The Easiest Money Any Beginner Can Make When First Getting Started Online?

I think practically everybody on WF is doing internet marketing, but I think that's actually a very small percentage of people overall.

It's also easy to forget what it was like when first starting. Everything seemed so foreign and daunting. At least for me anyway. The beauty though is that every little test or experiment, whether it works out as planned or not, leads to new discovers and advances one's IM "career". I think WF has been a great springboard for many people.

-Ben

LOL -- It's not like any marketers use that as a selling point or anything. Nope, they all tell potential customers just how EASY it is to make money online, with THEIR product(s) of course. Or, even if it's still hard work (they may admit that), it's still a cinch, no-brainer, no-fail-potential if you've at least got their product.

I actually had quite a bit of success on eBay over the course of a month back in 2010. It certainly wasn't a sustainable business model (as you'll see below), but it ended up netting me about $12,000 in one month.

I actually stumbled into this idea one Friday night in late June, 2010. I was at a 7-11 near my house picking up some beer and I saw a lady buying a sleeve of Big Gulp cups, along with a bunch of other random stuff. It was really weird, so I asked her why she was buying all this stuff. She said that 7-11 had just started a promotion with the Facebook game FarmVille where if you purchase certain items from 7-11, they come with a code to unlock special items in the game. Further, if you purchase all 8 of the types of food in the 7-11 promotion, you get to unlock $50 FarmVille Cash, which normally sells (at least at the time) for $50 US dollars. What she then told me really opened up my eyes. She said that a lot of her relatives didn't have any 7-11's near them, so she was buying the food products just for the codes to send to her relatives. Bingo!

I have never played FarmVille in my life, but I knew it was huge. FarmVille Secrets from ClickBank had been hovering around a 500 gravity for as long as I remember, so I knew it was a hot market. As soon as I got home from 7-11, I posted a very simple ad on eBay advertising a combo of all 8 products with the $50 FarmVille cash that would be unlocked with it. I made the ad for $40 and didn't worry about making it look visually appealing or anything like that, I just wanted to see if I could sell one of these. Mind you, I hadn't even purchased the products from 7-11. I figured I could do that after I made a sale.

Well, after I placed the ad on eBay I turned my attention to my Friday night activities. I may have had a few too many to drink and didn't fully remember to ad until the next morning. When I got up and checked eBay I was shocked. In about 12 hours I had sold 6 complete sets for $40 each. Over $200 in 12 hours! I couldn't believe it.

I then went to 7-11 and rounded up all the items. Each set included a sandwich, big gulp, coffee, ice cream, chips, iced coffee, a fruit bowl, and one other things that's escaping me at the moment. At any rate, it was a pretty big shopping trip getting 6 of each, but little did I know that was only the beginning!

I ended up selling 10 more sets on eBay just on Saturday alone. I went back to 7-11 and ended up clearing them out of all the items and had to go to another 7-11. I would then go home, peel off the stickers with the codes and e-mail them to the buyer. I would then put the codes in an envelope and send them to the buyer via snail mail to stay within eBay's terms of selling something physical.

As the month progressed I started making little tweaks in my ad to make it look better. I also noticed that once I got a couple positive feedbacks my sales went through the roof. People kept thanking me for offering the codes because they didn't have a 7-11 near them and thought it was a great deal since it would normally cost $50 to get 50 FarmVille cash. I ended up raising the price to $50 for the set. For awhile, I was selling about 20 a day at $50 each. To purchase all the food with the codes it was about $15 per set, so I was making $35 profit for every set of codes sold.

As the month went on it got more and more competitive on eBay as others started doing the same thing, but I was still able to get 10 sales a day even as the promotion was ending at the end of July 2010. Knowing that the promotion was ending and that this income stream was going to dry up, I went to the store owner of one of hte 7-11's and asked if he could place a larger order of the foods that I could be. He gladly agreed and I ended up paying $1,500 for another 100 sets. This allowed me to continue selling even after the promotion at 7-11 ended.

So obviously this isn't a sustainable business model because of the limited time promotion offered by 7-11, but that month was a great success for me on eBay. It was actually a lot of work. Typing in 16 digit codes to e-mail to the buyers took a long time. I was spending 2 - 3 hours a day just typing in codes of people who bought. And I had to stay on top of it or it just became overwhelming. So it wasn't necessarily "easy" month as there was work to it. But it was a great month for me!

-Ben