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

I didn’t learn how to make money online by succeeding at it. I learned by failing at it repeatedly and expensively.

That turns out to be the only curriculum that sticks. Every scheme that separated me from my money left the same lesson behind. Once I’d paid for that lesson enough times, the 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 doesn’t exist. Work exists, and the schemes sell you the fantasy that you can skip it.

What was Richard Lowe’s worst online 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. One person made money reliably in that arrangement.

The man selling the dream to people like me. I’d 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. 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 for exactly one party, the one at the top. I think the people running these things know exactly what they’re doing. That’s predatory. The promise of effortless profit is the bait, and it keeps a fresh supply of hopeful people paying to learn a secret that doesn’t exist.

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

What works for making money online?

The boring thing works, so 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. Then do the unglamorous work of reaching those people and serving them well. That’s the formula, and it’s boring because it’s true. Truth doesn’t need a hype video. Money isn’t the only test, either. I did affiliate marketing for about a year and made a lot of money, then quit because it was too slimy. The people involved were just slimeballs.

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’s 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 online money schemes?

Because the pitch sells hope to people who are stretched, and intelligence doesn’t protect anyone from wanting it to be true.

From the podcast

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

I wasn’t stupid when I bought those 900 numbers. I was hopeful, and that’s more dangerous. These schemes don’t 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’s why intelligence doesn’t 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 selling permission to skip the part you didn’t want to do anyway, and that permission is always a lie.

The blame belongs with the sellers. People who lose money to these pitches tend to beat themselves up for years, and I think that’s backward. Somebody built a machine designed to separate hopeful people from their savings, and the fault sits with the person who built it and profited from it.

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’s a business. If the answer is you, the newest person paying to learn the secret, it’s 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 proven skill is selling the program itself. None of these guarantees a scam on its own, but stacked together they’re 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, to people just as hopeful as I was.

If you want the real 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’s the work I do. I paid $750 to learn there’s no shortcut. You can have that lesson for nothing.

From the author

The Gig Economy
The Gig Economy started as my own money problem. I wasted months on passive income videos and blueprints before I switched to small tests, and the book shows how that works.

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