B0ne’s Home

It’s been about a week and I’ve come to a horrifying conclusion: There’s no money to be made on the Internet for small time bloggers such as myself. Maybe I should qualify that by saying, there’s no EASY money to be made by small timers. As much as the Get-Rich-Quick ebooks tout all of their “no-brainer” strategies, it’s all for naught.

I’m going to have to drench my poor ISP with thousands and millions of hits so that I can make enough clicks to retire on a tiny Greek Island with my much too young EuroGirlfriend in tow. I’ve followed some directions on how to direct traffic. The BlogRush thing has worked to a certain extent. I’ve seen a couple of strangers pass on by and my articles are getting shown on a few thousand other sites. I’ve tried FeedBurner as well. There are others out there that I’ve tried. I’ve even linked to myself but felt dirty about doing that in front of everyone on the Internet!

I haven’t seen ONE FLIPPING RED CENT in any of my accounts as a result of blogging for money. The only reliable way I’ve been making change has been to sell my crap on EBAY. I guess because that’s about as big time “brick and mortar” as you’re going to get on the Internet. I have to be more careful about shipping costs though. I’ve screwed myself a few times in some of my recent auctions. I may have to go to a flat rate that’s higher for some folks to recoup my losses.

Any way, it’s not like all these BS “Gurus” and “Experts” are saying. A big part of these earnings models is predicated on the idea that people click on ads and buy crap on the Internet. THAT’S NOT TRUE. Maybe if you have enough traffic, 1 out of 10,000 people will click on an ad and buy crap. Another part is to drive the traffic to your for-pay articles, which in turn should make the hosting company money through all of those clicks and you some sweet commission money.

Well, a week in and all I’ve got to show for it is three nice new blogs, a bunch of ads and affiliate links, and a folder chock full of ebooks and videos about setting up your site for EZ monetization and riches! Fooey! I will end this as I always do by tenderly begging you do donate a dollar to my Cause for the Pause by clicking on my “Donate” button. In other words: GIMMEADOLLAH FOO!!!!

Ebay Arbitrage is a pretty wide open area these days. If you want the Dictionary.com version of it, here it is:

“The simultaneous purchase and sale of the same securities, commodities, or foreign exchange in different markets to profit from unequal prices.”

Basically, you are profiting on the mistakes of others or being a middle-man. There are a number of schemes.

One of them involves spelling. You search for poor souls that misspelled “iPod Video” and put their precious box up in the “aPud Veedeeoh” section with a No Reserve auction type. You swoop in and buy the thing for a buck. Turn around and sell it and profit a thousand-fold. OK maybe a hundred… There are a multitude of tools out there looking for misspelled keywords. I’ve tried this with a PalmPilot. Unfortunately the misspelling wasn’t as blatent as my example and so I lost out. I think if I made it my business, I probably could have found one like that. Try out FatFingers and see if your luck is better than mine.

Another scheme is the drop ship. There are wholesalers out there that are willing to be the middleman in your wheel and deal. This eliminates having a bunch of product in your home which may or may not cause the IRS to come a knocking on your new Get-Rich-Quick plan. The beauty and the problem in this is that you never see the actual item being bid on. You also don’t deal with returns and such. Of course, if you get hooked up with a fly by night drop shipper, both you and your customer will be hung out to dry.

The Jedi Drop Ship scheme would be to bid on an item with misspelled keywords and immediately put it up for bid right after you win it. You then tell the person you bought it from to send it to your winning bidder. A very slick scheme indeed.

I’m not brave enough on these strategies to risk my precious ebay rating. I’m thinking about a relatively safe item to try a drop ship though. I’ll let you know how it went. If you want to try your hand at this, I’d suggest looking at Emergency Cash Generators. You can get the guide or register for some free information about arbitrage. Go for it!

This is it! I’m fed up with making it possible for other geeks to make money off my clicks. Time to fight back with Web 2.0 goodness. It will be my ongoing goal to find out if this pipe dream is at all possible.

I’ve already put the blatant plug out in the form of a “Donate” button on my sidebar, so GIMMIEADOLLAH!!!

I’m also always selling my crap on ebay, so if you want it BID ON IT!

So, I’m going to report on things like arbitrage, getting affliate stuff working, blogging for money and what ever crackpot scheme gets me bucks.

It all seems a bit dubious. Lots of ebooks for sale and GoogleThis/GoogleThat. Every Joe Blow out there has a scheme. So far, I’ve only dumped a few bucks on a couple of these freaks. The one thing I *do* know is not to trust anyone that calls themselves: Guru.

*I’m* the real guru! So click on my donate button and gimmeadamndollah!

Apparently, when they weren’t busy throwing people off the steps of their temples, they were trying to get drunk.

(Sorry, this is actually supposed to be Mayan, from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, here’s the authentic Aztec shot.)

I guess it figures… college kids need their beer.

The Aztecs made a mistake but you can make beer ON PURPOSE!

I keep forgetting that these guys aren’t in a “fight” but are competing in a contest.
So that means that there are rules and stuff to worry about. All I know is that the sight of two men hugging each other used to send me running out of the room. Somehow, maybe because of all the blood, I’m liking it.

Here are the rules!

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I find that most of the TSA employees are extremely good at making me feel like the plane is going to blow up. Now I know why!

Airport Screeners Fail to Catch Bomb

http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1788161