I know that there are several businesses that make money, but the tactics used are unknown to many.  I often wondered how they make money.  I did my research and will tell you the secrets of making money by the professionals.

Making money in real estate
Homestay
Renting
Buy house cheap and sell high after renovations
Making money on the Internet
Online Advertising
Online Microtransactions
How businesses make money
XBox, Playstation, Nintendo, and others
Printer manufacturers
Large supermarkets
Beating the competition
Email and/or home and/or business distribution lists
Fraction of a penny
Co-operatives, OPEC, Associations, and Coalitions
Vacation Home
Patents and Trademarks

Making money in real estate

House prices go up and down like a roller coaster.  Question is which houses are a good buy?  Looking at the houses currently available in the market, I realized that some houses that are dropping in value can still be sold for more than they are worth. The reason is because the owners do not want to sell.  Furthermore, there are some houses that nobody will buy unless you sell it below the market value.

Homestay

If you want a house that can create revenue while you are working, look for a house near a university or a college.  A house near a university or college can be used by foreign exchange students.  The term is called homestay.  A student that wants to study in a college or university nearby will pay around $1000 a month for a room, computer, food, and other stuff that can be negotiated with the owner.  If you have a house with many rooms, you can make quite a profit in this business.

Renting

Another money maker is houses in the heart of downtown.  This is where the professionals go to work.  For example, if you look at downtown Vancouver, there are giant towers everywhere.  One way streets, professional business people, expensive stores, etc…  If you own a condo here, you can rent it out and I am pretty sure that you will get accountants, business executives, and the like renting your condo.

If you buy a house near hospitals, government offices, or any building that has hundreds of people working in it, you will usually find that you charge more for rent.  These workers make a decent wage and can afford to pay higher rent.

With the price of gas going up, people will want to live closer to where they work. If the price of gas gets too expensive, people will move even closer to their workplace. An article that give a sample scenario can be found at http://aprivatebeach.com/blog/2008/10/before-you-buy-a-house/.

Buy house cheap and sell high after renovations

People often make money by buying a house that is in need of repair and fixing it up.  This can be risky.  Depending on the location, the house may sell for more or less what you paid for.  A smart buyer would know that the repairs could be temporary.  Just because a house looks pretty, does not mean it will stay that way.  In any case, houses appreciate in value in the long run.  If you are planning on keeping the same house for 20 or more years without renters, then location probably is not as important. As long as the house is not too far from large businesses, you could sell it for a profit in the future.

The places where the houses are cheap should be obvious.  The farther out you go from the heart of business, the cheaper the houses get.  Therefore, if you are a smart house shopper, you would go for the houses near universities, colleges, or large buildings with well paid employees and/or executives.

Vacation Home

When people go on vacation, they book a room. Why? You can book a house instead. Many houses are cheaper, larger, nicer, and more spacious to rent. If you have a house, you can rent a room, suite, or the whole house to vacationers. An easy way to make money if you like the idea of having strangers walking around. Although this may seem strange, it is something that offers an excellent source of income. Therefore, if you do not mind strangers in the house, you can pay off some of your bills with the extra cash.

Making money on the Internet

Advertising

Google, Yahoo, and many other sites are making money without charging the users.  How do they do it?  The key is advertising.  If you are able to get people to view your pages, you can make money.  There are several hints on how to do this.  I will list the ones that I know so far.

• Create something that people will want to use.  If you are good at programming, build something useful.  Post the program that you created on several websites.  Tell them that they should check your website for updates when they come out.
• You may have ideas or a different point of view.  You may have expertise in a specific area.  If you share the information that can help others looking for the information, you can get lots of users visiting your site.  Keep the information updated daily and the users will keep coming back to visit.
• Advertise yourself.  Visit other people and say hi through blogs, digg.com and forums.
• Buy your own easy to remember domain name.  I chose asecurepc.com and aprivatebeach.com.  The reason is because they are easy to remember.  Where am I?  I am at a secure PC, or I am at a private beach.  Choosing a name that is too long or complicated will make it difficult for people to remember where you are.
• Buying a domain name starts at about $10 a month.  I recommend buying the domain for five years or more.  If you register the domain for more than one year Google will see it as a professional website.  Google may rank it higher than others. Mine are registered for the next five years.
• Do not make your information private.  If you do, Google and other search engines may penalize your website.  That means your website will be near the bottom of all searches.
• You could host your blog on a free service such as Wordpress.com, but it makes you look unprofessional.  You can get a blog hosted on your server for about $5 a month extra.  I recommend you take this route instead.

The secret to making money is advertising.  You need to get several thousand hits a day.  As your website gets busier, you can get advertisers to pay a cost per 1000 impressions or CPI.   If a thousand people visit your website with advertising, you can get about 30 cents from an advertiser just by getting 1000 unique visitors to your page.  If you can manage to get ten advertisers on your page, you get about $3 for every $1000.  Advertising can be put as a banner.  It can be put on both the right and the left sides of the page.  It can be put at the bottom and between articles.  You have be careful though.  If the advertising annoys the viewer, he/she may stop visiting.  Therefore, you should put the advertising around the page and one small one in the middle.  As your website gets more visitors, advertisers will start coming around.  In some cases, you can get advertisers to bid for spaces on your page.

