£10k Experiment Rules

Well, not strictly rules, more like guidelines for myself. All experiments need guidelines to follow and this one is no different. The idea is to earn my ten grand, in my spare time, using the Internet. But what exactly does that mean?

Rule 1: The Internet must be involved somewhere in each money making process.

So it is ok for me to buy some vintage jeans at a car boot sale and sell them on ebay, but not ok for me to buy some vintage jeans at a car boot sale and sell them to a friend. I can't include anything I earn doing freelance for my old publishing contacts (even if the freelance is for a website). If I win a bid to do some freelance on elance.com however (for example), I can include those earnings.

It doesn't always have to be about buying and selling. The idea is to find ways of making money on the Internet, so that could include being paid to complete surveys, playing poker online or flipping websites.

Rule 2: All of the steps to the £10k must be possible for anyone to repeat.

This should be fairly easy to follow as I don't have any very specialised skills I will be using to make the money. Nothing I do will require the average person years of practice and study to emulate, but most things will require at least some investment of time and effort. I won't be building hugely complicated Flash-based websites or writing clever iPhone apps to sell. I don't currently know how to do these things and I don't have time to learn.

Rule 3: I will not spend any money earnt during the experiment, on anything not to do with the experiment.

This could be a tricky one. If all goes well I could have several thousand pounds sitting in a bank account in six months time and the temptation to dip into it for a new laptop or to pay the car insurance will be tough to resist. I need to try to remember that any money I earn will help me earn more (hopefully...), it will be my fund for buying things to sell, it will be my bankroll for online gambling.

Rule 4: The experiment must be done in my spare time.

My idea of the amount of spare time I have each week and my wife's idea of the amount of spare time I have each week differ greatly. However, I have come up with the figure of ten hours per week and I will do my best not to spend more time than this on the experiment. If I start spending 30 hours a week doing this, I might just as well work 30 hours overtime at my day job. The result would be essentially the same (although I might die of boredom if I did work for 30 extra hours at my current job). The idea is to find ways to make extra money that can be repeated year after year, not to devote my entire life to this to the exclusion of my family.