The first method to get rich quick is not very quick and is taking a lot of hard work. Sure, it’s still faster than buying stocks all your life and getting rich at 65. But I know a lot of people will not like the few years hard work it involves.

The second way to riches can be faster. The work involved can be much less.

The Summary

Find just one big deal (millions in size) where you can participate – either as a side in the deal or as an agent. Close the deal and make few millions. Then all you need to do is to manage the money so you don’t waste it.

What Does It Take

A lot of luck, a good nose for deals, being blunt, tenacious and sometimes impudent.

You may never find the right deal. Most people don’t. The good news is they don’t try at all. So the success ratio within these who try is not that bad.

The Examples

Such deals exist in every business. The first thing that probably comes to your mind is real estate. Find a good big property for $100M (for example a Mall) in a foreign country, find investors, connect and get few millions commission. You can do this with infrastructure projects, energy projects, software, food… everything. This is the agent’s way. It’s much easier said than done, but these opportunities do exist. Especially with the help of online tools like LinkedIn, Alibaba and more. Remember, most people don’t believe it is possible and don’t look for deals, that’s why they never make them.

The other way is to be a part of the deal. I bet the most popular product or service in your business is not much better than what you or your company does. It’s all a question of getting recommended on the right places. So if you produce something, find someone who is known well enough and make a joint venture deal to be recommended by them. Then the sales will start rolling in. For example if you sell software, it’s enough to be recommended on TechCrunch to make loads of cache. If you sell anything else, get recommended by Time magazine and you are done. Well, maybe not exactly but you got the idea.

The Downside

There are no guarantees. There are no guarantees for the problem solver either, but if he plays his card right, he can be almost sure in his success. Unlike that, the opportunity seeker may never find the right deal or make the right connections. Some people simply are born for that while most of us are not.

How To Start

Don’t random seek for opportunities that you know nothing about. Start by thinking for deals in your niche. What can you do that is good enough to be recommended by someone big enough? Can you establish a relationship with them? If you prefer the agent’s way, what protects your part in the deal? If you can answer these questions, you will be one step closer to making it.

If you are not familiar with the concept of growing assets, I strongly recommend you to read Passive Investing vs Growing Assets first.

The problem with growing assets by outsourcing is that you need money. If your income is too low you probably won’t be able to afford outsourcing your projects or it won’t be economically efficient for you.

Photo by NoahA at Flickr

For this reason you could be interested to learn about opportunities for growing your assets and income without big startup capital. There are some good ways to do it, so let’s talk about them.

Joint Ventures

How often have you had a good business idea but did not execute it because you can do only part of the work yourself? Some people can write great books but when it comes to promotion they have to go through the route of traditional publishing (that’s why many good books never see light). Others can write great software but don’t know how to sell it, that’s why they choose to work for someone else and write mediocre programs. Maybe you are good in selling and have connections in specific niches, but all the products you can find are overpriced or crap.

One solution to such problems is to have capital and pay someone else to do the job you can’t do yourself. The other solution is to form a join venture with someone who can do the other part of the work, but can’t or don’t want to do yours.

You can see examples of many joint ventures online. Probably many of the blogs you read participate in joint ventures. They promote products and service in exchange for % of the sales or shares in the project. That’s the simplest form of online joint venture.

If you want to learn more about how to do successful joint ventures, subscribe to this blog. There will be further guides on the topic soon.

Angel Funds

In the software industry getting angel funding is a popular way to grow a company with nothing but ideas and some very initial implementation. While finding angel investors for an IT startup is an industry standard and much easier, there is no reason for you to avoid it even if you are not in the IT field. In such case you will need to be more creative when searching for angels who would be interested to invest in your venture.

The assets that you grow with angel’s money will not be entirely yours of course – usually angels sign against 10% to 50% ownership of the startup company or product.

Don’t think that this ioption is available for large projects only. If you are in the IT, check Paul Graham’s Y Combinator for example. Each year they fund small web startup, so if you have an idea, you can be the next.

Another great place to look for angel funding of your business projects in any field is Go Big Network.

