My wife and I, together with our friends, were about to go for a quick weekend getaway to Florida with our kids - each family has an-almost-two-year-old. We booked our flights and started looking for hotels. The challenge was that we have 2 little babies with us and so we were looking for a hotel that was family-friendly. The ones that would provide us with cribs for the babies and save us from 5am yelling of drunk neighbors returning from after-hours parties. Don’t get me wrong - I am usually that neighbor myself but once traveling with little kids agendas change a bit…

So to our surprise we couldn’t find a hotel close enough to the beach yet friendly enough for the kids. We googled phrases like ‘places to stay in south beach’, ‘best hotels in Miami’ and many more and to our great shock found thousands of apartments in gorgeous water-front newly built buildings for very reasonable rates.

We finally picked a great 1,600 square feet 2 bedroom in Sunny Isles for just $300/night. This apartment was great. While babies sleep we can watch TVs, go on the terrace to watch sunset, play cards, order in some late snack or dinner, etc. If we’d stay in regular hotels, we’d be separated in 2 different rooms and would be stuck with a 20 inch TV set watching it with our wives Here while me and my friend were enjoying basketball on 60 inch Plasma, wives were on the terrace talking about kids.

So where is the make money idea? Well, here it is. When we were checking out I asked Robbert, who came to take back the apartment keys from us and receive the rest of the payment, to let me know when the apartment is available in Fall. He asked me to call him as soon as we’d come back to New York because he thinks he has almost all the weekends booked already…for Fall…in March..

He went on to tell me that not only he doesn’t live in this apartment at all, he is actually not even an owner. He is renting the apartment for $2,200/month from the owner; advertises it on Craigslist and other websites and without using any agents is able to rent the apartment out for more than half of the year at $300/night. Plus on long weekends and special holidays he charges double. So this guy is bringing in about $65,000/year spends about $35,000 on rent and cleaning and profits about $30,000/year cash. Not bad considering that the whole procedure is on auto-pilot. His posts are always on Craigslist, Cleaning Crew is on-call with their own key to clean up..

Then I learned that he actually rents 3 apartments in this building and 2 across the street. And he is making about $200,000/year in profits and this is his primary way to make money. He said that he hopes to buy a penthouse in this building in few years for which he says he can charge as much as $2,500 for Memorial or Labor Day Weekend and $450-600 on a regular weekend. He said a lot of tourists prefer this kind of lodging which was shocking to me.

So when we came back home my friend declared that he wants to make money renting an apartment in Manhattan to tourists. He rented a 2 bedroom in a nice midtown area and started posting listings on many different vacation-rental sites as well as Craigslist and other free posting portals. He found a cleaning service a block away from the apartment to be able to quickly clean-up. I thought it was a terrible idea full of unnecessary headaches. I didn’t think it would ever really make money. But, yet again, I was wrong.

Without investing much time into this, my friend is making on average $6-7,000/month in revenue as this apartment constantly gets rented out. Go figure. But it is really not a very expensive idea. All you need is to rent an apartment - put down 1-2 months of rent and get some discounted furniture…and your mini-hotel is ready-to-go. In towns where tourism is not that big people are turning their homes into bed-and-breakfasts. In big cities people are turning apartments they don’t even live in into gold. I hope you will find a way to profit from this idea. Good luck and, as always, let us know what you think and if it worked for you or not.

Make Money Selling Domains

Here is the thing. Back in 1996 I owned some very questionable domains. They were questionable to me because back then I didn’t think anyone will pay me for my UsedToyotas.com or BigTVsForSale.com They were very long domain names and market for them was small. I guess nobody really was selling Big TVs on websites..Only few retailers still had websites. So I let register.com take these $30/year monkey off my shoulders when those domains expired. I went back to domain buying in 2001 where I proudly registered names like Lagola.com, Sellme.Tv, Sellme.Biz, CancunVacations.com and many others. However, again in 2 years of keeping them and finding no buyers I let them go. If I still had those domains today I could have gotten over a million dollars for them. My point?

In 1996 I thought my domains were useless and so I did in 2001. Today I feel stupid. No good domain name is ever useless. .COMs are running out. I recently tried to register a domain name for an Email Marketing company. I tried to use a word Email with every animal, color, plant, etc. known to the world. I tried things like EmailMonkey, EmailDonkey :), EmailChicken, EmailRose, EmailFlower, EmailTullip, PinkEmail, BlueEmail, etc. etc. etc. - they were ALL taken!!! And I guarantee you that people will make money with these all domains one day. Just like people who were smart and bought names like UsedHyundaiNewJersey.com because 6 years ago they were useless but today you can sell it to a NJ used car dealer for $100k easy! I had domain HeavyPoker.com back then poker was not on ESPN and not that popular. I dropped it. Now I would have gotten $80-120,000 for it!! Who could’ve thought that Work from Home and Make Money Online programs will become so popular that now you can sell a shitty WAH name like WorkHomeUSA for $25k no questions asked…

It’s all about demand. And in few years there will be very heavy demand for any .com available.

