How many times have you heard that good grammar and spelling are essential to success online? Well, it’s true, your spelling and grammar should be reasonably good to make money blogging. But you can profit from other people’s bad spelling and grammar.
This idea isn’t new, but it’s worth talking about because it shows creative thinking. Many people put items for sale on Ebay, and before the time of Firefox there were lots of misspelled words in item descriptions. So someone searching for “clock radio” wouldn’t find the item entered under “clck radeo”. Buyers were missing out on products, and sellers were missing out on sales.
So enter some unsung genius who first thought about applying spell checking technology to an Ebay search engine. The basic idea is that you type in a correctly spelled search phrase, and it searches Ebay for misspellings of that phrase. This lets a buyer find those items that nobody might be bidding on because they’re misspelled.
And it makes the owner of the search engine a ton of money through Ebay affiliate commissions.
To see this sort of search engine in action, type a correctly spelled search phrase into this box, click Generate and then click the link that appears:
This is one of those ideas that, when someone first comes up with it, you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Making money online doesn’t have to be through blogging or straight affiliate sales. You can offer a genuinely useful service that also happens to net you affiliate commissions.
So when you’re thinking about how to make some money online, don’t limit yourself to what’s in the ebooks or blogs. Think outside the box and try to find a need to fill that can be monetized in some way.
Hey Jay, I recently had a post about grammatical and spelling errors that people usually overlook when they are blogging. In my post I had a few examples from JohnChow’s blog and how its best to proofread. I love that search engine you have, I can spend a bit of time doing that today! and I have heard how you can sometimes win auctions that dont have a reserve at a low price because they misspelled something. For example, recently an iPAQ (like mine) was selling for 99 cents because it was spelt iPOQ!
That is one of the big advantages of this sort of search engine, finding the hot items nobody else can find because they’re misspelled.
For some reason I haven’t been getting an update on your blog’s RSS feed. I’ll have to try resubscribing.
Jay
I have heard someone else tell me that too. It is weird because both my feed links are functional. Recently I had activated the FeedSmith plugin and ever since then the problems have started. I shall try deactivating it and see. Thanks! 🙂