Starting Business With Friends

Starting a business with friends is not a free way to grow assets, but it can be “almost” free depending on the number of friends enrolled in it and on everyone’s contribution. Often some of the founders participate with money, others with buildings or machines and some only with hard work, ideas and connections. Making a business with friends is just like a join venture, but in it you know the people you work with.

The big downside is that business and friendship sometimes mess badly and at the end you could lose both the business and the friends. There is no free lunch, you know.

Do It All Yourself

What most people try for growing a business or creating other long term asset is to do everything themselves. If you want to grow a fast food business, that makes no sense – you can’t cook, sell and take care for the supply entirely yourself. But if you are trying to create an asset that brings automated passive income, that may justify the hard work. Of course it’s better and faster if you can afford outsourcing part of the work, but if you can’t afford it you can still grow the asset for free. This is the way many intellectual products like books, innovations, software and web based projects are created.

Next time when you feel depressed about your financial situation, think what you can do to improve it. Isn’t it better to try to grow some assets than complaining and wondering how to cut your food expenses?

Most fellow bloggers will tell you there is no chance to get rich quick, but as usual I beg to differ. You can get rich quick. In the next few weeks or months I’ll share at least seven ways to do it. Will you be able to? It depends. You will not like some of the ways I suggest. I don’t like some too. For others you simply won’t be qualified, just like me. But still, that will be seven opportunities to become seriously rich in short time for you to pick.

So, how rich and how quick are we talking about? Everyone has their own opinion what is rich and what is quick, but let’s say I mean you can become richer than the top of the middle class and do it in less than 5 years. Sounds good? First option comes today:

The Summary

If you want to become rich quick, find the hardest problem you can find and solve it. Make sure it’s a problem that enough people have. You are likely to get rich in few months to few years at most.

What Does It Take

I told you – you are not going to like some of the options. Maybe you won’t like this one. It takes a lot of creativity, learning, hard work, courage, talent and some luck.

Finding the right problem to solve may be equally hard to solving it. Not that there are not enough problems out there, but most people focus on the wrong one. However we are lucky to live in the age of the internet – there are many online tools, forums and blogs where you can look to find what troubles most people.

The Examples

If you need real life examples, just look around you. Find a way to cure cancer and you’ll be rich. Find a way to solve traffic jams and you’ll be rich. Make a search engine that doesn’t suck and you’ll be rich. If you don’t believe, look at Google. They are rich because they made a search engine which sucked less than the others. Make one that sucks less than Google and you will get rich quick.

So in the real world you don’t need to find a completely new problem. You can take a solved one, just solve it better. Your solution doesn’t even need to be brilliant – it’s enough if it sucks less than the existing solutions.

The Downside

The problem with this option is that you may work hard for months and end up nowhere. There are several risks that you are taking:

• To pick a wrong problem
• To be unable to solve it no matter how hard you try
• Someone else could solve it better at the same time or even earlier than you

These are serious risks, but if you really work hard and use your brain, the odds for success are much better than the odds for winning the lottery.

How To Start

One of the best ways to go ahead is to start a startup. It doesn’t need to be IT, but the IT field offers good opportunities which don’t require big startup capital.

What’s the difference between people who earn significant income on the Web and the others who only wish so? Usually the first kind of people look at their websites as business projects while the second blog and hope to make money. If you want to be one of the first and earn alternative income online, look at your web based projects as a real business – it’s not different than running a brick and mortar grocery shop.

Photo by nicolasnova at Flickr

And business is something you can buy or sell. This is a post of the series about domain investing. If you are not familiar with the concepts, first learn how to profit from domains and websites and then how to find good domain deals. In this post I’ll share what I know about making real deals with websites.

