You know how it is–get one interesting semi-spam email, check out the link, and they want your email address before they’ll let you see anything. So you give ’em an address and all of a sudden you’re getting all kinds of similar semi-spam email.

I long ago created a special mailbox to have that stuff sent to, with a fake name. So far, that’s kept the “make money on the internet” stuff separated from the mail I really want to read.

Some of those sales letters are pretty darn persuasive. I remain a skeptic, and I’m definitely not going to shell out the kind of money these people all seem to want. (Funny how the price points are almost all identical, huh?) So what I generally do is look at the sales page (most of which look nearly identical) and save the email that sent me there in a special mailbox in Eudora. I go back and re-visit the site a couple days later to see if it still has any appeal.

You know what? That stuff doesn’t look nearly so enticing the second time around.

Oh, I’ve downloaded a few things and I’ve filled up a couple notebooks with printouts of this, that, and the other, and some of it has been helpful. The really helpful links, I think, are not to sales pages but to the various blogs run by the people who are peddling this stuff. Those are often worth reading not so much for what the salespeople write but for the comments they get. I know that most of those blogs are moderated, so I bet it’d be an eye-opener to see the comments that don’t get approved for public consumption.

Have I found the way to make a steady income yet? No. I do have a collection of e-commerce bookmarks, an AdSense account, an Amazon Affiliate account and a ClickBank account. That and about $3 will get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks if my son’s not buying.

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