How To Make Money At Home

Hey all, hope you like what you’ve seen of the blog so far. We’ll be bringing you a lot more of it, so stick around! We’re promoting ourselves, but if you’d like to help out… throw us a link, tell a friend and we’ll be eternally grateful.

If you want to make money, you can’t keep doing the same kinds of things that everyone else is. Often, you have to do things better than everyone else… or think out of the box. Thinking out of the box, that is being creative is a skill that you can learn over time.

I’m continually buzzing with ideas… now I’ll admit, most of them fail. Some of them DO hit it off though, and when they do they tend to do it well. Here’s one of them. I shared this on another blog a few months ago but wasn’t as in depth as I’m going to be here.

Fluff apart, let’s get started.

The offline world is a lot, lot easier than the online one – first off, you don’t have to (generally) compete with people living in other countries who can charge less for anything because their cost of living is less; secondly, as long as you do it right, it’s always easier to sell face to face rather than through email.

Most of you will know about the idea of offering website creation services to local businesses – this is something I’ve used extensively in the past, but will not be covering today. We’ll save that for another time.

What I will be covering though, involves no selling, no website creation, and you won’t even have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to.

What’s this magical thing? Offline contests.

You seen, on the whole offline companies tend to be less creative and less clued in (I’m talking about small to medium sized businesses here) than online companies.

A lot of them will run contests – often with huge (relative) dollar amounts. Over here in Dubai, which is not the most developed country out there, there are usually weekly or monthly contests. Most of you guys will find more of these in the countries that you stay in.

One example of a contest would be that for the logo design for a company. Some companies here have offered up to 10,000 dirhams (around $3,000 USD) to have their logo created. You also see contests for naming various monuments, for good photos to be sent in, for stories, for poems… you get the idea.

What I’ve done, and done successfully in the past is outsourced those tasks (for free!) online by joint venturing with freelancers, and splitting the profit with them should I win.

There are a lot of freelancers on various webmaster forums – Digital Point, Sitepoint, V7N, Namepros, the Warrior Forum just to name a few… that charge very little for quality. For example, the logo for this blog cost around ten bucks.

If you offer them the chance to make ten times that, most will be interested. So here’s what I did.

A company offline here ran a logo contest (they were an engineering company). The prize offered was equivalent to roughly $900 USD.

I’d been thinking of doing this for some time, so a few days before the contest just decided to run with it. I started a logo contest on a webmaster forum offering $100 to the winner, and had slightly more than twenty designs submitted. All of which I sent in. The contest ran for a week, both offline and online.

That’s 20+ different concepts, ranging from medium to high quality. End result? I won the contest, paid the freelancer whose design was chosen $100, and pocketed $800 for myself. No work whatsoever on my part other than emailing the designs to the company.

This however could be seen as unethical – for some reason I felt bad. So what I did for the next contest was contact 4-5 of the best freelancers, and told them what I was doing. Contests ran for $X amount here, and if I won I’d share 25 – 50% of the prize. Which was obviously a lot more than they were used to getting.

If I didn’t win, I didn’t pay. Most agreed with this, because a one time win would cover them creating around 20+ logos at the prices they usually charged. If they didn’t win, they got to use the logos in their portfolio anyways, so it was practise at the very least.

As long as you’re up front, there is nothing wrong with doing this. I won a few more contests over the next few months, nothing for as much as the original amount but I won a few contests with the prize amount of around $500 or more.

Another contest I entered offline was that a large newspaper ran here. They ran it weekly, and paid around $300 USD for the *best* photo sent in (chosen by them). The kicker was that you didn’t have to take the photo yourself, it could be one that you found.

I knew that *cute* photos (the ones with a dog and a duck cuddling etc, you get the idea) are loved by people, so I went to a few stock photo websites, looked for those kinds of photos and asked the photographer for the same kind of deal. Most were happy to comply.

Photos at IStockPhoto (for example) used to cost $1 – $10. I won the contest offline four times before the paper stopped running it (sadly!). Total result? Around $1,000+ net profit, and again, little to none work on my part.

You can do this for contests in your country, and make yourself a ton of cash. Again, be up front with the freelancers you work with and you’ll have no problems whatsoever.

Another idea is contests where short stories are sent in… with the winner getting a dollar figure. You could contact writers on writing forums, ask them if they were interested in a percentage split of the money. As long as you explain yourself well, most will be happy to take you up on your offer.

Another idea… is the *guess the score* challenge that they run offline for various sports. I’m a huge fan of football (soccer to those in the USA ), specifically the English Premier League.

Now… I suck at guessing the score, because I predict with my heart rather than my head. So even if the team I support is playing a difficult game, I’d predict them to win (and they likely end up losing or drawing). If their rivals are playing difficult games, I’d predict them to lose or draw (and they likely end up winning).

What I did was contact the person who was leading an online version of predict the score, and asked him for his predictions for the week – basically telling him what I was going to do. He sent them to me saying that I could use them at no cost.

End result? I got seven out of ten results right, and won myself free television subscription to the sports channels for a year. Which was worth around $300 – $500 USD. I plan to use this strategy on a few betting websites, and I will update here in future with my findings if it works.

Be creative, and you’ll make money. Of course, the key for this (and all other ideas) is first tweaking it to suit you, and then taking action. You don’t take action, you’ll never make money. Good luck, and feel free to ask questions if you have them!

Jason