:rasta:I figure this will be quite useful to newbies like me and anyone who is starting out.
So ...
1) How did YOU made your first big buck?
2) How BIG was the big buck?
Cheers!
How did YOU made your first big buck?
- Thread starter smashhell
- Start date
Looting people's houses in Ultima Online (pre uo:r) and selling their shit back to them for USD.
I started learning "web design" super young too (wanted to figure out how to up my stats on the website my mom built for our lacrosse team in 8th grade)
I was doing regular (weekly?) freelance work by 13 ... building sites for some lady I met on a forum (TutorialForum). She'd send me the specs/content and I'd build her the site. A few days later I'd get a check for $100. I was the most ballin' 13 year old I knew. Looking back on it I wonder how much she was making.
I suppose it's worth noting that I'll be turning 25 this June.
I've been building websites nearly half my life!
I started learning "web design" super young too (wanted to figure out how to up my stats on the website my mom built for our lacrosse team in 8th grade)
I was doing regular (weekly?) freelance work by 13 ... building sites for some lady I met on a forum (TutorialForum). She'd send me the specs/content and I'd build her the site. A few days later I'd get a check for $100. I was the most ballin' 13 year old I knew. Looking back on it I wonder how much she was making.
I suppose it's worth noting that I'll be turning 25 this June.
I've been building websites nearly half my life!
When I was in 5th grade I found a huge bin of 21 Jumpstreet non-sport card packs at Big Lots - each pack selling for 1c each. I bought about 1000 packs for 10 bucks, and took them to school and sold each of them for 25c each to kids around the school. Hired this young fellow to sell to lower grades for me for free packs for himself.
Banked enough to buy a couple boxes of 86 Donruss which back then was awesome. Had the Jose Canseco Rookie at 30+ bucks in it, and Fred McGriff as well. Loved those 86 donruss cards. Now they are worthless.
Banked enough to buy a couple boxes of 86 Donruss which back then was awesome. Had the Jose Canseco Rookie at 30+ bucks in it, and Fred McGriff as well. Loved those 86 donruss cards. Now they are worthless.
I called up Alienware, gave them the serials for 4 expensive laptops, and then said none of them would turn on. During the troubleshooting steps I pretended to cut myself and bleed over the laptops and also pretended that I had hepatitis C.
They had no other choice but to honour my RMA request so they pretty much had to ship me 4 free expensive laptops...
They had no other choice but to honour my RMA request so they pretty much had to ship me 4 free expensive laptops...
that is call-in/mail fraud. Commonly mistaken for "social engineering", but has almost nothing to do with it.
I like most people made my first buck on line through affiliate marketing. My friend had me market his product and soon I was making loads of sales for him, this was a long time ago, but it does bring back some memories.
LOL I sold a trash e-book that had about 40 pages and 2 pages of real content. I ended up making about 4k from it before I started feeling bad about selling "air". That was my first foray into IM and after that I started doing adsense and direct affiliate stuff. The mid-late 90's I was an affiliate for the webhosts "Virtualsys" and I did pretty well out of them before they went bust.
I have done several things.. shit this brings back memories....
1. In middle school I would buy "wax packs" of baseball cards and go thru them and pick out the good ones worth money. Then I would take rubber cement or stick glue and very thinly reseal the "wax pack" after putting in some garbage worthless cards so the pack still had the same number of cards in it. I would then go to school and sell the pack for retail or slightly above retail while keeping all the good cards back home. I would then take all my "free" good cards and uptrade them for better, basically offering like 5 Tony Goodwins for a Ken Griffey rookie or something later on and then selling that rookie for money down the line to someone else. cash money business! this was like 1990-1992 ish
2. Around 1996 ish I got into online adult stuff somehow. Found a couple guys that taught me how to make Adult AVS sites, TGP's, Link Lists, etc. I use to design galleries for porn stars ( some big names now ) and submit their galleries to thehun, onlymovies, shemps, etc while getting a design fee from them too. I would then also create my own TGPs and AVS sites and then go on AOL chat rooms and ewhore and trick people into signing up for the AVS sites I made. This is the first check I got online ever.
3. The adult stuff grew old as I could not make steady money in it with clients and TGPs and ewhoring was just sad.. so I started building mainstream sites for clients and learning programming and years later ( 2004 ) got into building Adsense sites ( still have my first Adsense check ) for myself and making money from Adsense and mainstream clients until right around 2007. I made a couple contributions to Wordpress and seo linking research + strategies too in this time that no one else was doing. I was also doing a lot of shit on Craigslist too where I would post ads to CL and redirect people back to my Adsense ladden websites and such.
