By paying a cent I mean:
- owning a computer (or buying one)
- paying for internet
- paying for web hosting
- paying someone to code a website for ya
So let's say you don't have any money (you're broke) and you wanna earn some money with your computer "skillz". Since you're broke, you don't have anything to loose besides your time ,right? The goal is to earn at least 10-30 EUR in the first month, well even if you earn 1 euro you're profiting. Yaay.
What do I do? Sitting in my new zen garden gave me some ideas. You could build an online community about a specific topic, like "
guacamole". You could start your home town portal-community site, where you could have useful information for everyone living there, a nice discussion board, etc... You could make a community about rock climbing, canyoning, surfing, hiking, violins, your dysfunctional family, naked girls (check if it's legal where you live). Make a community about fixing stuff: cars, bikes, houses, space ships, etc. There are many many ways you could start from.
The most important thing is to just go ahead and make something and stop f****ng procrastinating. For instance, while writing this post, I decided to make a blog about this topic:
Useful internet. So how do I make a website when I don't know squat about programming? It's easy to do that today. There are tons of CMS (content management systems) out there like: Joomla, e107, drupal. Forums: phpBB, SMF, punBB. Galleries: coppermine gallery, menalto. You can use them for free.
"How about web hosting, YA KNOW, it's expensive and costs a couple of hundred bucks a year and my daddy says that yahoo/some local company is the best way to go." Tell your daddy to piss off and let's get on to next step. You have quite a lot of free web hosting providers like: 110mb.com, noadsfree.com etc etc. Find them, google, I don't care, they are out there. Many of them let you host custom domain names and no banners are required. They offer PHP, MySQL, lots of bandwidth and support forums. But make sure you backup your site daily, otherwise you could loose everything. Never trust your web hosting company with your backups. Well maybe
www.supersplet.com, but hey, that's my company.
By paying I mean:Domain name? You can get an .info domain name for a couple of dollars, like 2-3 dollars or get a FREE domain name like
co.cc They don't just give you your desired name, especially if it has a famous relative in other TLD's (top level domains) but with some luck and creativity, you will find a good, free domain name. I was lucky with supersplet.co.cc - it was listed as free. Try it. You're good with this one until you start making some money but even then you don't have to change it, names are not THAT important, look at stupid names like de.licio.us or ... I don't know, I just think that de.licio.us is a stupid name for a website. But hey, they succeeded so why shouldn't you?
But I don't have a computer, my family is poor, my parents are cheap asses, my turtle ate it, my little brother/sister is using it all the time, it got infected with viruses, it's too old. I've heard it all. Being a computer repairman I've seen many situations where people make up excuses just to avoid working. What now you say.
Since this is article is about saving money, let's save you some electricity too. You can always go to the library where you can use their internet/computer to create stuff. You don't need any fancy programs like dreamweaver,photoshop,corel draw. Just plain ol' Internet Exploder/Firefox. You will be working mainly through them, since it is WEB you're working with. People tend to procrastinate when starting to work on something, like: I don't have a computer that can run Photoshop or I don't know how to use Photoshop or now I'm gonna make myself a nice shiny logo - they go on making that logo for about two months and forget about the whole thing. F**k the logo or the design. Make the website interesting through content. I've read somewhere that people actually fear nice designs subconsciously so they use bad ones instead - it's a win-win situation.
So how to profit?
For now put google ads on your site but in a month or two, as your user base will increase, try selling ads to local companies, hairdressers, auto-repair shops, computer repairmen etc, it will come to you.
And the most important rule here is:
don't listen to your dumb friends who will most likely discourage you with phrases like: "there are probably millions of websites just like that out there", or "why would you make that kind of website". They are stupid and/or jealous. We have about 6 billion people on earth and most of them don't know how to make websites - they need them, so you're set.
And remember, even if you don't earn a penny, you will feel better knowing you tried.