So how can you make money? While we still have .com’s around - go and start buying them! See if you can research some new technology that didn’t come out or become big yet (like poker was in 1996). You can buy domains much cheaper now. For $5-9/year you can own a dot.com domain. Don’t go crazy but buy 20 names that make sense. Even if you don’t sell it tomorrow, for $100/year you can hold on to almost 20 domains. If you will sell each domain for a misery average of $5,000 you will make $100,000 for your $100/year investment.

I finally learned that it works 4 years ago when I was able to sell NikeSuff.com for $17,500…Domain name that I bought for $14.99 Let’s make money! I am sure you have comments, questions, etc. - go ahead and post them and I and other users will gladly share our good and maybe bad? storied. Hey, this is what this site is for!

Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

There are millions of articles written about Affiliate Marketing on the Web. I am not going to go into details here…That would be a never-ending post. I just want to encourage everyone to try it out. If you only knew how much money some affiliate marketers are making…There are 2 ways to become an affiliate marketer: 1 - through an Affiliate Network such as Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare and more. 2 - directly through a company; everyone from shoe makers, music sellers, poker sites to electronic makers, book sellers, calling cards and even auction sites like eBay and Amazon have their own Affiliate Programs. Affiliates make money by earning commissions off sales, leads, ad other actions (email sign-ups and sometimes even clicks). While Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money and it may rank #1 way to earn money among 1000s of way to make money at home and on-line, it is not a very easy way. But it is a way with potentially more income than 50% of full-time jobs that I know of.

To be successful in Affiliate Marketing you must learn new skills. After all, you, in a nutshell, will have to online or regular Marketing. If you are a beginner, I recommend signing up to Amazon Associates and eBay Affiliate programs - you don’t get a very high commission but you have access to any product you want and can trying pushing everything from books to iPods, from sneakers to watches, from liquor to clothes, etc.

Say that you have no Money to invest into Email or Web Marketing programs and you have no money to build a website…How can you start? There are 100s of Free Blog platforms. Blogger.com, WordPress.com, TypePad.com, LiveJournal.com, Thoughts.com, ClearBlogs.com and many more offer absolutely free Blog space. You don’t need to know anything about making a website. You just blog about anything you want and insert HTML code that you can retrieve in your affiliate account into your blog in the middle of your writings. Then you promote your blog on free sites, email link to your friends and ask them to email it to other people as well. This is the most primitive way but this will give you a chance to start making money with affiliate marketing.

This is not the end of this post. I will be adding new Marketing tools used to making revenue with Affiliate programs. Stay tuned…

Make Money in a Focus Group

Companies pay Big Bucks for qualitative research. The best research of that kind comes from Focus Groups. Usually members of focus groups are asked questions about their attitude towards certain products, services, advertisements, ideas, packaging of products and much more. Since focus groups became such a valuable Marketing tool for companies people who participate in focus group started making more money!

Anyone can do it! Members are chosen based on their demographic background and their interest about a particular topic. Group discussions last about 1-2 hours. Groups are usually small from 5 to 10 people. Your pay varies based on time of group, length of session and complexity of the topic. You can be paid between $85-$500.00 for your time.

Many companies are hiring so look in your yellow book or search online in your local areas. We have found a company called The Focus Room (693 Fifth Ave at 54th St; 212-935-6820, focusroom.com) and sent one of my interns there (without telling anyone who he is). He signed-up online and got called up in 9 days. He was chosen into a group discussing HBO’s newest TV Series. After 2 hours of “hard work” Alexander was written a check for $125. Sounds like easy money to me!

I encourage all of you easy money seekers to try this money making idea. Please let us know through your comments or emails how it worked out for you. Enjoy!

Make Money with On-line Auctions

We’re not talking eBay and selling your stuff. I am not about to teach you how to buy cheap products and sell them on eAuctions (although I will do that in later posts). Right now I will show you how I was really able to make money with Auctions without carrying any inventory. I will use eBay as my example but this can really be done on any auction sites.

