How Not to Make Money Online (I Learned the Hard Way)

I did not learn how to make money online by succeeding at it. I learned by failing at it repeatedly and expensively, which turns out to be the only curriculum that sticks. Every scheme that separated me from my money left behind the same lesson, and once I had paid for that lesson enough times, the real principle underneath was impossible to miss.

Think of the online-money world as a casino that advertises itself as a bank. Everything about it is designed to make effortless riches feel one click away, and the entire business model depends on you believing that the click exists. It does not. What exists is work, and the schemes sell you the fantasy that you can skip it.

What was my worst money-making mistake?

My first venture is the one I still wince at. I fell in early with the late Don Lapre and his 900 numbers, back when 900 numbers were the gold rush everyone swore by. The pitch was irresistible in exactly the way these things always are: effortless profits, money while you sleep, a proven system. I invested $750 and bought two lines, one for Internet Tips and one for Romance Tips, and I waited for the money to roll in.

Total revenue from those 900 numbers: $7.50. Not seven hundred, not seventy. Seven dollars and fifty cents. The lines were worthless because the traffic the pitch promised never existed, and the one person reliably making money in that arrangement was the man selling the dream to people like me. I had bought a lottery ticket and been told it was a business plan.

Why do most online money schemes fail you?

Because the product being sold is the fantasy, not a business. When someone’s main offering is a course on how to make money, ask where their money comes from, and the answer is almost always selling that course to you. The scheme works beautifully for exactly one party, the one at the top, and the effortless-profit promise is the bait that keeps a fresh supply of hopeful people paying to learn a secret that does not exist.

The tell is always the same: they promise money without a real product or a real customer. Take those two things away and there is no business, only a story about a business, and you are the revenue. Every scheme I lost money to had this shape. There was no product anyone truly wanted and no customer who was not also a mark. Once you can see that shape, the whole industry stops looking mysterious and starts looking obvious.

What really works for making money online?

The boring thing works, which is why nobody sells it as a secret. Find or create a solid product you believe in, one that solves a real problem for a real person who will pay to have it solved, and then do the unglamorous work of reaching those people and serving them well. That is the whole formula, and it is boring precisely because it is true. Truth does not need a hype video.

For a writer, the product is often the writing itself, or a book that opens doors, because a book earns most of its money off the page through the credibility and clients it generates. The mechanism is different but the principle is identical: real value, delivered to real people, over real time. There is no version of this that skips the work, and every scheme that claims to is selling you a $750 lesson you can get from me for free.

Why do smart people fall for these schemes?

From the podcast

Joe Rockey traces the coming trouble to something more human than economics, on Leaders and Their Stories: People want to actually talk to people and have individuals solve their problems. Every scheme that works exploits that. It offers a person where the market only offered a menu.

I was not stupid when I bought those 900 numbers. I was hopeful, which is more dangerous. These schemes do not target the foolish, they target the ambitious, the people willing to work and dreaming of a way to make that work pay off faster. The pitch is engineered to bypass your judgment by speaking straight to your hope, and hope is a lot harder to argue with than logic.

That is why intelligence does not protect you. What protects you is a single stubborn habit: refusing to believe in effortless money no matter how good the story sounds. Every time I lost money, it was because I let the promise of a shortcut override what I already knew, that real income comes from real work. The schemes are not selling a method. They are selling permission to skip the part you did not want to do anyway, and that permission is always a lie.

How do you spot an online money scam?

Run everything through one question: where does the money come from? If the answer is a real product bought by real customers who are glad they paid, it is a business. If the answer is you, the newest person paying to learn the secret, it is a scheme wearing a business costume. That single question would have saved me $750 and every dollar that followed it.

Watch for the other markers too. Urgency that makes no sense, testimonials with no verifiable person behind them, and a founder whose only demonstrated skill is selling the program itself. None of these guarantees a scam on its own, but stacked together they are a pattern, and the pattern is old. Don Lapre was selling it in the 900-number era, and someone is selling the identical shape today with a different logo. The technology changes. The con does not.

If you want the honest version of building income from writing, the ghostwriting hub and the piece on getting paid fairly for your writing lay it out without a hype video in sight. And if you want a book built to generate real business instead of a fantasy of one, that is the work I do. I paid $750 to learn there is no shortcut. You can have that lesson for nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions