How to make money on the Internet?
Start an online book store, then slowly branch out to provide everything in the world. Everything from A to Z, you might say. All you have to do is set up a nationwide series of warehouses and one of the most advanced commerce platforms in the world. Patent a couple pieces of your system. Hire a couple thousand employees, survive the dot-com crash, become a household word.
Boom! Instant wealth.
Or, let's say you're not going to be able to do that. Maybe somebody already has. There's affiliate marketing, self-publishing, brand creation, pay-per-click arbitrage, eBay, web development, spam...
And then there's the really easy way: Payperpost. "The fastest path to tens of dollars on the Internet." (And I'll sell them that phrase if they want to start using it in their advertising!)
If you already have a blog (and if you don't, there's about zero chance you're reading MY blog, but if you are anyway then what's wrong with you? go get a blog!) all you have to do is fill out the Payperpost signup form. About ten minutes of work, ten hours of waiting, and then ten dollars per sponsored post you write.
This very post, strangely enough, is sponsored and takes me one step closer to my Wii. Yay!
Of course, the value to the sponsors on whose behalf Payperpost asks me to write is the links they get. It would be nice to believe that mere buzz is enough, but I think most blogs on the Internet generate as much buzz as mine does -- which is to say, absolutely none.
But I can create a pagerank-passing link as well as anyone, and here comes one now: Payperpost pays you for blog reviews!
In this case, Payperpost is both intermediary and actual sponsor, in an odd, self-referential circle of promotion. The Internet allows for these loops of causality. If you don't believe in time travel, don't think about this too much or it might injure your brain.
The point is, forty dollars. That's how much I've made already. The major world economic powers are trembling, I know. But I'll commit my newfound wealth into their established channels soon enough. Just two hundred and sixty dollars more.
About a month, I think. It's a cool incentive to blog!