Buying a Domain or Website – Beware Of Tricks

So, you have chosen a domain or site and you are going to buy. There are few possible tricks that dishonest sellers may try to use to cheat you. To protect your funds, act as follows:

• Always use escrow service. It’s better to pay few bucks to a company like Escrow but be sure that your money will be sent only after you receive all the login details and files for the web business that you are buying.
• Double check traffic details and links. Most website sellers will provide you screenshots from their traffic stats program to prove the traffic of the domain. Always keep in mind that faking a screenshot is possible and even easy for advanced users of programs like Photoshop. Check the traffic yourself: get a rough idea by looking at the Alexa.com and Compete.com ranks of the domain. Require a screenshot showing what keywords bring search engine traffic to the site – unless you are buying a website with a business model relying on PPC, affiliates or subscribers, you’d want at least 30% – 40% of the traffic to the domain to come from the search engines. Verifying this traffic is easy once you obtain the keyword stats – use Rank Checker to verify how the site ranks and the keyword tool to ensure that there is real demand for those key phrases. Some sellers are very professional in faking the website traffic, so this step is really vital.
• Check the domain with the Web Archive. You don’t want to buy a domain which has been used for something illegal in the past. Check with the Web Archive to ensure this domain has not been used to run an online scam, ponzi scheme or illegal adult content.
• Carefully examine the business model. When buying you must clearly understand how the domain makes money. Make sure that it doesn’t require you to do something that you can’t or don’t want to do. For example buying a website offering flash design services will be a bad deal if you are not a flash designer yourself (unless you can manage someone who is and offers prices that allow you make profits).

Buying a Domain or Website – Get a Better Price

People who have decided to sell their domains or websites have good reasons to do it. Usually they badly need the money or have totally lost interest in the business. Some of them want to sell because they lack the time due to a day job or other more important projects. Others sell because they are domain traders – they have bough the site earlier and now are trying to flip it for profit.

The common thing for all is they want to sell sooner rather than later. Which means if you offer a quick deal, you may gain some discount of the price. Don’t be shy to ask – I am sure you won’t refuse to save 10%.

Buying a Website – Closing The Deal

The seller is not the only one who want the deal to be closed sooner. You also must act quickly – don’t forget there might be other buyers. If you have found a really good web based business it would be a deal for other people too. If you procrastinate too much someone else may offer a better deal and immediate payment.

Here are few ideas which will help you make sure that exactly you and not someone else will buy the site:

• Offer BIN price. This contradicts a bit with the suggestion to ask for a discount, but sometimes it’s far more important to buy the site than to miss it trying to save few bucks. If you have found a really good deal and there is an auction (like on sitepoint.com), just go ahead and offer the BIN. There are some real treasure domains and if you don’t offer BIN, someone else will do it.
• Offer quick payment. Everyone who sells wants to see the money quickly. Offer fast payment by escrow.com or similar service. Your primary goal is to push the seller close the auction if there is one, remove the advertising and stop considering other buyers.
• Push the seller to act. Some sellers just aren’t sure if they really want to sell and if the price is good enough. You may need to push them act by sending emails or making phone calls. Let them understand they have to act quickly or you may re-decide. Maybe you are not in a hurry to spend your money, but don’t show this to the seller. Letting things drag for long usually leads nowhere.

How To Quickly Raise the Price of a Domain or Website

One way to make good profits from a domain is to buy one, do some work to improve it and flip it. This works better than trying to create new sites and sell them, because when working on an existing domain with traffic, your efforts can leverage the work invested so far by the previous owner.

When buying a web business with the idea to raise its price and flip it, you must know what exactly are you going to improve. Here are the possible aspects to work on:

• Ranking for specific keywords. You can improve the search engine ranks of the domain by doing some on-page SEO and bringing some inbound links. It’s much easier to improve the rankings of an established domain that already receives some search engine love. You can literally double the price of the site if you rank a page or two for some competitive search phrases.
• Increase the Google PR. This works best if you buy a website whose homepage has Google PR or 1, 2 or 3 because raising with one level on the low end of the scale is not very hard. While it’s almost impossible to raise a PR 7 site to PR 8 unless it’s already “almost PR 8″. You can increase the PR by bringing in few high quality or few hundred low quality inbound links. The sale price of the site however can increase a lot just because of the improved Google PR.
• Sell some ads. If you have bought a content site, try to sell some more ads. Probably you can run a promotional campaigns or something like that. The key is that the selling price of a domain depends a lot on its monthly revenue. If you can sell more ads for say next 3 months, you will be able to show and prove an increased revenue to potential buyers. You can get much better price for the site this way.
• Improve website’s revenue. Same as above – just work on increasing the website income even if this means that you have to do some over monetization for a while. Send a promo newsletter to the subscribers if there are any, add new advertising networks, add affiliate offers etc. If the site is selling something, run a promotion to sell more for a couple of months. This will increase the average monthly profit from the website, will show ascending trend of income and will gain you much better price when flipping.
• Improve the conversion. If you have bought a website which makes income from selling product or service, try to increase the conversion. Each percentage increased conversion equals the same percentage increased revenue and selling price.

