Daily Aid 58: Preparing for 2009 Part 3 - Making Money

As 2008 rolls to a close, I wanted to take some time this week to share some ideas about how to get ready for 2009. The year ahead holds incredible promise, unfathomable danger, and everything in between, and the best opportunities will be available to those prepared to take advantage.

Making Money Isn’t Rocket Science

Making money is decidedly not rocket science. Look at the generally accepted definition of money:

From Wikipedia:

Money is generally considered to have the following characteristics, which are summed up in a rhyme found in older economics textbooks: “Money is a matter of functions four, a medium, a measure, a standard, a store.” That is, money functions as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a standard of deferred payment, and a store of value.

How do you make money? Pay attention to the last part of the definition - money is a store of value. If you have something that someone else wants, you automatically have value. How badly someone else wants whatever you have determines how much value you have, and therefore how much money you can earn. Value can be anything - a product or tangible good like an iPod, a service like lawn mowing or snow shoveling, even vastly intangible things like hope and faith, for which churches, temples, and mosques collect enormous sums of money every year.

The key to making money is to have something of value, and more important, for it to be as high a value as possible. You accomplish this by either having something of great value that you sell somewhat infrequently (because a lot of money is needed to buy it, like gems, jewels, gold) or having something of relatively small value that you sell in vast quantities on a regular basis (like a pack of gum at Walmart).

Here’s one of the secrets of making money - in order to make money in a world saturated by media, marketers need your help getting attention for their goods. Attention - eyeballs, ears, minds - is one of those intangible things that has huge value to companies needing to sell stuff.

One of the quickest ways to start making money, even as a college student in school, is to do affiliate marketing. It’s a sales job of sorts - you sign up for an affiliate program like Shareasale [disclosure: paid link], find merchants whose stuff you like, and then begin marketing that merchant’s stuff on your web site, blog, Facebook profile, wherever you come in contact with people who want whatever it is the merchant has. In exchange for your time and access to people you know, the merchant gives you a commission, from pennies to 25-50% of the sale price.

Here’s an example of how I’ve used this for the Financial Aid Podcast. I signed up for a few Shareasale programs and put up some web pages for those programs right here on the site, just to try out the programs. I posted links to the various products that I thought might be fun to try out - not even stuff related to student loans or financial aid per se.

Now, bear in mind, I’ve had this running since mid-September when I first found out about Shareasale. Since then, I’ve done literally no work promoting these products and services until this blog post. I put the products and services on my web site and let it just stay out there for Google and you to find. With that in mind, here are the results for the first 3 months:

Am I retiring soon? Heck no. That’s a total of $1,151.06 in commissions earned over 3 months. Is that beer money? Absolutely - or I could use it to defray the costs of tuition, extra expenses, or even just to have a little spending money on campus during the school year. I’m not going to get rich on this, but I’m also not working 40 hours a week to pull in this money. Why does this work? Because a certain small percentage of my audience - you, perhaps - thought at some point in the last 3 months that the products and services I have on my web site are valuable enough to buy one, or perhaps a few.

Bear in mind there are products and services for everything under the sun. If it’s legal to sell, there’s a program out there selling it.

There are plenty of other ways to make money, too. Arbitrage is one of them - I covered this in a post recently about using Craigslist to find free stuff to resell.

As we enter 2009, you’re equipped with the basics - how to do a cashflow budget, how to cut expenses by finding cheaper alternatives, and how to make some money. With that, I hope your 2009 is a safe, happy, and prosperous one, and that a small percentage of you are so successful with these personal finance tips that you no longer need to be Student Loan Network customers (at least not for our student loans).

I wish you all the best. Happy New Year.

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