This post is not to encourage anyone to make counterfiet money and get away with it. But rather how easy it is to make very real looking currency. Fake money is illegal and could get you in big trouble :)

Earlier today I had to make a few copies of some pictures for my family. So I fired up the machine to print them out. There was a dollar bill laying right on the desk where my printer is. Ping, I had an idea.

I've seen tutorials on how to make fake money but I wanted to test it out to see how real it actually looks and feels. The results were astonishing! And I didn't use any special tools. Here's what I did to produce the fake cash.

Materials/How To

I own a printer/copier/scanner/fax machine. So that's what I used. And you obviously need regular paper, colored ink, and the dollar bill. To copy it, I simply ran the dollar bill through my machine to print it out on a piece of paper. Then I cut it out and crinkled it up a bit to give it a more realistic look and feel.

Can you tell which one of these bills are the fake?
(click images to enlarge. Opens in a new window)

The Real From The Fake

The counterfiet money is the left dollar bill on all three images. The real one is on the right. Not only does it look real, it also feels very real!

To use this money, you'd ovbiously have to print and cut out the backside of the bill and then lightly paste it to the front using some sort of adhesive that doesn't weigh it down or seep through. Or I suppose you could just mix it in with real money when purchasing something and pray they don't see the white back on it. And for the record, I do not plan on using this or becoming a counterfieter. Nor should you!

As a webmaster, you just dream of your site being at the top of the search results for your selected keywords. A keyword that has thousands of searches each day. How awesome would that be? Some achieve it and some will achieve it. It's just very hard if the competition is thick.

The other night while I was sleeping, I had a dream/idea. What if Google ran a contest?!? I know these guys don't have far to go until they pretty much own the whole internet, so I couldn't really think of a way for the contest to benefit them. But wouldn't that be an awesome thing for them to do? Picture this: Your wittle ole website at the very first result on the SERPs for EVERY search for one day. It could be right where they put one or two sponsored results. Not on the right, but the top.

I also haven't thought of a plan for how the contest would work. There would obviously be lots of cheaters/spammers if it wasn't thought out. But Google is a smart company. They can figure it out.

If this were to happen, also think about how hosting companies would benefit. All these webmasters that would be competing in this contest would have to upgrade their hosting big time to handle the millions of unique visitors brought to their site in a day. How many servers would you need? All Google has to do is make a simple edit on their site to put you at the top. Then you make crazy amounts of money.

Most of the big guys have a blog section with recommended money makers. Why don't I have one? I don't know, but I'm going to add one :)

I really don't have that many money makers. I find it easier to focus on a few things rather than 100 things. Although I do try to think of a few more ideas here and there. The truth is, I publish articles with ways to make money online that I sometimes don't even use. That doesn't mean that they're not good ways, but I just like to keep things simple. I have a very hard time focusing and multitasking. If my brain wasn't so limited, I could be making much more than what I do currently. I'm just trying to enjoy the work I do the best I can. Plus I'm lazy.

Like a lot of people, when first starting out looking for ways to generate an online income, I came across survey sites. Wow $50/hr to complete simple surveys?! Of course I'm going to sign up as I'm a complete noob. But it turns out that a lot of them wanted a sign up fee. So I brush that off. And for a while I still didn't know if paid surveys were the real deal or not. Then I discover Fusion Cash, which is not a survey site but it's a GPT site. Although they market them as survey sites for some reason. Even though GPT sites pay you to do various things like complete offers. Only a few times on there did I complete an actual survey.

So now, I've discovered this GPT site (it's the only one I knew of). I made about $70 that first month, then I just closed down shop and forgot about it. The following month I recieved a check in the mail. Wha?! It's a check from FusionCash. Now I see that this site is real so I go back to it to begin working again. If this site is for real then obviously there must be others like it. So I find them and work on them as well. But there was a few things wrong here. 1. I wasn't making as much money as I wanted. 2. I wanted to make more. Though GPT sites are a decent way to make some extra cash, but it was more like spending money or maybe just a place to go to if you're in trouble with a couple bills that need to be paid. Now I realize that referrals is where it's at. Eventually I learn that making money is all about advertising and publishing. You'd be surprised at what makes money. Even your local news stations are money hungry. A good example of this: Have you heard about "the big switch?" Apparently, in 2009 (next year) your t.v. will not work anymore unless it's a digital t.v. Now, the whole thing is sponsored by "rights sound gallery" which is a big local electronics company exlpaining all about this big switch. Can you imagine how much they're paying our local news station for this? Probably a good amount of money, because they want YOU to come to them and buy a big expensive digital t.v. But guess what? There's going to be converter boxes that you can hook up to your non-digital television set that will work in 2009. For about the price of $30 to $40. They don't tell you that!