Use the tactics above without cheating. Your efforts should demonstrate real raise in the site’s value. If you want to be a successful website flipper, be sure that you are really selling something which is better than what you have bought.

Selling a Domain or Website – Get The Best Price

If you follow the advice in the previous point, you should be able to get a good price. When making the deal, use the standard deal tactics for getting good price – point out the advantages, why your site is good, what extras does the buyer receive and make sure it’s clear that they have to act fast.

To increase your chances to get a good price, open auctions on 2-3 places – like Sitepoint and Sedo for example. Answer properly to inquiries and make sure to provide all the proofs you are asked for.

Selling a Domain or Website – Closing The Deal

When selling a website or domain, your closing the deal strategy can be similar to the one you use for buying. However you may slow down the rush a little bit. If your domain is really good, you will find buyers at a good price. So don’t let other experienced flippers rush to you sell right now. Selling a business is not like trying to sell your service or product to someone. The demand for good working domains is higher than the supply, so you can afford being picky.

When selling, make sure to either use an escrow service, or get the payment in advance (the latter is unlikely to happen). Besides the payment, you don’t have much more things to worry about.

Trading and flipping websites is often much more profitable than trying to make money by blogging or affiliate marketing. Of course it involves risk, but in my opinion the risk is much more reasonable than the risk in Forex trading and the rewards can be much higher.

Enough geeks, it’s time to invite a military guy for a blitz interview. Do you expect a disciplined and dry officer? Don’t. Patrick from Cash Money Life is very friendly fellow and has a glib tongue. His blog offers a mix of personal finance and personal development topics which makes it quite useful even for those who don’t know what a 401K plan means (i.e. those like me).

So, let’s ask Patrick a few questions:

SI: What’s the importance of the education in your life and finances? Would you be doing better or worse if you hadn’t a degree – and is getting a degree worth it?

Patrick: I believe education is one of the most important things anyone can do to improve their situation in life – be it financial situation, career situation, or simply the way they enjoy life. I don’ think the education necessarily has to be a college degree either. There are hundreds of ways to learn without getting a degree. Learning can be as easy as reading a blog or watching an instructional video, or it could be more involved, like going through a doctorate course.

Is a degree worth it? Yes, for me it was. I started my career as an enlisted member of the USAF where I repaired aircraft. I learned a lot in that job, but there was only so far that I could advance without a degree. Fortunately, I was able to get the USAF to pay for my degree, and I took full advantage of that opportunity. I don’t, however, believe a degree is necessary for everyone. I believe people should follow their dreams and base their career decisions on what they want to do. If that means obtaining a degree, then by all means, go for it.

SI Note: Fully agree here, go study if you feel like you want to have a degree or want to work in a field that requires it. Don’t do it only because everyone else does.

SI: How do you feel about taking significant financial risks? Would you like to risk, say 50% of your net worth for the chance to become rich in an year and never have to worry about money again? Or would you prefer to slowly build your wealth and avoid risks?

Patrick: I’m of the mindset that slow and steady wins the race. I will take risk if it is something I believe in, but I’m not willing to risk everything. I’m comfortable where I am financially, and I am in no rush to become “rich.”

SI Note: Well for someone whose net worth is negative, I guess this would be out of question *grin*. But when people are in comfortable situation, it becomes much harder to take risks. It really depends on one’s goals – I would advise everyone who is not happy with his life to be more courageous about taking risks.

SI: Why do you want to be a millionaire?. And what are you going to do after you become one?

