Get Money: 7. Cash Machine
To bring in the money, you’ve got to have something to sell, be it products or services. And these have got to be something people want...
To bring in the money, you’ve got to have something to sell, be it products or services. And these have got to be something people want. There has to be an existing market for what you have on offer. You can create new markets, but you’ll need a ton of investment to get the show on the road and make people aware of your stuff. And even then it might not take off.
So it’s wise to target existing markets. If you don’t, well, you’re a naval-gazer – self-absorbed. Just look at many sellers on Etsy. They make wonderful stuff. But nobody is searching for it. Nobody cares. You can spend your life creating stuff you like – usually in the quest for self-expression and fulfillment – but it won’t get you anywhere. It’s fine if your goal is to be a starving artist. But it’s no good if you wanna get your hands on filthy lucre.
You also see this scenario in the music business. Bands playing what they want to play instead of studying the current music markets and mirroring that with some element of originality and future edge. It usually leads to becoming a tribute act, rather than an international star.
It’s all so very introspective. Fuck those people. You’re not one of them. You want to be a living, breathing cash machine, raking in the readies 24/7.
But what if you’ve got no money? No investment?
Take a job and save some money? Give up?
Good luck with saving money. Jobs don’t pay! Sure, giving up is an option. But you might regret that for the rest of your life.
“Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I will give you a man who will make history. Give me a man without a goal and I’ll give you a stock clerk.”
James Cash Penney (1875-1971), founder JC Penney Co
No, the answer is to do it now, regardless of your situation. Get up and go. You’ll find a solution.
It’s like back in the early 2000s I was talking to a guy from Atlanta, who went on to become a famous rapper. A very good one. He was dealing drugs at the time. His attitude was he wanted to drive a Lamborghini. The best option he could see was pushing drugs. There’s a big market for drugs. So it made sense. And he got his Lambo and was dripping in gold. All before he became a big time rapper.
He was adamant he’d have money. He said: “If it wasn’t drugs I’d have turned mineral water into holy water and sold it at a premium.”
So there we are. It’s all down to imagination and sheer audacity.
Go on eBay. Find items that are badly listed and using the wrong keywords. Bid on them. Buy them. Then relist them yourself with decent ad copy, keywords and photos. Think out of the box.
Or do what one-time kickboxer Andrew Tate did. Rent a house, stick women in each room with webcams and get them satiating the sexual and emotional needs of lonely men. He made a mint. And note that he was supplying an existing market with serious demand.
Sure, you could say he was a kind of pimp. So what? He made money. What else matters? The women got better money than they’d have gotten otherwise in some minimum wage job. So Mr. Tate was bringing employment to people and enriching society generally. And presumably he was paying taxes, so the syndicate government would have been happy.
The point is there’s endless things you can do – even without much capital. It helps to have a bit, say a few hundred pounds. You can use this to set up a website. If you don’t know how to do that LEARN NOW. Sure you can pay people to do it for you, but web design firms are usually clueless when it comes to selling. They’ll build you a fancy site that’s hard to navigate and is essentially useless. On top of that they’ll charge you a monthly fee for maintenance and for any updates you ask them to do. Let’s make no bones about it: web design firms are fools and will just take your money.
BUT: You’ll save a ton of money if you teach yourself how to set up and use a self-hosted Wordpress site (see Wordpress.org). Best thing is to use a hosting service with one-click Wordpress install. If you’re in the UK, check out SiteGround. The US check out HostGator. You’ll need a domain too. These are cheap to register and you’ll be able to do that via your hosting firm. You’ll also need to make sure your site is SSL – Secure Sockets Layer. That’s a prerequisite these days as it’s all about encrypting data flowing to and from your site. So SSL is all about trust, and if people are going to buy from you, you need to do all you can to engender confidence in you.
SSL makes your domain name look like this: https://YourSite.com. Without SSL it’s this: http://YourSite.com.
Another thing you’ll need is contact forms. The simplest solution is to head over to Wordpress.com and get their JetPack plugin. This has lots of functionality built in, including contact forms. It also has simple, but very good, web stats built in, so you can monitor and analyse traffic coming to your site. If you want more advanced stats you can install Google Analytics. It’s nightmarishly complex and does your head in. But I have it installed and look at it now and then. But when it comes to stats, you should really be looking at the money stats! That’s the real measure of the value of your site.
But with any business or marketing, it’s all about getting noticed. If you operate mostly on the web, you need traffic. Back in the day traffic was easy. But with Google’s algorithms changing over the years, along with more and more competitive websites springing up, it’s a lot harder, and you need to use your ingenuity to get visitors to your site. Added to that you’ve got Facebook – the BIG internet eater – which has led to a big decline in traffic going to autonomous websites. When Facebook went down recently for 24-hours, news sites reported an 11% rise in traffic.
For a lot of people on this planet, Facebook is the internet. I hate that personally. It has destroyed the original “wild west” nature of the web, where logging on was exciting. Now it’s dull as fuck. You need to run the Tor browser and go dark to find the old excitement again. But if you do that, beware, it’s not called the dark web for nothing. On a map it would be marked “Here there be dragons.”
All that said, you can run ads on Facebook and target lots of different user demographics. It’ll cost you, but is cheaper than Google’s advertising platform. The downside is Facebook isn’t over-keen on you advertising your website. It gives you the option. But often people’s ads get disapproved when they do that; yet Facebook is quite happy if your ad is pointing to your FB page. Zuck, the AI android, likes you to stay on Facebook even if you’re paying for ads! Of course you can get round that by pointing your ad to a post on your FB page which has a big and bold link to your website.
I do know somebody who makes £50K a month on Facebook, though. So good money can be made via the FB platform. The only downside of centering your business around Facebook is it’s not your platform, not your own website, so you could get closed down at any time if they decide you’re violating their terms of agreement. If you argue the toss about that, it probably won’t cut any ice. If they wanna get rid of you, they can.
“I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system...”
Vladislav Surkov (b. 1964), Russian businessman, politician, and author of gangsta fiction novel Almost Zero
In the end, when it comes to traffic, all you can do is test, test, and test again – to see what works for you. Don’t follow the herd, or listen to people saying Twitter or Instagram is great. It might work for them, but might not for you.
In fact, you might even find going old school works better – print ads!
Who knows. It’s all part of the game – the money hunt…
Take Action
Everyday take one concerted action that will help you in your money-drawing activities. Create a website. Print a brochure or business cards. Do some Facebook networking. Plan a sales strategy. Do whatever is needed and do at least one thing each day. It’s all about action – the more the better because it’s rarely one action alone that lands you in the money. Sometimes the real cash will come from another source, even an unexpected one. But it is the amalgam of actions that takes you into the money gathering realm.