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Why Spend Money to Make Money?

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"It takes money to make money."

How many times have you heard this in the course of your online money making career? Do I even need to ask that question? We all know that it's a common mantra that is used far too often. For me, it's almost nauseating to think that there are people out there who believe that this is a set-in-stone fact of life. There is no law (unwritten or otherwise) that says that you must spend any money in order to put cash into your pocket. Sure, investing in a plan can be a good thing, and there are plenty of ways to make your money work for you to put a nice fat wad of bills in the storage space on your right (or left) butt-cheek protector.  But to believe the false statement that you MUST spend your cash to make money is an outright lie by someone who simply wants you to invest in THEIR program.

Are you serious? I think you are lying...

When I started this blog (about a year ago), my goals were simple: make some money without investing squat. To be fair, yes, I have purchased a couple of domain names, but really that's all I've spent in this whole venture. But I can tell you this: I earned the money I used for the domain names from this blog BEFORE I invested any of that on anything. That's right! I was able to make money online without investing one red cent! I'll be honest, it wasn't exactly the easiest thing to do, since I didn't know anything at all about what methods I would use to pull it off. I had no decent hosting, no domain name, and no clue about where to find programs to make money. That's when I decided to get sneaky and Google my way to the cash.

In the beginning...

I knew that no matter which method I used to make money, I would need a website or a blog. In the past, I had built several sites (none of which were very fancy, a couple of which were a touch on the darker side of the internet - no, not those kind...they were 'security sites') but after much consideration, I decided to give WordPress a spin, since I had been hearing great things about it. The problem was that I couldn't afford to pay for hosting, so I set up a blog on WordPress.com. I found that it was very easy to learn to use, and that I could get some really awesome looking designs for my blog without having to hack away at HTML all night (as I had become accustomed to doing). The problem, as I would soon find out, was that they didn't allow sponsored posts or many different forms of moneymaking.

Learning to adapt...

Well, crap. I had the blog, but I had no way (that I knew of) to make money without getting banned from WP. Then, as luck would have it, I noticed something on a few of the other blogs that I was reading that were also hosted on WP:

*this is a sp0_s0_ed post (or some variation of that text string)

That was a bit odd...why would they be changing up the words? Then, as the gears in my head figured it out, I realized that it was to HIDE the fact that they were getting paid while still indicating to their readers that it was a paid post. This is where the lightbulb appeared above my head.

I started checking the web for good programs that would pay me to make posts on my own site. The first two that I found were ReviewMe and PayPerPost - and I promptly signed up for both sites and patiently waited for that first paid post to come around. When I took the first offer, I made my post and used the obfuscation trick that I had seen, and submitted my post for approval.

It worked.

That was a cool feeling. But what would happen if WordPress.com caught on?

Eventually, I got to the point that I was thinking they wouldn't really care. I mean, they hadn't cared yet...so I decided to stop the obfuscation of the 'I make money with this post' stuff. Pretty soon, I received a warning asking me to remove the post.

What could I do? I was waiting to get paid...and I sure didn't want to lose my blog to the rules of WP. My old hacker nature got curious...I wonder if they check these posts by hand...so I re-wrote the disclosure, complete with obfuscated characters.

It worked again.

Wow. I mean, really...checking posts for compliance with a script? That's so free hosting-ish...

Armed with that little bit of knowledge, I proceeded to make paid posts on my WordPress.com blog...carefully.

Eventually I moved the blog to some better hosting that was donated by my brother in law, and then the whole ballgame evolved...which I will cover in another post!

Be sure to stay tuned to learn how I made even more money without investing a freaking cent!