Howdy all, I’m Geoff. I run a little blog entitled Can’t Get Rich, where I record my daily laments regarding the fact that I can’t seem to get rich online because all of the good ideas are taken. Anyway, Jason is busy with life and such, so he’s put me in charge of entertaining you all for a day. Why did he pick me as a guest poster? Beats me, but we do have at least one thing in common: We’re both university kids.

Well, he’s a kid. At 21, I don’t like to consider myself a kid, but in any case, we’re both university students. That’s something I’ve noticed a lot online recently: Lots of people in the 16-24 age bracket are trying to make money online. Of course, this makes perfect sense to me, but for those out there who are out of touch with my generation, let me sum up our reasoning for you in two words: We’re poor. Last semester, I worked 32 hours per week just so I could pay my bills, and that seriously cut into my time for studying. I knew something had to change, so I started researching how to make money online.

Blogging

My first thought was what everybody else seems to be thinking: Blogging for bucks. After discovering that I have no interesting hobbies and mediocre writing skills, I threw that idea out the window, but not before creating Can’t Get Rich. I haven’t monetized that blog at all, but it’s a nice daily distraction so I keep updating it. Occasionally, I’ll have a reader ask me when I’m going to start monetizing and I always tell them the same thing: When I hit 1,000 readers per day. Why 1,000? It seems like a nice round number. Tell someone that you get 963 readers per day and they’ll shrug, but 1,000? That’s respectable. Speaking of traffic, here’s a bit of advice to all the other bloggers in my age bracket: Stop trying to monetize your blog when you have 10 hits per day and 3 RSS readers. When your blog is that small, I want to see content, not Adsense blocks. Besides, Adsense is ugly.

Affiliate Marketing

Anyway, with blogging for cash out of the picture, I had to explore other options. I’d heard about some crazy magical goldmine known as affiliate marketing, but that all seemed way too complicated for me. Then I found the website of another (former) university kid, Uberaffiliate. Paul, a 19 year old affiliate marketing god makes more money in one week than I do all year. After reading his affiliate marketing guide, it didn’t seem so complicated anymore. With my newfound knowledge, I set out with small budget and high hopes to make thousands with little or no effort. After falling flat on my face due to inexperience, I finally found a technique that made me $100 overnight. The best part was I had coded that specific landing page and forgotten about it. Imagine my surprise when I saw my earnings the next evening.

Nifty, huh? Of course I haven’t done anything with that account in awhile, so that $100 was a one-hit wonder, not a daily occurrence. Still, it was a good lesson to learn, and now I’m hooked on affiliate marketing.

The bottom line

The real goal for all of us University kids should be to find what works best for us individually. Jason writes ebooks, Paul does affiliate marketing while drinking lemonade on his private island, etc. We’re young, we aren’t tied down with the 9-5 grind, and we have a lot of years stretching out before us. Find what works best for you and run with it, and don’t be afraid to screw up. Just be sure to learn from the pros and you’ll be driving a corvette around campus in no time.