys, you may want to reconsider. You're unlikely to earn enough to buy that yacht you always dreamed of and chances are you'll be used and abused by all those Internet con-artists who've been at it a damn sight longer than you have. If its a second income you're after, I'd sooner recommend robbing a bank - the hours are better anyway. |
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