Let me start by saying that there are many ways to make a dollar online; this post will outline one such method. I am not sure who this quote belongs to, but I have heard it said that if you drop a entrepreneur off in New York City with nothing but the clothes on his back and a 100 dollar bill, you could find him a year latter running his own fleet of hot dog stands. I believe that one of the skills of a good entrepreneur is that, if necessary, they can make money without spending it.

Robert Kiyosaki, in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad advises his readers never to take a job for the money, but rather, for the experience. Every now and again, I will suggest an experiment for the readers of this blog to conduct. If you decide to try any of these experiments, PLEASE don’t do it for the money… it won’t be worth it. What you will learn from these experiments on the other hand, that’s another story.

But I digress, back to the subject of how to make a dollar online without spending any money. For this experiment you will need at least the following, a PayPal.com Account and a Squidoo.com Account. Your mission, if you choose to accept it is to create a “lens” on Squidoo and bring the “lensmaster” revenue on your account from $0.00 to $1.00. One of the cool things about Squidoo is that they allow you to set your own payment threshold, so for purposes of this experiment you may well want to set the threshold to $1.00.

Squidoo hosts what I would call mini-webpages, what they call “lenses” for free. Lenses on Squidoo are made up of “modules”. You could have a module for text, one for pictures, one for recommended books, and so on. A lens can generate revenue by Google AdSense ads plus other possible revenue streams such as revenue from sponsors like Amazon and eBay. Squidoo shares 50% of all revenue from a lens with that lens’s lensmaster.

So the question becomes how to generate enough traffic, to filter through your conversion piece… I mean lens, to make it to the $1.00 threshold in a reasonable amount of time. Let’s consider some options.

You could make an awesome lens that ranked in the top 100 lenses on Squidoo. This should garner you a good amount of traffic from those searching the top 100 list as well as those conducting searches on Squidoo.com. You could sign up for a forum related to your lens topic and write posts that include a link to your lens in the signature file. You might use the “FREE keyword suggestion tool” at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ to find some good keywords and attempt to use article marketing and SEO to gain some traffic for your site.

If that last suggestion threw you for a loop, don’t worry, a post on that topic will be coming out very soon.

Since I would like you to complete this experiment well before you qualify for social security, let me give you a big hint. You are probably best off sticking to one of the following topics: insurance, mortgages, or pharmaceuticals.

If you complete this experiment, let us know by posting a comment on this post. You can even include a link to your lens as the URL. That link alone should be good for some more traffic, and who knows we may even feature your lens in a future post.

If you enjoyed this post you might like our post on monetizing web traffic.

When the scandals of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom were first exposed the world was in shock. The stories of these three companies are not the only tales of woe from the business world that make us wonder if the average CEO of a publicly traded company has the best interests of his shareholders in mind.

The above mentioned scandals have caused some to loose faith in the stock market. Of course there are those talking heads on TV who would tell us that there is no reason to loose faith in the market and that the scandals which have been exposed are isolated incidents. Here is the issue, with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line; do you think that the temptation to steal will ever disappear?

Of course government regulatory agencies like the SEC that monitor publicly traded companies in this country have adapted since these scandals in an effort to make sure such antics are tougher to pull off for the future would be crooks. This sort of evolution is natural but the question is how much more comfortable should it make us feel? More…

Let’s say that you are absolutely nuts about golf, and you have decided to follow your passion and build an email list around the subject. Imagine that at this point you have built your email list up to 100,000 leads and that you have several products in your pipeline, which you plan on release in the near future. This could include a product on weight-lifting for golf, a product for improved driving, and a product for achieving putting perfection.

A simple way to market these 3 products would be to create an email campaign for each product and send the entire campaign to every one of your subscribers. Of course even with such a simple strategy you would want to make sure to spread out each campaign. No list will respond well to being constantly bombarded with sales pitch after sales pitch, and padding the space in between pitches with informative, and preferably unique information, on golf can only help your credibility in the eyes of your list.

A more complicated marketing strategy would be to divide up your list into a main list with several sub-lists. So you might send an email to your main list telling them that you have special information for anyone interested in efficient weight lifting for golf, which will add yards to their drives and fairway shots, even without a touch of improvement to their technique! This email would contain a link for anyone interested to follow.

Anyone who clicks on this link will be brought to a second opt-in page where they will have the option to become a member of the sub-list for “weight-lifting for golf.” Of course I would not advise you to use the term “sub-list” anywhere on this web-page, just some brief information to pique there curiosity, and get them to sign up.

Once your “weight-lifting for golf” email marketing campaign is completed you can send it to your sub-list. Please not that by campaign I mean a series of 5 to 7 emails designed not to inform but specifically to sell. At the same time you send your campaign to your sub-list you can send a brief series of sales letters, between 1 and 3 to your main list to try to encourage some extra sales.

Breaking up your email list in this way tends to cause better results in terms of conversion rate as opposed to treating all members of your lists as equals. You are always going to get a higher conversion rate emailing to your list of pre-qualified golf leads then you would to a list of 100,000 members of the general public. The reason is that your list represents leads that are pre-qualified based on the specific interest of golfing. It is the specific interest of the lead that gives it its value, and in a market as wide as golfing related products, there are bound to be even more specific interests which can be unearthed.

Two posts ago we spoke about “The Four Horsemen of Web Traffic,” namely Paid Advertising, Organic Search, Social Networking, and Viral Marketing. In that post we hinted at a “Hidden Source of Web Traffic“. So what could this source possibly be, and what benefit could it be to your online business? Let’s start with the benefits.

Imagine for a moment that you have just invested serious time and money developing a first class ebook. Regardless of your chosen niche, you face an enormous problem when it comes to monetizing your product. In this day and age of file sharing services, websites, bit-torrent, and so forth, ebooks are especially susceptible to being copied illicitly. Given the nature of this technological disadvantage inherent to ebooks it would be extremely valuable to drive large amounts of targeted web-traffic to a specific conversion piece, the moment your product is released. If you assume that eventually your work will be pirated, it makes sense to sell as many copies “out of the gate” as possible.

Let’s say that you have just invented the world’s greatest course for making money with Blogs, AdSense, Mini-Sites, Affiliate Marketing, whatever. It would help to be able to make some sort of outrageous claim as a hook for the Sales Letter. For example “Discover how I made $10,000, in one Month with [Fill in the Blank].” Of course people will be skeptical of your claim so you will want screen shots to prove your earnings over a one month period. If you are the type that has no reservations about glossing over some the inherent advantages you had in accomplishing this feet, you may want to drive some instant traffic to your money making site in order to increase sales.

Business is of a time sensitive nature and a product that is a hit today, may well have turned out as a flop if brought to market a year later. If you have a product to bring to market and you just don’t have time to wait for traffic to trickle in order to test various versions of your sales letter, what should you do? Once again it would be great to be able to send a thousand or so unique visitors to each version of your letter to drastically increase the speed of your testing process.
The “Hidden Source of Web Traffic” that might allow you to duplicate the above mentioned feats of marketing magic, is a well crafted email list. We mentioned in our post “Lead Me to It” about the incredible value of a list of pre-qualified physical addresses. Building an email list of targeted leads is yet another way to fabricate your own gold mine. Indeed a large and well built list can mean instant traffic, however building such a list is not an overnight assignment. In some cases it could take years to build such a list, and even after the list is built, constant maintenance is required to keep your leads from dropping out or losing interest in your promotions.
Email lists are not a cure-all for your online business, they have there own pitfalls and dangers like any other online business technique. So I wouldn’t swear by them, but I would suggest you check them out.

If you liked this post, chances are that you’ll enjoy our post on monetizing web traffic.