So I was browsing through goods and I found few auctions that were about to end soon and latest bid was much lower than I expected. I concentrated on 3 auctions. 1st one was selling a case of Hi-End Baseball cards The Sweet Spot. Case contained 20 boxes and was at the price of 875 dollars with 11 minutes to go. I quickly did another search for Sweet Spot cases recently sold and found that the cheapest one was sold for $1,025 as each of the boxes inside retails for $65 so most of the cases went for around $1,120. I stayed on top of the auction and ended up winning the item for $910. Keep in mind that on eBay you get minimum 5 days before the seller will start bothering you about payments. The 2nd auction was on PSP System and with 3 minutes before closing the price was $81. I was able to buy it for $89. The 3rd auction was selling Dell laptop and I came away with it for $350 which was about $150 cheaper than retail price on that particular Dell.

It took me about 20 minutes and I was the winner of these 3 auctions. The next thing I did was listing all 3 items I just “bought” on eBay from my account. After spending about $10 in listing fees on all 3 combined I was offering the items I just acquired on a 1-day auction. In 24 hours, as I expected, I was able to sell all 3. I sold Baseball case for $1,115 followed with PSP for $110 and Dell for $440.

My total profit was $206 after I deducted the listing fees. I contacted the winners of my auctions and received payments from all of them in my Paypal in 3 days (2 paid instantly and 1 paid in 3 days). Now with these funds in my PayPal I paid the sellers of the auctions whom I owed the money to. Here comes the greatest part. You get to input name and shipping address of where the goods are going. So I entered names and address of people who bought the items from me and the original sellers shipped the merchandise directly to MY buyers.

In about 4 days I had 6 positive feedbacks adding to my eBay account - 3 from my sellers and 3 from my buyers. Everyone was happy: Sellers got their money, buyers got their purchases and I Made $206 in 24 hours and got 6 positive feedbacks on eBay by spending of no more than 1 hour in front of my laptop. I did this and so can you. You can choose from hundreds of thousands different products on eBay and other auction sites.

Even if you only make $100 in these transactions every day you will make $3k/month in Free money for spending about 30 hours online. That’s about $100/hr for your time, you need no money to invest and no products to have. Can you beat that?

I hope this idea will make you better financially. Looking forward to your feedback, comments and success stories!

Make Money with Google

Here is a program that allowed my neighbor Brian Moss to make almost $30k in 1 month. I could NOT believe it when he showed me this check. He was just a regular guy whose IQ I thought was definitely below average. How could he make money with this a program ? In addition to not being exceptionally smart he hardly knew how to use PC. He had no special computer skills, no money to invest, no nothing. If he could do it so can you!!!

Money is made through Adsense, Google’s Content Publisher program - you can see it on this site to your right where it says Advertisement. Now I am very afraid of misleading you into Adsense as I am not a Pro at it. However there are some great training programs and kits that really explain everything and set everything up for you from A to Z for like two dollars. Here is one of them: Try it today There are many people from this site that already tried it out and are making some money - not much - but about $400/week in this economy is sure helping…plus it’s pretty much an auto-pilot, so you don’t really spend much more than 15-20 minutes a day to get that $400.

Make Money Watching TV for Rating Companies

There is actually more than 1 way to make money watching TV. Usually average pay of the ‘TV Watched’ is $15/hour. So let’s see how you can establish second income for simply watching TV.

You can get paid for watching commercials and providing your feedback to advertisers, you can earn money for writing reviews for TV shows and movies and you can get extra income for writing quiz questions about specific TV shows for makers of trivia games & game shows.

Look for advertisements in local media as these opportunities frequently appear in newspaper, radio and TV ads as well as on Internet web sites. One of the companies you can always contact to see if such “work” is available in your area is Nielsen. What was a media analytical giant AC Nielsen is now called just Nielsen and those guys are expanding In April 2007 Nielsen Co. signed a deal to pay $225 million for IAG Research Inc., a privately owned NYC-based company that measures consumer engagement with television programs, national commercials and product placements.

It’s very easy money to make if you have the extra time.  IAG makes reports on TV series/shows and Ad Campaigns it provide super valuable reports for which advertisers and TV stations are willing to pay the big bucks. So paying people to watch those and put in their opinions is actually very profitable for Nielsen.  You can go toiagr.net and fill out application for Research position or call them and ask away. We found this Ad from them (see below). Very interesting way to describe a TV watched Nevertheless, it’s good for us that these kind of money making opportunities are available.

“We are looking for self-starters. Are you self-motivated and have an entrepreneurial spirit?  Learn how to develop the innovative research that will allow our clients to make critical advertising and Ad management decisions much more effectively. You will work with an elite highly-qualified team that focuses on delivering quantifiable results.”

Apply away and let us know how it goes!!!