How to Make a Million Dollars
Renewable Wealth - First Revenue!
I checked my Google Adsense logs today, and saw that RenewableWealth.com got two clicks, earning me 71¢. Frankly this surprised me - the site has almost no content, and other than my posting here, I have done nothing at all to promote it. Yet already I’ve earned back almost 20% of my investment.
It appears that it won’t take long at all for me to double my stake with this method, and this tiny little trickle of revenue should continue indefinitely.
Then What?
And what will I do with the tiny sum of money it generates? Reinvest it, of course. 71¢ in a day isn’t much on its own. But imagine if I put up 100 more sites like this. Say they each averaged 71¢ a day. (A rather pessimistic estimate, actually.) That would produce $71 a day. Not enough to buy a yacht, perhaps, but that is $26,000 a year in purely passive income . Who couldn’t use that?
If You Can Do it Once…
Seeing as it only took a couple of days to put this site up, I could have 100 sites up in a few months. And if I can do 100, why not 500? Assuming they all average the same, that would produce $355 a day, or $129,575 a year on autopilot. It might take a couple of years to do this, but so what? $129,000 in passive income is enough to free you to do just about anything you want. You could take big risks without having to worry about going broke. That kind of passive income would give you the freedom to shoot for millions, or pursue your dreams, or do nothing at all, if that’s your thing.
Slay Your Inner Nay-Sayer
This method may not last forever. Heck, it probably won’t. But if you’re smart, and save, and diversify, it won’t have to.
The Inspiration
So how did I learn about this technique? There’s a little-known membership service called Super Apprentice, which is dedicated to this idea. It is run by Dave Moore, one of the very few straight-arrow, honest, real heroes of the Internet Marketing business. The service takes the concept a lot farther than I have covered in my brief discussion here, and provides a bunch of tools which automate much of the process, allowing you to publish revenue earning sites rapidly and efficiently. You should check it out if this concept appeals to you.
The service is not free, so I built RenewableWealth manually, in order to stick to the rules. It would have gone a lot faster had I been able to use the tools the Super Apprentice service provides, but c’est la vie. When I build my stake up enough to cover my membership, I’ll start using Super Apprentice to bump things up a notch. In the mean time, I’ll stick to Rule 6 and keep plugging away with what I have.
Can You Feel It?
Do you get the feeling things are starting to get exciting? I have now parlayed my dime into an actual revenue producing business. It’s on a very small scale, of course, but it can be replicated indefinitely, without a single additional dime being added. It is now self-sustaining, and it is quite literally only a matter of time before I have a million dollars. All that is required now is to work to shorten the time needed.
More importantly, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same.
So now what?
I have grown tired of reselling used books. While I’m quite certain that I could easily use this method to get up to a pretty big stake, it’s a hassle to find, post, wrap, and ship them, and it’s getting boring, so it’s time to move to something new.
I have $6.04. In a sense that’s a pretty extraordinary sum - I have increased my starting stake by over 6000% in a very short period of time. That’s the power of trading value for value. But as you can see, I’m starting to run up against one of the inherent limits of any business - time. You see, if it takes me an hour to do all the work necessary to buy and resell a single used book, I am really only earning an hourly wage for doing so, and a pathetically small one at that.
The Magic of Leverage
So how do we get around this problem? The answer is leverage. We must find a way to work once, but be paid many times for it. There are many ways to achieve this. Having people work for you is one - you do the management job once, while being paid for the work of many. However, $6.04 is not going to get me very many employees.
Another method is to use debt - you borrow someone else’s money, and invest it in a way that generates more profits than the interest you pay. In a sense this is another way of profiting from the work of others, in the form of the money they have been paid. Using debt is not against the rules, but you must be able to pay the interest out of your stake, and again, I don’t see any banks lending against $6.04 any time soon.
The Ultimate in Leverage
So how can we create leverage with so small a stake? The answer lies in the Internet. The vast fortunes that it has created are due to the fact that it is the most efficient creator of leverage in the history of human civilization. How does this work?
The answer is that if you write something once, then publish it on the Internet, you can create and distribute what is for all intents and purposes an unlimited number of copies at little to no cost. If you provide advertising or promote a product on that page, then so long as some non-zero percentage of your visitors clicks or buys, each page view is worth a certain amount of income (on average). Now it may be (and probably will be) a very small amount of income, but the power of leverage is such that even the tiniest amount of income can make you very, very rich if it’s leveraged sufficiently. In other words, if you can grow your traffic sufficiently, a single Web page can generate practically unlimited income. Don’t believe me? Check out Million Dollar Homepage. The creator of that site found a way to work once, and be paid $1 a million individual times for his efforts.
Archimedes famously said that with a large enough lever, he could move the entire Earth. We need not be so ambitious. We’re only trying to double a $6 stake, here. And I have a plan for how to do it. More to come soon.
The Secret to Building Real Wealth
My brother is what some might call a ne’er do well. He’s never had much luck holding down a job. He’s extremely intelligent, creative, and charismatic, which of course means he’s utterly unsuited for the typical stifling corporate workplace. To make matters worse, he’s a high-school dropout.
Building Real Wealth
After a series of unsuccessful jobs, he was discouraged, and had a chat with our mother, who told him what I’ve been telling him for years: he needed to start a business and be his own boss. It’s the only true path to building real wealth - there really are no exceptions when you look closely enough. If you get rich in stocks, it’s because you own the businesses you invest in. Dot-Com millionaires don’t get rich off of their salaries, but off of their stock options, which again represent ownership of a business. Even CEO salaries are peanuts compared to what they make off of stock ownership. The list goes on and on.
My brother understood the idea intuitively. The trouble was he had no earthly idea how to go about starting a business of his own.
