There are ways to make real money online, then there are real ways to make money online. The difference? Amounts to be made. Pursuing “real money” can lead to frustration and make one susceptible to scams. Pursuing “real ways” will make one money, the trick is how to scale “real ways” to be “real money.”

eBay

Selling things on eBay can garner one money. First step is to open an account, and sell stuff. Doesn’t matter what, and I recommend doing a house cleaning sell the findings. This will 1). get you use to the eBay sellers format, and 2). start earning some positive feedback.

Some very good eBay information from a Powerseller is available here.
How to Sell on Ebay: Picking a Product

Scale eBay

After selling personal possessions, finding a second long lasting source of goods is fairly easy. One can offer to be an eBay broker and sell other people’s goods and take a percentage. Charge $5.00 to post and list, while taking a smaller percentage of the final sales price. This was is a no lose proposition.

Another way to scale eBay is to find dropship products. I recommend Doba as they have plenty of eBay tools to use. Post the offer, collect payment, and THEN order. With over a million products, Doba has plenty of products and niches to sell. Profitability is pretty easy to factor with listing fees (be sure to account for both sold and unsold products) and Doba’s monthly fee of about $50.00.

Zazzle

Zazzle is a print on demand product company. The masses supply the design, and Zazzle will print on a variety of products. Zazzle is much like its competitor Cafepress. Though Cafepress has been around longer, my preference is Zazzle. Zazzle allows one to print multiple designs on the same products. With Cafepress, the free account is limited to one design to one product. Meaning if you put a design on a basic white t-shirt, you cannot put another design on a basic white t-shirt (to do so, one has to upgrade to a monthly paid account- store account).

Another benefit to Zazzle is that it has a text design creator. For a non-graphic artist such as myself (all my products are slogans/text), this is a wonderful tool. Login, create a phrase, use the tool to choose fonts, sizes, and colors, and then chose products to put it on.

Scale Zazzle

With the text design tool and some dedication it would be easy to add numerous phrases and sayings over time. One a day would have at year’s end 365 phrases on any number of products. Need help choosing topic areas? Check this blog post about Google and Yahoo 2008 top topics, these topics will also be hot topics for text and phrases. If some are stale or outdated (2008 Bejing?), they should give you some ideas on how to keep on the look out for other topical interests.

iStock

iStock is a photography web site that sells pictures individually or upon subscription. Understand that one is relinquishing rights to photographs under their terms, but there is some fair amount of money to be made. The royalty is 20% of each download. However, each photo can be downloaded numerous times.

However, the standards are high. A quality digital camera will be required, a camera phone will not cut it. Then quality photos will be needed, above what you typically see on Flikr. Understand that many perusers will be looking to use the photos in marketing, keep that in mind for subject matter. Ansel Adam shots are nice, but subjects that present things like travel, weight loss, modern life/technology, etc, political topics, would be better sellers.

Scale iStock

Like Zazzle, volume is key. Post often and methodically, take photos of everything, but choose what you upload carefully. Maybe one in one hundred shots are worthy of loading, depending on your capability. For ideas, I suggest looking at picapp.com, and choose to browse their creative photos. One will see many photos that can be mimicked or improved upon.

Another scale is to continually add keywords for the photographs. Buyers will be looking for photographs based upon words that match what they are looking for. Woman, lady, female would need to be added to for any picture of a female. Do not rely on your first posting, continually add keywords as time allows.

These are three simple “real ways” to make money online. Money may not be great, but it will be scam free. Like any other business, perseverance will be needed.