You can visit the man who will show you how to do this JohnChow.com. He was in magazines and the news.  If you are curious you can also check out Mr. Ham owns the Internet.  They both have one thing in common.  They both made money from advertising.  A Google search in the news on both these people will give some interesting articles such as http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/megabytes/2009/11/22/tweets-sale and http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/blogger+cashing+part+time+pastime/2157029/story.html.  It seems that advertising is evolving with the Internet.

Microtransactions

Many people are frugal.  They do not want to pay when a free alternative is available.  Many websites that rely on advertising to make ends meet have disappeared because the revenue stream is not enough.  With this, a new system emerged that allowed many websites to become profitable.

Second Life, Neopets, and various other online games have developed a system where players can pay cash for items that are not available for free.  For example, a player can pay five dollars for a cold sword.  An item that is not available for free.  Another example is to pay five dollars for 30000 in-game points.  Although the points can be earned by playing, some players may opt to pay to reduce the time required to earn that many points.

Games that are given away free will most likely be played by more people than games that have to be bought.  Furthermore, since many people like to ,among other things, show off their wealth, uniqueness, and/or power, they will purchase items that cannot be attained normally.  These items have to be paid with either cash, credit card, or some other form of payment.

Free is almost always preferred.  Other ways have to be found to make the consumer willingly pay.

Business trying out microtransactions for new  online game
http://www.edge-online.com/features/microtransactions-way-future

Patents and Trademarks

When you patent an idea, you own the right to that idea. Therefore, if you patent an idea and find out that next year several hundred companies are implementing your idea in their product, you can sue and collect royalties. This is how some individuals get rich. By hiding the idea and cashing in on it later.

Trademarks are also used to either collect royalties or sell for cash. A trademark that is catchy will often fetch millions of dollars if the buyer really wants it. If you own a trademark that someone else wants in the future, you could negotiate a deal that could see you set for life.

How businesses make money

XBox, Playstation, Nintendo, and others

It is well known that their consoles are sold at or below cost.  The reasoning behind this logic is simple.  If you buy the console, you need to buy more games.  The games are where they make their money.  An expensive console will decrease sales overall.  If it is cheap enough that most people can afford it and buy it, there is good chance that they will come back to buy more games for it.

Playstation 3 is a loss leader http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10448137-17.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Printer manufacturers

They also use the same tactic as the game console manufacturers.  They sell their product at or below cost.  If you buy a printer, you must constantly feed the printer with ink or toner.  They are relying on you not to buy generic brand ink or toner.  That would defeat the purpose of selling the printer at or below cost.  They are relying on a constant flow of cash coming in from the ink or toner.

Large supermarkets

They distribute flyer’s to showcase cheap items sold at or below cost.  When you come in, you have to walk through several other things you need before you even get there.  These other items are sold for a profit.  They are counting on you to buy these other items with the items sold at or below cost.

Beating the competition

Manufacturers are constantly building stuff elsewhere.  The reason is cheap labor.  If you want to sell a product cheap, you make it in a country where it can be made cheap.  That way anyone who tries to sell a product similar to yours will have to compete with cheaper products.  I wrote an article about outsourcing and how people demand it.  This is going to be a trend that will continue.  Unless the government implements a plan to force manufacturers to put the country of origin on the product, this will be the future.  Just because the product is packaged in Canada does not mean the product is from Canada. The manufacturers seem to find ways to work around the labelling system.  If the government makes a law, the manufacturers will find a way around it.  The only solution is to put a law stating that if any of the product(s), process, etc… is made or done in another country, the country must be stated on the box with the product(s), process, etc… done in that country.  That should work.  I will need to see a lawyer about that.

Email and/or home and/or business distribution lists

This is one of a businesses unscrupulous ways of making money.  When you buy and/or use a product, you may have to submit your information such as email, phone, and home address.  This information can be sold to advertisers who will attempt to sell you products based on your previous purchases.

Companies such as Dell, HP, Visa, Mastercard probably do not sell and/or share this information without your permission, but companies such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Google may share and/or sell this information without your permission.

Therefore, it is good idea to put false information for address, phone number and other sellable information.  I have one email account designed specifically for websites that I do not trust.  If I have any doubts, I use that email address.  If it starts filling with junk mail, I can close that account and use a new one.

Fraction of a penny

Banks are famous for this.  When you get interest, you only care about the last penny.  What about the additional digits after the last penny?  That, my friend, goes back to the bank.  Apparently there have been scams associated with this, and many have gone to jail for it. The amount of money earned can be a high as millions of dollars every month and possibly more.

You can read more on this by doing a search for “Salami fraud is profitable until you get caught” in my search box.

Co-operatives, OPEC, Associations, and Coalitions

The price of food and other commodities are based on demand.  Therefore, how do you keep the prices high if there is no demand?  You join forces and agree to work together to set a target for export quantity, price, fines, etc.  Many do not know, but these forces are quite powerful.  They work together to ensure that businesses big and small will survive.  They eliminate the need  for competition.  They eliminate the need to survive.  It was developed to protect individual businesses from being phased out from too much competition.