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Money Out Of Thin Air

Each of us has heard more than once how they say about someone: “He knows how to make money out of thin air.” Sometimes this is how they characterize outright fraudsters who use human gullibility for their profit.

By Michail BukinPublished 2 years ago 8 min read
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Money Out Of Thin Air
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

But more often we are talking about original and non-standard ideas that bring considerable profit to their authors. The expression “money out of thin air” is also used to mean any income without investment. However, “making money out of thin air” is possible in the most literal sense.

How to make money out of thin air:

A tempting prospect is to lie on the couch, doing nothing, and watch how the money in your wallet keeps adding and adding. For example, you can hit the jackpot in the lottery. Without getting up from the couch, you buy a lottery ticket online via your smartphone, wait for the draw, and then … how lucky, although the chances of a big win are few. You can try to win not only in the lottery but also on the stock exchange or in the casino.

Still, getting “money out of thin air” means something else. The main meaning is unusual, extraordinary ideas of earning, without relying on luck and blind chance. Projects that sometimes seem insane can bring the authors a good profit.

One-page website for $ 1,000,000.

In 2005, English student Alex Dew, to pay for his studies, created a one-page site in the form of a field of 10,000 cells, 100 pixels each. He offered to buy cells for placing banners for $ 100 — $ 1 per pixel.

The content of the banner was determined by the desire of the buyer — advertising, wishes for happiness, etc. The last thousand cells were sold six months after the launch of the site at the eBay auction. The website traffic as of January 2006 was almost a million people a day. The project brought the creator $ 1,037,100.

Giving up freedom of choice for $ 100,000.

In 2008, American Mike Merrill created the site KmikeyM.com, where he put up 100,000 shares for sale for $ 1. The shares were directly related to the enterprising American.

Now shareholders, by a majority vote, decide how to act for Mike in various situations — how to dress, what to eat, with whom to meet, whom to vote for in the elections, etc. Merrill earned more than $ 10,000 on his project. Although he says that the main idea is not in making a profit, but in putting together a team that will make decisions together.

New life for $ 305,000.

48-year-old Briton living in Australia, Ian Asher, sold his life on eBay for $ 305,000. Lot “The Life of Ian Usher”: house with furniture, motorcycle, jet ski, parachute equipment. Bonuses: meeting Usher’s loved ones and working as a carpet seller.

With the money he received, Ian traveled for two years, blogged about it, and by the end of the trip he had finished the book “A Life Sold”. In two years, Usher achieved 93 goals and spent $ 270,000. Disney bought the rights to film Usher’s book, and with that money, he bought a small island in Panama and built a house.

$ 10,000,000 Minimalism Demand.

Or Arbel from Israel, solving the problem of creating a program for quick communication between a manager and an assistant, has developed a messenger that can send just one-word “Yo”. He had a hard time putting Yo on the Apple App Store because the moderators thought it was unfinished.

But within a few weeks, Yo went to Arbel’s friends, then to friends of his friends, and finally to the press. A month later, 20,000 people in Tel Aviv sent each other “Yo” almost hourly, and the app became a leader in Product Hunt. The app was estimated at $ 10,000,000. For some time it was popular, but then people, having played enough with sending each other the same type of messages, abandoned the application.

Nostalgia for $ 1,000,000.

Irishman Pat Bark moved to the United States. Friends who had previously moved to America asked to bring them a handful of their native land for a reward. The idea of ​​selling and delivering land from a distant homeland to anywhere in the world formed the basis of the Official Irish Dirt business. One Irish immigrant bought several tons of land for $ 100,000 to fill his grave with this land. Another built a house on his native land. As a result, the company has already sold 240 tons of land for more than $ 1,000,000.

The most unusual, sometimes even ridiculous ideas, bring their owners a lot of money. What distinguishes people who can generate ideas for profit from nothing:

  • creativity;
  • innovation;
  • flight of thought;
  • freedom from prejudice;
  • the ability to make the most of the situation to their advantage.