Okay, so at this point, I've discovered affiliate marketing and the networks with this whole referral thing. Instead of completing offers, I'll refer people! I thought it would be easier but it wasn't. The thing is, you need a website for people to come to so you can make the commissions (referral earnings). So I sucked it up and I did realize that if you want to make some good cash, then you need to suck it up and spend some money. Basically what I'm saying is, one of the best ways to make money online is to have your own website(s). But you also need to be helpful and keep traffic coming to your site to keep earnings rolling in with affiliates and Google adsense. You need to monetize your site with these things.

So how do I make money? I use affiliate networks and I'm an Adsense publisher. But there's many other ways to market these affiliates without having your own website. One example is bum marketing. Another example is PPC (you advertise somewhere like on Google and only pay when someone clicks your link).

To Sum It Up...

I mainly make money with affiliate networks, freelancing and Adsense publishing. Making money by referring is not limited to affiliate networks. There's plenty of sites that have their own affiliate(referral) programs. I'll be adding a page of recommended money makers that I use and do well with. Hopefully within the next day or two.

This article turned out longer than I had planned. Guess I should have named it my journey to make money :)

Lately, there's been a few people that have asked about getting paid to post on forums. If you're a frequent user on DP then this is most likely nothing new to you as there are forum posting jobs posted everyday on there. But the question is - Is it really worth it to spend your time doing this for cents per post? In a short answer, no, it's not really worth it. But lets talk about it for a bit in case you decide to do this in your spare time for some extra money.

Why Will They Pay Me To Post?

Getting a new forum kicked off can be quite difficult. There are many online forums where there's already dedicated members. So why would someone want to be a part of this new forum when there is practically no users, posts, or any activity for that matter? This brand new forum needs some activity to get it kicked off. The owners of these new message boards are willing to pay you to become an active member and make posts to fill up the boards so they can gain more popularity and members. There is obviously going to be some rules, so you can't just sign up and spam the boards with posts with no value. The owners ask that you post real threads and genuine replies.

So What's The Pay Like?

I believe the cheaps will pay about 2 or 3 cents per post. That's obviously a rip off. You can find lots of forum owners on DP offering posting jobs that range from 10 to 20 cents per post. 10 cents is about average but the nice guys will pay more. But like I said, there will sometimes be rules. For example: "20 cents per post but you are limited to 50 posts per day" or something along those lines.

These types of jobs do not pay very well as you can see, but they might come in handy if you have some spare time and want to make a few extra bucks. But I strongly urge you to spend your valuable time wisely and make money using other ways. There's lots! Don't depend on these small jobs.

One big problem many of us Adsense publishers have to go through is low paying clicks. You got your ads in all the right places and your click through rate is doing wonderfully, but the CPC is just killing you. A solution to this problem would be to remove low paying ads. And there's a free tool to help you do this. Like many others, when I first started with Adsense, I would just build the code, copy it, paste it on my website and wait for revenue. You don't really think about optimizing it. But this could cause you to lose out on lots of money!

Creating a Blacklist For your Website

AdsBlacklist.com is a free tool that generates a list of blacklisted advertisers who are known for low cost per click. You can indentify and block advertisers that use keyword arbitrage to steal your traffic leaving you with little to no money for the click. So these guys are stealing our traffic and we're getting practically nothing.

To use AdsBlacklist.com you first need to register obviously. Then click on "My Account" which is on the left in the site navigation. Click "Add a New Domain" and fill out the required info which would be your sites URL, title and they keywords that are used often on your site. Go on and click submit. You'll then be redirected to the main page I think. Now you want to click on "Generate Filter List" in the menu, click on your website name and drag it into the box right next to it. Make sure that you have the MFA and LCPC boxes checked before you click submit. You'll then see the list and you then copy all of the URLs.

Now go to your Google Adsense account and click "Adsense Setup". Then click on the "Competitive Ad Filter" and paste the list of URLs in there and click on "save". Google only allows 200 max.

How To See If an Ad Is Low Paying

With this tool, you can manually check to see if an ad on your site is a low cost per click. First locate an ad you want to check on by right clicking (don't left click!) the Adsense ad and clicking "properties". Copy the properties URL and paste it in notepad or something for easier viewing. Now if you look through that Google URL you can see the advertisers original landing URL. Now go back to AdsBlacklist.com and click on domain checker on the left (you may have to be logged in). Paste the URL in there and click enter. The sites status will appear and you can see if it is blacklisted. If so, go on and add it to your list in your Adsense account