“The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.”

– Aristotle Onassis

The biggest lesson that I learned from this month’s challenge is how boring making money online actually is. It’s slow, time consuming, and frustrating; just like real work. Contrary to what Tim Ferriss may insist, selling things online is just as labor intensive and exciting as selling things in real life. At the end of the day it’s just a job.

However, it does have some perks that normal employment doesn’t.

• You can work from anywhere.

Working from a coffee shop isn’t super exciting, but it still beats being at a real work place. While I’m still being anti-social and focusing on making money, there is a nice ambiance. That should count for something.

• Dealing with weirdos is minimal.

Aside from tricking on Craigslist, you don’t have to associate with too many strange people. Towards the end of the month my radar for time wasters and complainers improved to the point that I could ignore “clients” who’d never actually purchase anything.

• eBooks are a tough racket.

At last count there were 9,000,000 different eBooks about making money, losing weight, and picking up girls. That’s a lot of competition. If you assume that throwing up a web page that says “click here to buy my book on fitness/sex/wealth” is going to make you rich, you are a fool.

• Making money online is the second most tedious job you can have.

Selling services on Fiverr, writing eBooks, and affiliate marketing are all difficult and mundane jobs. Putting pants on shelves, filing TPS reports, and doing other menial tasks are worse. They’re worse because you’re stuck there. If I felt burnt out from web business I could take the night off, if I felt burnt out from my day job I still had to come in the next day. The freedom of quitting is what keeps me in the web game.

My online businesses are starting to make me money. As much as I gripe about them, I’ll keep at it. I’d rather work hard to have money and free time, than to slack off and only have money.

“I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need, if I die by four o’clock.”

– Henny Youngman

For the past two weeks I’ve had a hankering for L-Theanine. Unfortunately, I’m budgeting and trying to ween myself off nonessential items. This meant that I’d have to earn extra money in order to make impulse purchases.

Enter: Fiverr.

For the uninitiated, Fiverr is a website where people sell their services for a measly five dollars. While this sounds like a waste of time, I actually enjoyed doing it. All the jobs I did were incredibly easy and took between 20 and 30 minutes to complete. I hyperlinked text for a website, wrote a 250 word article on Nicki Minaj, composed a blog post about England’s porn filter, and did some other simple tasks. Nothing I did was elaborately complex, or required immense effort.

With that said, there are several downsides to selling services through Fiverr. The first, and biggest one, is obviously the low price tag. If you have a specialized skill set, there’s really no reason to waste your time making five bucks an hour. Secondly, Fiverr takes one dollar from ever task that you complete. As such, you only get four dollars per job. This means that anything too time consuming should be completely avoided since you’ll end up making almost nothing.

Despite Fiverr’s low pay out, I think the site is worth looking into. By the end of last week I’d made enough money to buy my L-Theanine, a book, and some juicing supplies. If you’re a broke college kid or have a “make work” job, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to open a Fiverr account and start making side money.

“It ain’t hard to make money”

– Wale

This is one of the most simplistically brilliant ideas that I’ve ever heard.

“Sent my old b*tch right back to get her Masters.”

– Pusha T

Warning: Today’s post involves prostitution. Read at your own risk and put “allegedly” in front of everything illegal that happens.

After writing about the used panty industry, I decided to learn more about the world on online prostitution. To do so, I befriended a couple of Craigslist hookers and studied them. The task took a little while it paid off; I ended up learning a lot of interesting information about shady businesses, social engineering, and deception.

• Prostitution is booming.

In real life I don’t think I’ve ever actually encountered a sex worker. Yet the Internet seems to have an infestation of women exploiting their bodies for profit. Reddit, Twitter, eBay, and most other social media sites are inundated with prostitutes. Aside from the girls who’ll have sex or sell naked pictures for money, there are tons of women who maintain Amazon Wish Lists. These girls, usually, use sites like Twitter to post scantily clad pictures in hopes that thirsty dudes will fawn over them and buy whatever is on their list.

• Most men are horrible with women.

If you read half a pick up book and applied ten percent of what you learned, you’d be more of a player than the average man. While pretending to be a Craigslist hooker, I made a text only listing that clearly indicated I’d only have sex for money. My initial assumption was that a bunch of Patrick Bateman, or criminal type guys would contact me. Instead I got the lamest responses ever. “Hey,” and “You sound beautiful” were the two most common. The Craigslist killer would weep if he could see how far his old stomping grounds have fallen.

• Women love robbing weak men.

My actual hooker friends were pretty good at tricking herb guys into paying them and getting nothing in return. Some of the girls would even go so far as to rob the dude and then blackmail him for more money.

• The average man’s Internet security is laughable.

Whenever guys got blackmailed it was because they’d made themselves incredibly vulnerable. A lot of them used their real email, or did stupid things like sending money through PayPal accounts that linked back to their home addresses.

• A man offered to pay for my college tuition simply because he thought I was a girl.

Not believing the amount of money that some of the girls were making, seriously they rake it in, I decided to pose as a Craigslist hooker. In each of my posts I’d come up with some outlandish request and still have it met. At one point I pretended to be a broke college girl living in Idaho and asked if any men would be willing to cover my tuition in exchange for sexual favors. Keep in mind that this ad was placed on the same website people buy used furniture from, and was nestled between “Mature BBW seeks young athletic guy” and “Smaller BBW seeks fit and hung stud.” I also hadn’t posted an image, instead opting for a generic description filled with annoying text speak. Within an hour some dude was offering to foot the bill. I couldn’t believe it.

No matter how well you write, how many books you author, and how hard you work; you will never be able to make as much “easy” money as some prostitute who hooks up with men from Craigslist.