Christopher Moran



Christopher Moran

IT 315 P

March 3, 2003

How to Make Money on the Web

There are many ways to make money on the internet. As many sites will readily tell you. Starting with the dot-com boom of the late nineties, the internet population has been like the forty-niner’s looking to strike it rich in the Gold Rush of 1849. Many people looked, and still look, to the internet with the dream that there is some magic way they will virtually make money and not have to do anything. As with most too-good-to-be-true stories, there is two ways to look at it. One can either look at ways to make money on the internet as a grandiose dream to be fulfilled without having to work at it, or one can take the practical “hard work pays off” path and use the internet as a means of furthering whatever money-driven endeavor is at hand. I will present some examples based on these ideas on how to make money on the web.

The first website I would like to direct your attention to is . Their home page greets you with a nice button in the middle saying, “Join Now! Start earning mad cash!” This does sound enticing, as well as the claim that “Over $3,601,124.16 USD earned by our users!” What exactly do you have to do earn all this “mad cash?” It looks like all you have to do is view some ads, and poof, you get paid just by viewing banners that come up. It sure sounds easy enough. Click Join and you are on your way. But before that happens, I suggest digging a little deeper. Clicking on their FAQ button, you find that after registering, you have to download a CashBar which, once installed and running on your computer, is where all the ads are shown while surfing the internet. How much do you get paid then? Well, apparently all that mad cash translates to “currently [earning] about 1/10th of a cent per hour” with a 4 hour maximum limit each day. They use some type of point system to keep track of how many ads you view, and then later convert those points to dollars, or I guess you could say pennies for a while. But for everyone’s sake, payday occurs when you, rack up at least $20, so you don’t have to mess with a stack load of $1 checks going to the bank when you need money (although technically checks are not cash …).

It is obvious by all this, their goal is in the best interest of their members, as they do indicate. “Our goal is to send out as much cash as possible.” Boy am I glad to hear that, because I just cannot wait to get all that mad cash.

Other ways to boost your cash flow at is to add referrals, where you can “earn one point (about 10%) for each banner they view or action they take.” You can also sign up for CashSurfers’ Special Deals which include anything from magazine subscriptions to books to credit cards, bearing in mind that you must sign up for the offer to get the sign up bonus. So be careful, unless you are just dying to receive a dozen credit cards, or whatever else you basically are enticed to buy from similar sounding spam emails.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on them. After all, it looks as if some of their information is a little dated, seeing as how “the average check was $43.68 in August 2000.” I can only assume that number has increased dramatically after two and half years passing. And I can only further naturally assume that updates have not been made to the site because they are so busy paying out all that “mad cash.”

Another way to make money on the internet is to develop some type of business, probably to bring some type of supply to a niche market, and then create a website displaying and advertising your product or products, and then selling to customers. This can be carried out in several ways. You can attempt to do it all yourself: develop your products, create a website, find a host for the website like , and handle the physical sale and deliveries of the product. This can be too much for some people, and they may opt to go with a service that handles their home-based business by hosting, and handling all the software and coding to handle their sales and credit card processing and help generate feedback on the products and advertising on other sites. Sometimes internet malls, such as or Shop-, offer ways to help with this by joining them. Another avenue to take is to make money selling a product that someone else has already developed and produced. The only thing that needs to be done is to try and advertise and drive customers to your site to sell the items, especially since times these businesses claim the product sells itself. These are sometimes multi-level marketing pyramids, but not always. International Teamworks, Inc. is an example of making money this way.

Just putting “make money on the web” into a search engine brings up many results. Unfortunately the hard part comes in trying to weed out the illegitimate ones. Research is the main key. Before jumping into anything and handing out personal information, ensure that the company in question is legit, and that it is actually something you want to pursue. The bottom line in this, as with anything, is that hard work pays off. There are no get rich quick schemes, and with that in mind, you can find reputable forms of work on the internet making money.

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