How to make money from nothing — an overview of options without investment.

If you have not yet come up with the original idea of ​​earning from nothing, you can use standard methods of earning income without investment. Here are some of them.

Provision of intermediary services.

At its core, mediation is the organization of a meeting between a seller of a product and/or service with a buyer who needs this product and/or service. And you can make good money on organizing such meetings.

The number of earnings will depend on the scale of the mediation. If you just help friends, acquaintances, acquaintances of friends, etc., then you can hardly count on a large income. But you can, for example, engage in a dealership, using different options for organizing this business without investment (trade “on order”, taking goods for sale, testing goods).

Another option is to participate in affiliate programs. They brought a client and got a reward. Partnerships are possible in a wide variety of areas:

  • tourism;
  • medicine;
  • sales;
  • insurance;
  • real estate;
  • loans;
  • transport services, etc.

Earning on your skills and abilities.

Each person knows how to do something better than many others. Your skills can be made a source of income, in most cases, it does not require any investment:

  • individual tailoring of clothes from the customer’s material or tailoring of original goods — for example, eco-bags ;
  • production of handmade products to order;
  • tutoring and other types of online education (now you can study with students from the comfort of your home, using, for example, Skype);
  • creation and sale of training courses, master classes, information business, and production ;
  • sale of photos, photo and video filming of various events;
  • creation of sites, setting up advertising, and other earnings on the network.
  • By the way, orders for such types of services can be found on the Internet, for example, on freelance exchanges.

Love for computer games can also become a source of real income. The easiest option is to test new developments: such tasks often appear on freelance exchanges. A more difficult option is to show a master class on passing a difficult place in the game, pump the hero to a higher level, etc.

Where to make money?

Even today, you can find many examples of non-standard earnings.

The Snuggery firm operates in the USA, which offers the services of hug masters. No, these are not services for adults, but spiritual intimacy for people who miss it so much. An hour of hugs costs $ 60.

There is a company in Switzerland that is engaged in coming up with unique names for babies. And this service is by no means cheap — tens of thousands of dollars!

In France, the owner of a small perfume company, Cathy Apalategui, creates the fragrances of the dead by extracting scent molecules from the clothes of the deceased. Bottles with a similar scent are offered to relatives at funeral homes in France for only $ 600.

If you do not limit yourself to the dead, such a product has a great future. You can sell celebrity fragrances — fans will go crazy with happiness.

Selling air as a profitable business.

Money can be made out of thin air in the most direct sense.

The idea for such a business came from China. Large industrial cities are often covered with smog. A breath of fresh air at such a moment is just the right thing to do! Therefore, an enterprising Chinese businessman began selling fresh air in banks.

In Japan, they went even further: their oxygen is sold in bottles with special inhalers. The manufacturers claim that when this air is inhaled, the hormone of happiness is produced.

A profitable option is selling air from concerts of show business stars, weddings of famous personalities — in general, from any world-class events. There are lots on eBay priced at $ 50,000.

Good development of the sale of air is the creation of souvenirs, for example, offering tourists to bring from travel not tired of all fridge magnets, but a jar of canned air. For friends, such a souvenir will be something new.

How else to make money out of thin air.

An air business can be created by selling various equipment that improves the quality of the atmosphere around us. These are air conditioners, ionizers, humidifiers, odor removers, and other devices for air purification and microclimate improvement. Sales of such devices are constantly growing, which means that money can be made out of thin air in this area. If we consider options without investment, then this is a dealership or affiliate network.

Making money out of thin air is real, both literally and figuratively. Yes, not everyone can think of original business ideas out of nothing.

To start an original business, you need certain qualities and a favorable set of circumstances. But almost everyone can receive income without investing. To do this, you need to find a free niche in the market, come up with something that will be in demand, what you can do and what you can share with other people.

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About the Creator

Michail Bukin

Creative Writing Expert and Ambitious Stutterer

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