How To Make Money
An introduction to the concepts of how to make money
A note before we begin
An introduction to the concepts of how to make money
A note before we begin
Making money is easy but sadly the issues have been clouded by lots of "how to make money" pundits that do not know what they are talking about. Some of them are very rich - making their money blogging about "how to make money".
Clue 42's guide to making money aims to strip away the many myths and falsehoods around the topic. We are going to answer the question "how can I make money?" We are going to do it without demanding you pay us first. It is going to be a free guide.
Where money comes from
When addressing the question of "how to make money" (online or off) one must understand that the money must come from somewhere. Before making money that money will be held by other entities (people, companies, charities etc). The secret of how to make money is in finding a reason why these people might want to give you their money.
It sounds obvious but many people when asking "please tell me how to make money" miss this first simple fact. People need a reason to give you money if you can provide a reason that can be accepted why people should give you money then they probably will. The basics of how to make money are very easy.
This applies not just to money but to people's time, recommendation, support and attention as well. If you can give a good reason why someone should spend time doing something you would like them to do then they will often do it. That's why most people spend their time at work (they get paid and that is a good reason).
How to provide a reason for people to give you money
You do not have to do this alone!
There are only two reasons why people will want to give you money - to make themselves feel good or to get something they think they need.
If you can provide something and allow people to understand why they need it then they will buy it. This can be hard but fortunately you can specialise. This makes it easier to make money because much of the work has been done for you.
There are those that know how to make money but do not have the resources to implement part of it. There are those that present the reason to the people but do not have the "something" available. This is called a "high demand situation" and it is an ideal place to start.
How to make money - an example
This is an example of making money online with a partner agency
Take the example of contextual adverts. People advertise because they know that it is a way to make money by getting the message of why people need "something" to the people that might "need it". Google, Yahoo and MSN all recognise this (as do others) and have their own platforms for providing advert space.
Take an example within this example and we see that "blue widget add on company" knows how to make money - the answer is to sell to blue widget owners. Advertising to everyone would be expensive so they choose to target more exclusively. This is where we come in.
There is, in our "how to make money" example lots of users looking for blue widget content on all sorts of social media sites and on the search engines. There are also a lot of people bidding a lot of money to try and get adverts to these people. There is all round high demand.
So we start a blue widget blog and choose an advertising partner. On this blog we write (or pay others to write) all about blue widgets and all the sorts of things you can do with them. We are starting to meet the need of the people searching and so will see a lot of attention in terms of visitors to our blog. These people will see adverts for products that interest them and so buy clicking on those ads they close the transaction between need and money and we all win.
What we did was marry up two sets of needs. One source had money that (via our partner agency) they would provide if we can meet their need (interested people) and the other would give us attention, support and recommendation if we could meet their need for information. By drawing the information hungry to one place we created something (an audience) that someone was willing to pay for.
That is how to make money, or one way at any rate. What you provide need not be physical but it must be or seem real. Sometimes you can trade your time via a number of steps to turn something simple into a good income.
There is an underlying secret here
This is clearly not the whole story on "how to make money". There are a few skills that you can foster that will make you better able to turn something common into something rarer. In our example the extra secret was knowledge - we knew a lot about the state of the market and you can know that too.
A little research goes a long way. This is a topic that will be covered in other pages on the clue42.com how to make money guide.