Patrick: Ha! This contradicts the last question, doesn’t it? Well, actually, I don’t think it does. Becoming a millionaire is not the end all be all financial goal for me. Becoming a millionaire is more like a road sign on the journey. It is a round number that has a certain aura to it and it certainly lets me know I am moving in the right direction. My goal in becoming a millionaire, isn’t so much about having the word millionaire next to my name, but rather the opportunities that I believe I could have with such a high net worth. I believe it would allow me to have more freedom when making financial decisions, especially those related to employment. I like my job, but no so much that I want to give the prime years of my life to someone else.

SI Note: Since most people will have to work most of their life, all I have to say is – don’t look at the job like giving your time to someone else. Look at it as working on your self development. You may just notice a big chance. Other than that I agree with Patrick that a million buck could give you a lot of freedom.

If you have just few minutes, I recommend you to read Patrick’s article Is A Job Worth Your Life? where you’ll be reminded that money is not everything. And of course it’s best if you subscribe to Cash Money Life by RSS or email.

What’s the best way to earn alternative income? The simple answer is that it is different for different people – but I know this answer doesn’t help you much. A better answer is that the best way to earn alternative income is through doing something that you enjoy.

Photo by ralphbijker at Flickr

A lot of people seem to enjoy playing with their digital cameras and some are pretty good in doing that – and I want to share few ways to earn income while doing it. Making illustrations usually requires more effort and some talent but making money from them is similar to the other two, so I will talk about illustrations as well.

Alternative Income From Selling Photos

If you enjoy taking pictures this can be a great source of alternative income for you. If you are able to make high quality digital photos, you can try to sell them online. Doing so might be easier than you think.

The straightforward way to do it is to sign up in websites which sell royalty free photos. Usually they will provide you with a platform to upload your photos and will put them in the front of thousands customers. In exchange you have to share the profits from the photos you sold.For example on 123 Royalty Free you will receive 50% of the sale price of each of your photos. The price of the photos is defined from the site and you cannot set yours. The prices are also quite low (I buy web-sized photos for my web projects for $1 – $2. Photos with print quality are more expensive). But note that each photo can be sold many times and in many sizes. So if you want to make $1,000 this doesn’t mean you should sell 1000 different photos. You can make that much with just one picture. The “catch” is that your photo must be good enough to make people buy it.

Other way to profit from making photographs is to freelance (more about freelancing). Most freelance marketplaces have some photography related options but Guru has a special section about photography and videography with many active projects.

You can also set up your own store for selling your photos. The advantage is that you don’t need to share your profits with anyone. You can set your own prices and define high prices for photos that will be sold only once. The problems with this method to earn alternative income from photos are mostly two:

• Development of your photo store may cost you a lot of money or at least time.
• It’s harder to get found by customers compared to submitting photos in 123 Royalty Free and similar sites. You have to work hard on search engine optimization and promotion in order to get buyers.

One great way to attract buyers for your own photo store is by publishing free images on Flickr. Flickr lets your photos be noticed by a lot of people who look for free pictures for their blog posts for example. Many of these people are also interested in buying, so they can go to your photo store following your Flickr profile link.

And one hint: Don’t spend thousands on expensive photography equipment. A decent middle class camera is OK for the beginning. Better spend your money to travel and visit places where you can make good photographs. Everyone can make photos with a good camera – this is not what makes the good photographer.

Alternative Income From Selling Videos

Selling videos is a bit harder. People don’t usually look for videos for their websites in the same way they look for images. Most people need custom videos. These who want a video to illustrate a blog post may not need custom ones, but then they would go and link videos for free from YouTube.

You can try your luck at CreateSpace where you can sell a lot more than videos. But as you will see there are special requirements and you have less freedom and probably lesser market than with selling photos.

Of course you always have the freelancing option. Again on Guru there is a special section for videography projects. Many other freelance hubs also have video recording and video editing work.

The smarter way to earn from videos is indirect. As much as YouTube hurts you by offering millions of videos for free, it also helps you because you can put some of your videos in the front of million eyes. By recording a good video you can advertise a product or service – just have a link in the description or display your website address in the beginning and in the end of the video. Hint: don’t make your video look like an advertising itself – only really interesting, sexy, funny or really useful videos “make it” on YouTube.

