Method #3

Online gaming.

Yes. You read that right. I have a section on how to make money from online gaming.

Online gaming can be one of the most profitable ways to make money online - and fun - but is also one of the most volatile.

One way you can go about making money online is by picking a game you like and do some research to see if there is much in the way of tournaments for that game and kick butt at those tournaments. Online gaming tournaments are so popular in some places, that they ( called E-Sports ) have actually become the most popular spectator sports in the region. The most notable of these is South Korea and Starcraft: Brood War which has evolved into Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. But other up and coming ones include League of Legends and DOTA 2. In the USA two of the most popular games for people to play professionally are the Madden Series and Call of Duty.

The methods above have the potential to earn a person hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but the one caveat is that, like sports most Americans are familiar with - such as Football, Basket Ball, Baseball, etc - competition for one of those high paying spots is cut throat and will require hours upon hours upon hours of practicing ... and a really patient girl friend! But at least you will be having fun!

Becoming a force to be reckoned with in a single game is one way to make money, but the way I have made most of my money is actually from selling online items for games such as Diablo III and World of Warcraft.

(I'm going to give a VERY abbreviated version of this here, but if you would like to know more, leave a message in the comment section for what you would like me to elaborate on and I would be more than happy to)

My most recent jackpot was through the game Diablo III. This game is almost a gift to anyone that wants to make some insanely easy money since there is actually a component of it - called the "Auction House" - that streamlines the sale of online items, into money that gets deposited directly into your paypal account.

When the game first came out, the Auction House was not ready yet, so what I did - along with other like minded folks - was find as much in-game gold and rare items as possible and waited for the auction house to go online. When it did, items could sell for as much as $250 and gold sold for $1/100k gold. To put that into perspective, a well-geared character could earn as much as 300k gold/hour. "Oh that's only 3/hr. I could make that doing XY and Z." Think again my friend.

But that's where it gets sticky. While playing the game by hand and making $3/hr isn't the worst deal in the world but there are programs often referred to as "Bots" that essentially play the game for you, slaying the monsters of Hell, picking up gold and collecting rare loot. Long story short, I invested $1500 into a powerful gaming computer and made:

300k gold/hr

Bots don't get tired so they ran 24/7

It took Blizzard ( the company that created diablo 3 ) about a month to get the auction house online, so that was a month of me hoarding gold and items:

(300k g/hr) * (24hrs) * (28 days ) = 201,600k gold 

( $1/100k gold ) = $201,600 from selling online items... No joke. Unfortunately I didn't get to keep the full amount since Blizzard takes 15% of sales and PayPal takes another 15% and then of the remaining 70% I had to pay some hefty taxes. At the end of the day I had a little over $80k - which all went to school loans.

One final tip is that depending on the computer you use, you can run multiple copies of the game at once, after the peak of selling gold, I got to a maximum of 8 characters collecting gold/items for me at once.

The downside with making money by capitalizing on games release/demand is that profits drop off sharply at some point. As of now, I think the price of gold is 10 million gold/25 cents and because having a computer program play for you is against the Terms of Service set forth by Blizzard, if they catch you "cheating" in this way, they could ban your account - which simply means that you would have to pay $60 for another game serial key and build the character from scratch. Also, you have to keep an eye on the video game market to see which games are coming out soon and which ones carry the heaviest demand - Diablo III was/is the best selling PC game of all time.

If you don't believe me, do a simple google search to confirm everything that was said here and I welcome anyone to post opposing views in the comments section.

Rating:

When game first came out: 10/10.

Now: 3/10 for Diablo III and 4.5/10 for World of Warcraft.