KEY POINTS:
Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has cashed in big time with this year's e-commerce must-read, The Long Tail, which is a kind of self-help guide book for wannabe internet entrepreneurs.
The book's hypothesis isn't that startling; it simply notes that outside mainstream e-tailing there is a huge market
for niche products that sit in the tailing-off (but still substantial) end of the demand curve.
If Anderson can make a bomb flogging a book like this, I decided I'd go one better and come up with five tips for making money on the internet.
1. Become a spam baron
Judging by the state of my inbox, everyone else seems to be marketing via junk email, so why not. It must be lucrative. The great thing about email is it's cheap to send, so a minuscule take-up rate off those Viagra ads is all you'll need to make your new online pharmacy business viable.
This, of course, is bad news for internet service providers (ISPs) and their customers, as ihug's over-taxed email servers demonstrated in the past fortnight when they ground to a halt under an unexpected influx of spam.
Didn't Microsoft's Bill Gates promise to solve this problem a couple of years ago?
As the world's richest man, Gates should have known better than to underestimate the power of market economics. The business model obviously works, otherwise the spammers wouldn't keep spamming.
2. Get someone else to spam for you
Not convinced spam baroning is for you? Try getting others to do the actual spamming for you. This strategy is called viral marketing. You make a cute, funny or rude advertisement, send it to everyone in your address book, and hope they do the same.
It worked for the founders of 42 Below. The liquor company became famous for its amusing virals, a couple of which must have made it to the inbox of some Bacardi executive who couldn't resist buying the company.
3. Send spam, but call it something else
The country's largest ISP, Telecom's Xtra, last month celebrated its 10th birthday by - amongst other things - generating a whole heap of its own spam.
Customers were invited to sign up for an email game it called Pass the Parcel. Every few hours during the course of the game, registrants received a Pass the Parcel email with a link to a website which told them they hadn't won a prize this time, better luck next time.
I signed up and have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the thrill of not winning one of the hundreds of spot prizes.
I'm sure I wasn't alone - the reality is people love receiving "call-to-action" emails. That's why Blackberries have been such a success. It's not that the wheels of commerce would grind to a halt if an army of business people couldn't reply to email immediately from the airport. It's because we've become addicted to staying in the loop, even if that loop is just a treadmill of spam.
If the Pass the Parcel concept of lottery-by-spam takes off, our already overworked ISP mail servers are in for another pounding.
Imagine the possibilities: "Click through to our website, where every 100th visitor wins a Russian bride for free!"
4. Mine the internet's long tail
I've mentioned this already: Find a niche for some obscure product and with little more than a slick website the world becomes your market.
Stuck for a product niche? How about books on making money off the long tail? Fake Rolexes for impotent Nigerians? Or silver bullets, engraved with the words "die spammer"?
5. Patent a flying robot or a hologram
Another stunt that Xtra pulled to mark its 10th birthday was to poll the nation's 10-year-olds, who it scarily dubbed: "Generation Xtra, who've never known life without the internet".
The survey revealed those born in 1996 believe flying robots and holograms will be amongst the technologies that help us communicate with each other in future.
This is a savvy demographic - 57 per cent of them told the pollsters they use the internet as their main source of homework information, compared with only 4 per cent who rely on text books - so we should take their prophecies seriously.
The survey didn't ask this young demographic for its predictions on the fate of spam.
If it had I'm sure they would have said that we'll continue to have plenty of spam in the future, only it will be spam of much better quality than it is today.