Alternative Income From Selling Illustrations

If you are good in drawing, you have the chance to make more money than the photo/video fellows. No offense to photographers, but making a quality illustration is harder than making a quality photo. That’s why there are much less people who try to sell great drawings online than those who sell great photos – therefore you have less competition and can earn more.

There are many sites where you can sell your art – for example Yessy. If you are good in making clipart images, Crafty Clipart is one site where you can sell them and get 50% of the profits. The business model is the same like the first one in photos section.

If you want to work on freelance drawing projects, there is probably more work for you – not only Guru, but also Elance and other big freelance hubs have special sections about illustrations and design.

For selling on your own site or making indirect profits you can again use Flickr with quite good results – there are much less illustrations available there than photos. So the chances your good illustrations to be noticed and then the user to land on your site or blog are much better.

Since this short article can’t cover all the details about earning income from photos, videos and drawings, I would recommend you to search for more information. Certainly each of these methods is good to earn alternative income – many people even make living by selling photos, videos and/or illustrations.

Today I had the modest and wise guy who runs My Two Dollars blog to answer a bunch of questions. One of the questions is intentionally very dumb and there is no prize for guessing which one is it. David’s blog is quite balanced and written with a lot of reason so I tried to check if he is as reasonable in his real life.

So, let’s hear David speaking:

SI: Your blog often discusses saving money. Does it work well for you so far? Don’t you regret sometimes for all the things you are not buying because of saving for the future?

David: Yes, we try to save as much as possible while still having a life. I never regret not buying something because I am saving, as they are just things. Retirement and a house are the two things I save for; nothing else is that important. Why waste good money on a bunch of stuff I won’t want in a year or two just for the instant gratification? For us, it doesn’t make sense. We spend our money on experiences, not just filler for our home.

SI Note: Spending on experiences is a topic I plan to discuss some day too. What I can say in very short is that I don’t remember most of the expensive things I have bought (if any at all), but I do remember all the trips and other great experiences we have had. So what looks more “real” – experiences or things?

SI: What’s the smartest financial decisions that you ever made?

David: Paying off my credit card debt. I got into debt in college buying music, gadgets, etc., thinking I would pay them all off when I graduated and got a real job. No one bothered telling me that my first job would not pay much, and I would then have expenses I hadn’t thought of – housing, car, gas, insurance, food, etc. It took forever and a day to pay them off once I started doing it, but to this day I would not trade that decision for anything.

SI Note: I’ve never had a credit card debt, so I have missed to make such a smart move. But seems most Americans do have credit card debt, so it’s the time to ask: Did you pay yours? Or said in other way: Don’t ask what your credit card can do for you. Ask what you can do for your credit card *grin*

How to get rich quick?

David: You don’t, unless you win the lottery. Everything else anyone would do “get rich” takes work, whether it is working at a career and saving your money or starting a company and getting bought out for millions years later. There really is no such thing as getting rich quick, and honestly, I am not sure I would want to even if I could. The money would not be rewarding at all and would not make you a happier person in the least, without having to work for it.

SI Note: So here is one more blogger who seems to say that those $97 “get rich quick” e-books don’t work. Are you still buying any?

If you want to read more from David, make sure to subscribe via RSS or email. And pay special attention to this article.

I have a lot of ideas, therefore I will be rich.

Heard that before? I know many people who think this way. Not many of them are rich – most even have a lot of financial problems. There must be something wrong with that point of view then. But aren’t ideas the most valuable thing in the world, aren’t ideas what drives the progress, technology and innovation? I think yes, in most cases good ideas power the progress. But only some ideas do it, while most go into the trash can.

Photo by Felipe Morin at Flickr

Ideas are cheap

I can generate at least ten promising business ideas per month and maybe another ten ideas how to improve the world or our everyday life (it takes a while to turn these into business ideas). I know people who can generate a lot more ideas than that. I am sure you can also come up with that many or even more ideas – most people who try, can do it. If there are only a million people in the world who can generate ideas with such speed, that means ten million business ideas per month.

