A few days ago I wrote about some of the ways that expats can earn money. Today I thought I’d give two examples of how people make very large amounts of money on the internet.
I don’t do either of these – they are not very ethical and and do require some technical knowledge – but nonetheless I am confident they work. That geeky kid in the neighbours house who never leaves his bedroom? This could be what he’s up to!
I’ve described them as I understand them, and only in brief summary, and have missed some of the finer points. I understand that lots of people make very large amounts of money with each of these methods. I DO NOT recommend you do these, I have written about them for general information, and so that you can be aware that your spotty teenage nephew really might be earning five times more than you do, without ever leaving the house.
First method: Find or make a photo, movie, song that lots of people want to download. Preferably a copy of a brand new film or a photo you can describe in a way that makes people want to download it (hint: including words like ‘Paris Hilton’ and ‘nude’ in the title is a typical ploy).
Upload the file to a file download site. Called ‘torrent’ sites these are not sites that you will usually visit, but there are lots of them! They appear to be the modern way of obtaining dodgy downloads.
Package your video etc as a file that needs to be unzipped, along with an auto-install program. As part of the unzipping, the file will also install a different piece of software on the computer – software that is unnecessary to watch the film etc but allows the owner of the software to monitor the computer its installed on. This software is often called spyware or malware. Alternatively a form that collects email addresses can be included as part of the unzipping.
Many companies will pay out each time their software is installed on a computer or for each valid email address they can add to their lists. (You’ve seen those flashing ads telling you that you are the 999,999th person to visit a site so you win a prize? They are actually paying the site owner for email address collection).
Voila! You get great big payouts each month because of the auto-install software or the email address collection.
Method 2: This method first requires a ‘real’ website which actually sells something real. These are easy to sign up for and are called affiliate schemes. As example a seller of sports clothes might pay 5% commission for each sale you send their way from your site. Many companies run these schemes. Usually you will find it very difficult to get enough visitors to your website to make any sales.
Make hundreds of websites (these are quick and cheap to buy and create, appearance isn’t important – I’ll spare you the details but it isn’t complicated). Obtain some software that automatically rewrites pages of text (called ‘spinning’ again easily available). Use this to create thousands of pages of text based on the product you are trying to sell, starting with just a few pages of real text.
These pages will not be readable by people, but will appear genuine to the search engines who come visiting. They think they have found hundreds of useful sites about cheap sports clothing. Each site may only atract a few visitors a day – but you have hundreds of them, so that will add up to a lot of visitors.
The clever part – you don’t want real people to arrive at these sites – they are rubbish after all! For these sites, create settings such that if a search engine comes to the site they look through it like any other site, but if anyone else comes they automatically get sent to your real site that actually sells the product. Again very simple (you may recall BMW got banned from google results for a day or two last year because of doing a similar thing).
You sell your product – you are happy. The supplier sells his product – he is happy. The customer buys his product from your ‘proper’ site – he is happy. Everyone is happy. Question for the day – does anyone actually lose out by this method?
As I said, I am not endorsing these methods but they are interesting! I have also missed out a significant part of each of the processes so I don’t seem to be encouraging these practices. But I still find it amazing that geeky teenagers can make thousands of dollars using these techniques!
Thanks, now i know how all those advertisers and spammers get my email address. Never did get to see Paris Hilton nude, either…
P.S., why was it you wanted my email address when I left a comment again???
When I read your comment I didn’t notice what post it was for and thought you were suggesting that this blog was the cause of spam email. Glad it wasn’t!!
It’s a good question about why blog entries ask for an email address. It’s part of the software and I suppose is intended to reduce spam postings, although I don’t think it works too well.
If you are concerned I suggest setting up a free email account with hotmail and always using that email address for blog postings etc, but never using the same email address for ‘real’ correspondence – so you know it will never receive real messages.
On a happier note, in the last couple of months two different people have found old friends from this blog, where the old friend had posted a comment, and their name showed up in a google search. In both cases I was able to contact the poster of the comment to check I could release their email, and then give it to the person who was looking for them. That won’t work if you give a fake email address!