Build Your Own Wealth by Helping Others
Faced with this quandary, my brother asked my mother what to do. Her response was the most important six words any aspiring entrepreneur can hear. This simple statement holds the secret to unlimited wealth: Find a need and fill it. Repeat this statement to yourself. Think on it. Meditate on it. It’s the secret behind every successful business ever made. If you can manage to follow this extremely simple idea, then your success will be all but assured.
Of course the idea may be simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. How do you find an unfilled need? Well let’s look at what my brother did: He started visiting successful businesses in the small Southern where he lives. He simply walked up to the front desks asked to speak with the owners of the businesses. More often than not, he was let right in. He then chatted with the owners about their businesses and asked if there was a service which would help them out, which they wished were available locally. (As I mentioned, he’s quite charismatic.)
Build Real Wealth With A Few Mops and Some Elbow Grease
As it turned out, this small Southern town was in a bit of an expansive boom, and lots of medium to large office buildings were cropping up downtown, yet many of the standard services for office buildings you see in bigger cities just weren’t available in town. One was after-hours industrial cleaning.
So my brother bought some gear, and started an industrial cleaning business. The very same business owners he chatted with originally became his first customers, and his business quickly expanded by word of mouth. He now has several employees and more business than he can handle. More importantly, there’s no jerk in a stuffed suit telling him what to do. He’s well on his way to achieving financial success, and he’s done it all his own way.
You can Build Your Own Wealth, Too
Trust me, if my brother the high school dropout can make such great strides toward building financial wealth , anyone can. Just follow mom’s advice.
Inspiration and Resources for Building Financial Wealth
Whether you’re playing the game and looking for some inspiration or some help, or are brewing your own wacky idea, here is a list of resources and success stories to help you along the way.
Wacky Ideas
Every one of these ideas seemed crazy at first. Laughable, even. Who’s laughing, now?
- One Red Paperclip — A guy who traded a red paperclip for a house.
- The Million-Dollar Homepage — A kid who made a million dollars by selling space on his home page one pixel at a time.
- Plenty of Fish — A free dating site run by two people, the founder and his girlfriend, out of the founder’s apartment. They’re making over $1 million a year in Google Adsense revenue.
- How to Double Your Way to a Million — Stuart Goldsmith’s classic that inspired this site. Mr. Goldsmith has made millions over the years using the exact ideas he writes about.
Free Resources
With so many free tools available now, it’s easier than ever to make something out of nothing.
- The Gimp — A powerful free graphics editing tool. Why pay hundreds for Photoshop when the Gimp has almost all of the same functionality, and is free? All of the graphics you see on this site were created with it.
- Emacs — The best text editor in the world. This entire site was written in it. (No vi fanaticism, please.)
- Wordpress — A powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use blog publishing platform. This site is published using it.
- ReCaptcha — Having to enter distorted words to verify that you’re human is mildly annoying, but a necessary evil to stop the scourge of comment spam. ReCaptcha is a free service that actually makes use of the effort you make to decipher the words, because it uses real scans from old books that are being digitized. Thus, I ch0se ReCaptcha to provide the human verification for this site. Stop spam, and help preserve old books at the same time. What could be better?
Learn About Money
- The Motley Fool — A comprehensive financial education may be found on this site, all written with great humor and irreverence.
- Warren Buffett’s Annual Letters to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders — Read every one of these letters from beginning to end, and you will learn more about business, the economy, the markets, and finance than in any MBA program in the world.
The Game: Earn a Million Dollars Starting with One Dime
My name is Sean, and my plan is to grow a dime I found on the street into a million dollars. I got the idea from a fairly well-known article by Stuart Goldsmith, called “Double Your Way to a Million.” I discovered it during one of those fits of daydreaming you have when you really ought to be working, but you hate your job.
If you’re like me, you like to hatch all sorts of wacky schemes to get your hands on what’s known as “go-to-hell money” (defined as enough money to be comfortable telling your boss to do exactly that). The Internet is full of get-rich-quick schemes, of course, and we all know that 99.9% of them are scams. Still, the breathless marketing language can make for entertaining reading (more entertaining than civil lawsuit motions, at any rate). So when I heard mention of Mr. Goldsmith’s report on one of the bulletin boards I frequent, I decided to have a look.
How to Earn a Million Dollars From Street Change
 The Original Million-Dollar Dime |
The essay describes a sort of “game” where you try to make a million dollars literally out of nothing. Like any other game, there are rules, and the number-one rule in this case is that you’re not allowed to use any of your own money. Your initial stake must come from change you find lying in the street.
Naturally the idea seemed a little silly at first, and I soon forgot all about it.
Big Internet Money Making Ideas
Then sites like One Red Paperclip and the Million-Dollar Homepage started popping up and proving that, as it turns out, these sorts of wacky ideas actually can work if you have the faith to follow through with them.
It comes down to this: If Kyle MacDonald can trade a red paperclip for a house, why can’t I make a million dollars from street change? I can’t think of a good reason, nor can I come up with an excuse not to try it.
Building Real Wealth From Nothing
I started scanning the streets like a hawk, and it wasn’t long until I found my starting stake, a shiny new dime. (Actually it’s from 1999, so it’s not all that new, but it’s still shiny.) This site is named after that first shiny dime, and will serve to track my progress. You can see my version of the rules here. I’ve made some minor changes to Mr. Goldsmith’s rules for convenience, and to reflect recent advances in the Internet, but I have made every effort to stick to the spirit of the original.
Just 24 Steps to Earn a Million Dollars
Starting with one dime, I only need to double my stake 24 times, and I will have almost $1.7 million. Just 24 steps — that doesn’t sound that hard, does it? I will document every transaction here on this site, so watch this space.
Last but not least, I encourage you to try the game as well!