blogmastr

As you probably know, to earn money with most sites (or blogs) you have to put in quite a lot of work (or money) to get anything substantial back. But! It doesn’t have to be like that. There are a few types of sites that involve nearly no effort at all on your part and can rake in a tonne of money at the same time. The two types of sites i’m talking about a proxy sites and what i like to call “piggy back” sites.

Most of you will probably know what a proxy site is, but for those that don’t I’ll explain. A proxy site is a site that people go to to get to sites that are blocked or they otherwise can’t access. For example, if you’re school blocks myspace.com, then you could go to a proxy site and use that proxy site to visit myspace.com without any hassels! Great stuff, isn’t it? Now this means that the owner of that proxy site will get quite a lot of hits when the kids at school start catching on and using it to visit their favourite sites that they can’t otherwise. The problem is that when it starts getting really popular, the proxy site its self is going to get blocked and your user-base will drop substantially.

If you want to set up a proxy site, we advise that you have a Private or Dedicated Server, because proxies can use up a LOT of bandwidth and resources (especially if you get really popular). You should be able to find a proxy script by searching google. After that, it usually only takes ten minutes or so to install, and then you’re up and running! But you’ll still need to get people to use it. Start by telling all your school- or college-aged friends about it, then try marketing through myspace. Set up a myspace account and start adding every single person you can. After a few days (once you’ve added lots of people and they’ve had time to accept) send a few bulletins, or even private messeges (but don’t spam) telling them about your site and how it will let them go to myspace at school.

Now, “piggy back” sites, as i like to call them, are something completely different. The only real similarity is that you don’t need to write any of your own content, you just piggy back off other people’s content :D There are a few ways to go about this. The easiest way is simply to set up an “autoblog”. This means you set up a blog that automatically posts content from other blogs from their RSS feed. Whilst it is theoretically possible to earn money this way, it generally isn’t very successful (and annoys the shiz out of me when people start posting my content).

The best way to set up a “piggy back” site involves a bit of work. If you know php, mysql and html (and maybe javascript and css) then you can use an API from another site to create your own. For example, you can use twitter’s API to find a unique, interesting or convenient way of posting or reading tweets. For example, you could create a twitter (web) application for the iPhone. Or you could use Flickr’s API to help users find photos that were taken near to their current location (with help from flickr’s geotagging and maybe some GPS magic from the iPhone, etc).

Now for most of you, those two last paragraphs may not have made much sense, but that doesn’t matter. The point is, it doesn’t take a lot of hard work to make a few bucks online.Nor do you need to write all of your own content. Piggy back off someone else’s content!