I collect examples of creative ways to make money for my websites, and I recently found a fun one in a great little story I read. It was written by a man who had certain survival talents and decided to demonstrate them by being dumped in the middle of a large city with no money. By that evening he had a nice hotel room and some money in his pocket. Some of the things he did deserve the warning, "Don't try this at home," but they are good examples of the possible anyhow.

As I recall (I may get a few details wrong), he first went to the drive-through windows of a few fast food restaurants to collect the change that inevitably drops on the ground as it is passed from cars to cashiers. Once he had a dollar put together he went to a store and exchanged it for four quarters. These he used to buy a newspaper from a coin-operated paper box, but he actually took all sixteen papers from it. He claims to have repaid the newspaper company in full after this experiment.

He sold the sixteen papers at full retail on the street, for a total of sixteen dollars. With that he went to a bar he already had in mind and ordered the cheapest beer. After talking to the bartender for a while he made what is commonly called a "bar bet" with him for the next beer. I don't recall the trick, but there are many you can learn from books that cover these things. I can make a nickel go through a hole in a piece of paper the size of a dime, for example, without tearing the paper. Then there are the usual card tricks that can be learned with a bit of practice.

In any case, he won his next beer and then got a few of the other people in the bar interested in his tricks. He made a ten dollar bet or two, which he naturally won. As the evening progressed he found other "targets" who were willing to bet more. By that night he had enough to pay for a nice hotel and still had $5 or so in his pocket.

More Creative Ways To Make Money

You may have heard about the man who turned a paper clip into a house a few years ago. It was a large colorful paper clip, and he traded it for an antique door knob, and that for something else, and so on, doing a little better on each trade. Within about a year or so he had traded up to a house. That was his goal, and he meant it as his home, but he certainly could sell it, making this a very creative way to make money. Here are a few more.

A friend of mine cut cows out of plywood, painted them and sold them in his front yard.

I was having trouble selling an ebook so I gave it away by email a chapter at a time, making money off the ads on the website pages where the chapters were hosted, quadrupling the income from the book.

Today I read about a pet detective that uses trained tracking hounds to locate lost pets.

We met a man in Boulder Colorado who juggled burning bowling pins and other things while riding a unicycle. He then took up a collection from the audience, which looked to be about $50 after his twenty-minute show.

I recently read about people who are getting old clothing from thrift stores for a dollar or so per item and selling them on Ebay for ten to forty times that. The key is that they use dyes, sequins and more to "dress them up" into something interesting to wear.

A brother of a friend discovered that he can sell old books by adding his own commentary or other content and converting them into Kindle downloads. He chooses books that no longer have a copyright, and sells them cheap (he gets a share of each sale). Kindle is an ebook reader created by Amazon, and anyone can become an author or publisher for free.

There are dozens more creative ways to make money that I could list off the top of my head. Then there are all the ones I haven't heard of yet. Why not pick one out or invent your own and start having fun making money?