How to Make a Million Dollars (Thirty Cents at a Time)

Anytime new stuff appears it's only a matter of time before folk get to thinking "Hmm, I wonder how I can make money with that?" and the internet has not turned out to be a shining, virtuous exception to the rule.

What tends to initially catch people's attention of course are the yarns of epic wealth that the media likes to breathlessly spin about the few fortunate entrepreneurs who cooked up some whizzy new idea, razzle-dazzled an awestruck world and walked away two weeks later with loot so far beyond avarice their first problem was having it shipped to a medium sized moon orbiting Jupiter simply for storage space.

So where do you suppose most folk then go hunting for further information about this latter day Klondike? You guessed it - online, where even more lurid rumours abound and practically every search engine query turns up a whole new set of wise and friendly experts only too willing to assist you in your quest, in return for a modest consideration of course.

In this online El Dorado no serpent escapes the relentless trade in oil futures. Here our intrepid adventurer learns of unbelievable (yes, really really unbelievable) sums of money simply ready for the taking; little effort and no previous experience required, apparently.

Of course, it's not so much "too good to be true" (which it is) as "too far-fetched to be plausible". And when the cold shower of reality inevitably drenches our plucky online hero, soothing badly burned fingers is scant consolation for a harvest of shattered hopes and bitter disillusionment.

So how can you make money online? Is it even possible, or is it all just hype and bullshit with the occasional lucky sod promoted like last week's lottery winner purely to encourage all the other suckers?

Well actually you can. I do for instance and although it's not especially difficult it does nevertheless require that you stump up a certain amount of thought, effort and determination of your own.

It's a matter of mindset. Back in the days of the good old gold rush many people did very well indeed, but they weren’t usually the fools digging for gold. The gold diggers for the most part lost their money, a good chunk of their lives and much of whatever else they had before they set off in search of that one lucky strike that would mean they might spend the rest of their days sitting around doing sweet FA.

Those who did well on the other hand were mostly looking to make a buck here, a buck there selling mining paraphernalia, secret maps, expedition supplies, beer, liquor, sex and no doubt towards the end marriage guidance and debt counselling. And when the whole fuss died down they carried on working, 'cos they were persistent buggers, figuring out how to scale up from a buck here to two bucks there as the gold diggers moved on to seek their instant fortunes from the next Big Thing.

Now I don't know how to create the next eBay or Digg or whatever else attracts popular attention any more than I know how to write down the winning numbers for next week's lottery. But I do know that if I can figure out how to go from zero to one dollar a day online, then I can just as simply work out how to turn one dollar into two and after that two into four and so on.

But it's not worth it, the online gold diggers in unison retort. All that effort for what, five bucks a day? Yes, but in the few months it typically takes to scale the dizzy financial cliff that is five dollars a day (which incidentally is $150 per month or just over $1,800 per annum - a useful sum to many) you will have learned lessons that will lead to a lifetime of relentless and relatively easy accumulation of real, countable, spendable money.

Making a million dollars thirty cents at a time is more straightforward than many folk appreciate. The rate at which other people will in effect throw thirty (or twenty or fifty, the actual amount isn't really important) cents at you online is one part of the equation. Another is the fact that once this flow of funds gets started it just keeps going pretty much by itself. It might take significant effort to get the darn thing rolling to begin with but it's close to effortless once you have momentum, at which point you will find yourself delicately perched on the horns of most agreeable dilemma.

You can either leave it to get on churning out the same amount day in day out while you spend more time with your golf clubs, or you can get beavering to divert another stream your way (yes I know that's not what beavers do, I just want some beaver/stream imagery without the dam clogging things up so to speak - I don't think this explanation is helping...).

So how in fact do you get off zero to any amount of money at all in the first place? Well, many are the ways and one in particular is ideally suited to the overly opinionated novice with far too much to say for him or herself. But this post has rambled on long enough already, so check back here some other time and I shall spell it out in detail for those to whom any of this might not be old news.