4. mid 2007 I started working in affiliate and made what I thought was the first fake blog/flog site ( even though I am sure others did it too before me ). I promoted some colon products thru commission junction at the time in mid 2007 and told a fake story how I lost weight with this colon product using my real name. I didnt earn much so I gave up on it until I seen someone else doing it on Facebook about 7 months later and then I gave it go again, but this time I decided to try something no one had done yet and add 2 products ( green tea and colon, and the later acai and colon ) to the fake blog to see if I could get 2 sales from 1 customer and also because someone I knew had just made their own colon product too and wanted me to push it for them. I hooked up with a partner and had him rewrite the copy to make it 10x better then my original version back in mid 2007. Facebook was hot, green tea was hot, weight loss was hot, and the story I made up about why they needed the 2nd product ( colon ) was even hotter. I ended up making enough money to quit everything else I was doing at the time and and focus just on media buying and being a self employed online marketer.. this came at a perfect time in life too as I had got laid off from a job I loved too.
5. Doing all kinds of different shit now. One thing I learned from all this is, being specialized is great and can make you a ton of fucking money, but being diversified is where its safe once you have something to protect and keep from losing. Some people don't understand this and think you should keep blazing forward getting better and better and topping yourself every year regardless of the risk it takes.
Once you reach a certain point though, its smarter to just protect what you have, diversify, and grow what you have slowly in several areas to make sure its still there 40 years from now. - Oh yeah, hire people to do all these things for you. Nothing is worse then being diversified and spread out, and you being the only one doing all of it. Pay people to help diversify you and do all these things for you...
1. In middle school I would buy "wax packs" of baseball cards and go thru them and pick out the good ones worth money. Then I would take rubber cement or stick glue and very thinly reseal the "wax pack" after putting in some garbage worthless cards so the pack still had the same number of cards in it. I would then go to school and sell the pack for retail or slightly above retail while keeping all the good cards back home. I would then take all my "free" good cards and uptrade them for better, basically offering like 5 Tony Goodwins for a Ken Griffey rookie or something later on and then selling that rookie for money down the line to someone else. cash money business! this was like 1990-1992 ish
2. Around 1996 ish I got into online adult stuff somehow. Found a couple guys that taught me how to make Adult AVS sites, TGP's, Link Lists, etc. I use to design galleries for porn stars ( some big names now ) and submit their galleries to thehun, onlymovies, shemps, etc while getting a design fee from them too. I would then also create my own TGPs and AVS sites and then go on AOL chat rooms and ewhore and trick people into signing up for the AVS sites I made. This is the first check I got online ever.
3. The adult stuff grew old as I could not make steady money in it with clients and TGPs and ewhoring was just sad.. so I started building mainstream sites for clients and learning programming and years later ( 2004 ) got into building Adsense sites ( still have my first Adsense check ) for myself and making money from Adsense and mainstream clients until right around 2007. I made a couple contributions to Wordpress and seo linking research + strategies too in this time that no one else was doing. I was also doing a lot of shit on Craigslist too where I would post ads to CL and redirect people back to my Adsense ladden websites and such.
4. mid 2007 I started working in affiliate and made what I thought was the first fake blog/flog site ( even though I am sure others did it too before me ). I promoted some colon products thru commission junction at the time in mid 2007 and told a fake story how I lost weight with this colon product using my real name. I didnt earn much so I gave up on it until I seen someone else doing it on Facebook about 7 months later and then I gave it go again, but this time I decided to try something no one had done yet and add 2 products ( green tea and colon, and the later acai and colon ) to the fake blog to see if I could get 2 sales from 1 customer and also because someone I knew had just made their own colon product too and wanted me to push it for them. I hooked up with a partner and had him rewrite the copy to make it 10x better then my original version back in mid 2007. Facebook was hot, green tea was hot, weight loss was hot, and the story I made up about why they needed the 2nd product ( colon ) was even hotter. I ended up making enough money to quit everything else I was doing at the time and and focus just on media buying and being a self employed online marketer.. this came at a perfect time in life too as I had got laid off from a job I loved too.
5. Doing all kinds of different shit now. One thing I learned from all this is, being specialized is great and can make you a ton of fucking money, but being diversified is where its safe once you have something to protect and keep from losing. Some people don't understand this and think you should keep blazing forward getting better and better and topping yourself every year regardless of the risk it takes.
Once you reach a certain point though, its smarter to just protect what you have, diversify, and grow what you have slowly in several areas to make sure its still there 40 years from now. - Oh yeah, hire people to do all these things for you. Nothing is worse then being diversified and spread out, and you being the only one doing all of it. Pay people to help diversify you and do all these things for you...
I sold stuff on eBay back when it was relatively new and easy enough for people to get on and push whatever they had. It was all right but I realized that I didn't like the hassle of having to take stuff to the post office and send it off. I'd rather sell stuff online and let someone else worry about the shipping and other headaches.
First real internet money I made was selling an eBook on eBay, while cookie stuffing all visitors, along with the auto watch script, it was a goldmine and was the starting point for my IM empire...