During the first dot com boom you could buy and sell domains for profit without even trying.  Back in the heady days of 1999 I had a team of three people doing just that – searching for new domains, holding for a month or two and selling.

Back then, we would buy fairly generic domains, develop them ever so slightly, then use direct marketing to sell them to relevant companies for big bucks.  It was easy, fun work.

But the dot com bust of 2000 put an end to that.  And it was getting harder each day anyway, with all of the decent one and two word generics all gone by then.

Fast forward to 2010, and the days of registering new domains is all but over for those wanting to make money from domains.  These days, it’s about buying and selling domains in the secondary market.

Domains aren’t a big part of my revenue model these days, but I still buy and sell just for fun and pocket money.  What prompted me to write this post is a quick sale I made last week, which netted me $1,500.

Now some of you might be thinking ‘who cares, domains sell for more than that all the time’.  And you’d be right, domains have been selling in the millions of dollars for some time now, and six figure sales are happening every other week.  A five figure sale simply doesn’t register on the radar.

But tell me this – how many of you own a domain worth seven figures?  Six figures?  Five figures…?  Yeah, I thought so.

This particular domain was bought through a very small domain auction site, which was great because it means there’s not much competition from other bidders.  I bought the domain for just under a grand and put a very basic site on there, then listed it for sale on a better known site.

Well, I needn’t have bothered putting together a page for the domain, because just two days later I was offered my target price of $2,500.  In hindsight, I should have listed it for more, but $1,500 for fifteen minutes work in two weeks is still pretty good.

If you could manage one these each week, it would be some great pocket money.  If you could manage to string a few together each week, or each day, you could make some serious cash.

So what are my top tips for making easy money from domains?

1.  Don’t shop for domains on the well known secondary markets.  There’s too much competition from other bidders.  You want to buy where there aren’t many bidders and sell where there’s lots of bidders.

2.  Spend money on decent domains.  Don’t waste your time buying $50 or $100 domains (unless you find a genuine bargain), get into the $500 to $1,500 market to start with, and work your way up from there.

3.  Put something on the domain straight away.  Just get something relevant on there and stick some links to it on your other sites.  If it’s a good domain with decent type-in traffic, you should get some ads on there too.  Might as well make some cash from ads whilst waiting for a buyer.

4.  Be patient 1.  Don’t feel like you have to buy the first domain that comes up.  Be patient, watch the market, and only buy domains which you believe to be undervalued.

5.  Be patient 2.  If you have a great domain, don’t just take the first decent offer.  If someone wants your domain they will chase you for it.

I will be writing a far more comprehensive guide over the coming weeks, so make sure you follow me on Twitter to get the latest updates!

So you’ve setup a successful blog and you’re making a few bucks.  By a few bucks, I mean five figures a month.  It’s great money, and I bet you think it’s only going to get better from here, right?

Some of you will continue to earn five figures a month for a few years, then you’ll make it to six figures a month and then you’re well and truly in the million-a-year club.  Once you’re at that point, if you handle things properly, you’ll never look back.

But for most of you, it will be short lived.  Why?  For some of you it will be due to laziness, and you won’t be able to continue pumping out the great content that made you the money in the first place.

For others, it will simply be due to the fickle and changing nature of the internet.  One minute you’re the king of the kids, next minute you’re yesterday’s news.

So you need to look at something which smart investors have been practicing for years – diversification.  This could be as simple as diversifying into different online businesses, but I recommend diversifying completely out of the internet to truly safeguard yourself from future challenges.

Where should you invest?  It’s a common question, and there are a million different opinions out there from a million different people.  I could tell you what I think, but why on earth would you trust an anonymous person over the internet?  You might as well just stick your savings in the poker machines.

Many of these apparently successful ‘online entrepreneurs’ like to put pictures of Ferrari cars, big yachts and luxury houses on their blogs, to make you think they are super successful.

And you know what?  It works!  But you know what else?  I know for a fact that many of them don’t own these items, not the smart ones anyway.  They aren’t wasting their money on items that are depreciating, instead they are investing 50% of their profits back into online business, and 50% into non-internet investments.

Want my advice?  Save the Ferrari and yachts for your midlife crisis.  If you’re smart enough to be making good money from your blog, invest your money wisely, both in yourself and in assets which will build a legacy for each generation which follows you.

A great example is that of Yaro Starak.  It is well known that Yaro makes fantastic money from his online businesses, but if you’ve spent enough time on his blog you’ll have read that Yaro drives a little Suzuki Swift and lives in a modest (but nice) home.

