When I’m not busy looking after guests in our gites or writing this column, and it’s raining outside, I have been known to pass an hour or two surfing on the internet. I’m quite a gullible kind of person, and very often ‘get rich quick’ adverts catch my eye.
Occassionally I take a look, but usually don’t bother, on the grounds that someone rich is not going to waste their time telling me how to get rich. However, it is a popular subject and, well, to be honest, I would quite like to get rich, so I have been reviewing the (legal) options. First up is ‘pretend to be an expert on getting rich and sell a book about how to it’. Ideally this will be an ebook, so you can sell it over the internet without all the burdens of printing and publishing costs, and avoiding the humiliation of seeing a pile of your unsold books being used as landfill. Sounds like a nice idea. Promise that you will make people rich for £29.99, sell just 20 copies a week for a year and you have made £30,000. Or sell ten times as many, or ten different books, and make £300,000 per year. Can hardly go wrong can it? There are apparently 1 billion internet users in the world now, so selling something to 20 of them a week shouldn’t be impossible. Of course, you do actually need a book to sell, but a couple of hours hacking paragraphs out of other peoples websites should do the job nicely.
You will need a reasonably compelling explanation as to why someone so rich is bothering to write the book. Best option is to pretend you are so rich that you really don’t care if someone else copies your secret, and that you might as well write a book while you are sat by the pool sipping your tequila.
Second idea that I hear so much about is auctioning things on eBay. I did once try and sell something on eBay, and failed, but I understand that hundreds of people actually make a living from it. Of course the average attic doesn’t hold hundreds valuable itels waiting to be sold, so you will need to buy an actual product to sell. As long as you can avoid paying in advance, or even better you can avoid ever handling real goods at all, this is another idea that might work. Or perhaps that is where I can sell my eBook?
The third option is more enigmatic. You start a business – a real actual business, not a n internet business – using a business model that can clearly never make any money. Ideally you will provide free goods or services to as many people as possible, and the whole world will acept the goods and services and be amazed at your generosity. So much so that eventually you start to make money in unexpected ways, usually advertising.
Because this sounds far-fetched, a couple of examples are in order. Which ones would you have identified as good business ideas early on? Google started as a search engine run as a project by a couple of bright young lads. Now it is one of the biggest companies in the world. Ryanair flies people around Europe, often for as little as £1 per ticket. Can’t be possible, we all cried, as they proceeded to become one of the most successful airline companies. And my personal favourite? There is a Free Dating Service website in north America, run more or less by one man, and he apparently makes $10,000 per day, from advertisers on the site.
So I am now trying to dream up a business idea that can never work – that shouldn’t be too difficult – and convince Mrs B that I should work on the idea for a few years until the money flops through the letterbox and the bank manager starts inviting us around for aperitifs.
Meanwhile, a special leatherbound manual ‘Get Rich Quick with Boris’, containing all the above advice and more, that will really work for you, and will only take 30 minutes a week of your time, and will make you very rich, is available directly from me, or on eBay, price just £19.99 (a 30% discount on the recommended price – offer must end soon!!!). Postage and packing extra.
Information in this entry was supplied by What is SEO many thanks
Recent Comments