It’s wrong to think that ideas are something too valuable. They are cheap. Every intellectual product that can be generated in such quantities is cheap. And it is easy to see the reason behind this – most ideas don’t produce real value, because they never get implemented. You may have the greatest idea in the word but if you don’t implement it, it probably costs $0.02.

So, implementation is what creates the value of the ideas.

How To Appraise Ideas

If you want to invest in ideas, you must tell the good ones from the bad ones. You need to appraise the value of the ideas – and more important, the value of their future implementation. It’s easy to think that an idea is great if you look only at the final outcome that it could produce some day. But there is very little use of such appraisal if you don’t take in mind its implementation.

Implementation simply means how you can turn the idea into something real.

The good ideas are the ideas that can be implemented with reasonable resources and that you know how to implement. You may not need to know all the technical details of the idea’s implementation, but you must know well who can take care for them and how much resources is it going to take.

So, let’s say for example you have the idea to create a flying car. When considering the final outcome, it seems the idea is quite valuable. A flying car must interest a lot of people and probably will sell well. Of course, “probably” is not the best thing to rely on, but at this very early stage of brainstorming it is ok to rely on your guesswork. The idea of a flying car would be great if you could implement it. Maybe you are not an engineer and cannot invent it yourself. Do you know who could do it, how much is it going to cost and how much time is it going to take? Are you sure there is not someone else who is working on the same idea and could implement it faster than you?

The real value of the idea is an equation. On the left side you have the wealth/profits that the idea can generate. On the right side you have the costs of it’s implementation. The more you have at left, the better the idea is.

But even this appraisal is way too simple. Because you need also to consider the probability to turn the business idea into action and to do it better and faster than the competition. So finally the very simplified equation looks like this:

Value = (Possible profit value * Probability to be implemented) – Costs of implementation

If you play with few numbers in the above equation, you will see that the probability factor plays much bigger role in estimating the idea value rather than the costs of implementation.

Let’s get for example a software project that could bring you a million dollars in sales. If you hire a cheap team to develop it, the chances for successful idea implementation yet on the development stage are quite poor. This means that no matter how great the idea is, you will probably not see any profits. On the other hand, hiring a more experienced and talented team will cost you more, but will increase the chances of success and you may actually see the profits.

However, if you simply can not afford to hire the expensive team, then you have only the first option. Which makes the idea much less valuable. If exactly the same idea was owned by someone who could afford hiring a good team, it would have bigger value.

How To Implement Ideas

Since implementation of ideas is so valuable, you must work much harder on your skills for implementing ideas rather than on the skill for generating ideas.

What does it actually take to implement an idea? Said simply, it requires action. When you appraise an idea and feel it could turn into something real, just start action as soon as possible. The first action could be as simple as creating a word document which actually describes the idea. Once you write it down and save the file, you are one step further to actually doing something.

Next good steps are writing a business plan and writing an action plan. An action plan is simply a list of future actions and rough timelines showing when you are going to take them. The action plan will help you get organized and disciplined and actually implement the idea.

Selling Ideas

Unfortunately we cannot afford implementing all the valuable ideas we have. I know for sure that I cannot do it – because I don’t have neither the money nor the time to do it. So if I have ten good ideas, all of them are valuable, and I can implement each of them individually, I still cannot implement them all. This is sad, because we have to let some good ideas die.

One way to solve this problem is to actually try to sell your ideas. Selling an idea in its very first stage makes no sense at all – because if someone wants to buy your idea, they would need first to hear it.

The ideas can be sold at a later stage – at least when there is some business plan created and hopefully even some part of the implementation started. Usually you will not be able to sell your idea in the normal way – like selling some item. Instead of that, selling an idea is done in the form of funding – think about venture capital and angel investing. What angel investors and venture capitalists do is to invest in ideas at the early stages of implementation. They will not be able to give you time, but by giving you money they will let you hire people who can take care for the implementation of your idea.

So usually you can profit from idea by starting a startup. With a promising startup you can seek early stage funding and at a later moment get bought. This is probably the shortest way to selling an idea that you don’t want or can afford to fully develop yourself.