What I love about Yaro is that he’s proud of paying cash for his nice little car and house.  He didn’t feel the need to go and lease a Porsche and take out a big mortgage on a mansion.

I have no doubt that one day Yaro will be able to buy whatever his heart desires, but for now he is a great example which all of you bloggers should be following.

Get your Ferrari pictures from Google images, not from the overpriced debt-ridden one in your driveway!

If you’re happy to work a full week and make a nice income, then you probably don’t need to worry about outsourcing.  There’s nothing wrong with that, if you can work from home for six hours a day and make a decent income, more power to you.

But if you want to make serious money, and/or you want to work just a few hours a week, then outsourcing is an absolute must.

Before the term ‘outsourcing’ became a buzz word, I had long been a master of the art of delegation.  I would surround myself with good staff, and I knew I could trust them to complete all the jobs that I didn’t require my own expertise.

In today’s globalised world, it’s no longer necessary to have your staff in your own office, or even your own country for that matter.  I do still keep a small staff within my own office, as there are some things that I simply don’t trust being managed by anyone else, but for the rest of it I outsource.

I have wholeheartedly embraced outsourcing, and I think it’s a beautiful thing.  For me, it works like this:

I do – The big things, the ones that no one else can do.

My staff do – The important things which I could only trust them to do.

My outsourced people do – The boring tedious work, the stuff that would suck the life out of my own staff.

But my buddies who get the outsourced work, they love it.  They are making very little money in our terms, but great money when compared to their compatriots.

What’s my secret to making sure they love it?

Well, I make sure they feel like part of the team, even though they are not.  I include them in a monthly email which only they receive.  They think it’s a company-wide email, but it’s not, it’s just written to make them feel special.

I also have them believe that the head of the company is someone else.  Say what?  Well, I don’t want to travel to see them once or twice a year, so instead I have one of my staff turn up to see them every once in a while.  It saves me a lot of time, and makes my outsourced people feel special.

And the final trick…  The company they think they work for is not actually real.  I have created an entirely fake company that they think they work for.  It has a website (with my outsourced staff listed on the ‘about us’ page!) and everything else to make it appear like a large multinational.

This way it saves my main company from the embarrassment of being revieled as a user of cheap overseas labour.  If you just run a blog or some other small company it’s not a problem, but when you run a large investment company, you don’t want people to know that over 50% of your head office staff are actually working from home on the other side of the world…

But it’s not all about tricks.  I pay these people more than the going rate, and I give them generous bonuses at the end of each year.  In my money, it’s just a night out with my friends, but for them it’s a big deal.

I won’t get into the nitty gritty of outsourcing, as that’s all looked after by one of my in-house staff members who I call Tommy.  What I will do is refer you to a young guy named Tyrone Shum.

I came across Tyrone via a well known acquaintance of mine, and after buying his outsourcing course for my man Tommy, I am told it is very good.  It even taught Tommy a few things, and he’s been looking after my outsourcing for quite some time.

I tend to be dubious about a lot of these courses being sold, but after seeking an interview Tyrone did with the esteemed Yaro Starak, I am convinced that Tyrone is the real deal.

Okay, so here are my top tips for outsourcing:

1. Pay your outsourced staff well.  It will mean nothing to you, but a lot to them.
2. If you’re scared of people finding out about your outsourcing, create a fake company that your outsourced staff are to believe they are doing the work for.
3. Use a combination of yourself, your own staff, and your outsourced staff to create the ultimate working machine.
4. Carrying on from tip 3, ensure you have clear processes in place so that each level of staff (in-house and outsourced) know what their responsibilities.
5. Get yourself educated and speak to other professionals who have used outsourcing.  Outsourcing can be fantastic when done well, but when things go bad they can go VERY bad…

For me this is post number 312, give or take a few, but for this new blog it is certainly post number 1.

It feels strange writing this first post.  I’ve written for plenty of different blogs, but always under fake identities.  Hang on though, aren’t I writing under a fake identity now though?  No.  There is nothing fake about this identity, it’s just that I’m not revealing it.

So what am I going to write about over the coming months?  I’m going to rely on the great work of others, and instead of creating huge amounts of my own content, I’ll be pointing you in the direction of other peoples great content.

I’ll be concentrating on subjects such as outsourcing (a must for a scalable business), lessons you can learn from my previous successes and failures, and dissecting what other people are doing to make money online.

But the main thing I’ll be concentrating on is showing YOU how to make money online, and how you can BE an entrepreneur rather than just calling yourself one.