I made a mistake and need advice.

Hello. The mistake I made was rather simple, but is very irritating to me. A few friends and I have been working on a business called "Conarch Inc" in the game of RuneScape for quite some time now and wanted to expand into another community. Second Life looked perfect since you can buy/sell, do whatever you want and have fun. I upgraded my account to premium today only to find out I can't even buy any land. A guy offered me a 512 land plot for 6k Linden, and when I went to see how much that would cost to buy with real dollars, It came out to $22. I can't spend that kind of real money on this. It is not a real business, it is simply a group of friends that wanted to come here and do things that we couldn't do in RuneScape, like have our own offices, sell items we create, and have company vehicles.

Does anyone have any advice or could help in any way?

If you can't afford the $22, you can rent land, although you could have done that without a premium membership. But soon your rent will add up to $22. Maybe you could skip some of the movies this summer. Most of the sequels have sucked anyway. Or don't supersize for a while. Take up a collection with your friends? Cancel Netflix?

BTW, check the first page of land seach. Sort by mainland. You should be able to find a plot for 5K.

Sounds like you had a little bit of a different idea of what SL business is like. In SL you need to develop something someone else wants and market it - there isn't a lot of roleplay involved (unless you want to). No need for a company car here!

Honestly, the cost of a 512 isn't that much - think about how much your tier costs in comparison. And if you sell say... 100L a day, you make back your "investment" in 2 months.

Alternatively, if you really don't want to shell out for some land, you can get a cheap mall rental for something like 50L a week (or less!), or just list on SLX/SLB for free.

Here's an idea: as a premium you get 300L stipend a week (if they ever get around to paying them out...) If you rent a mall stall for 100, budget 50 for classifieds and 150 for texture uploads etc, you can have a business started for no extra cash. Once you make your first 6000, go buy your land!

You do realize that if you put your mind to it, you can make real money through your SL business?

It really is worth the effort.

P2

If you go with renting then there's really no reason to continue paying 10$ a month for premium. If you were to just buy lindens with that you'd get something like 2600 lindens a month or 650 lindens a week.

Personally, I think if you can afford to own a computer capable of running SL, and pay the monthly cost for broadband Internet, you can pay $22 or so for a one-time land cost. But if you don't want to, you've had some good ideas offered.

Regarding ways to "undo" your mistake, if you paid for the premium for a year in advance, you'll just about get it back in the form of your weekly stipend. I get L$400 a week, or $1,600 a month, which is about equal to the $6 a month that premium costs if you pay ahead. If you only paid the first month, you can downgrade to free and then you're just out the one month cost ($4 as mitigated by the stipend.)

But I don't really get it. SL is something you can enjoy for very little cost, or something you can invest in and really put a stake in the ground... literally and figuratively. I spend $50 to $75 a month in real USD here, partly for land costs and shop rental, and partly to buy things. Other people pump in $10 or $15 to buy L$ and they're good for a few weeks.

You don't have to spend a lot, of course. But if you're serious about making the investment needed to have a business and a presence here, I am not sure why $22 USD is too much.

Most people - over 98% - find that they pay far more in membership fees, land purchases, land tier payments, land rental, and general purchases (clothes, skins, pose balls, other merchandise) than they can hope to make in profits in any given month. Less than 2% of all residents in SL make a profit here, but it can be done. I am one of the ones who is doing it. And I am a basic member. I don't pay Premium dues.

I started small, selling t-shirts in a rented mall space, and living in SL on a group's land, with some friends. I now own over 6,000 M2 of land on a private island sim, I have stores in 6 locations, and I earn enough that I cash out L$ into real US Dollars at least every two weeks, and often do so every week. And that is a profit on top of my mall rental and land maintenance fees, and after all my monthly expenses are all paid. My main businesses now are making and selling custom textures that others use to build their creations, and making and designing multiple sims, and all the content in them. My clothing stores still sell t-shirts, but hardly contribute to my profits.

It took me 4 months of hard work to build my skills and refine the products that I sell to the point where my income in SL paid me more than my expenses. Two months later I had recovered every penny I had paid in, and was making a small profit. I work 20 to 40 hours a week doing stuff for SL, and what I earn in-world is still less than what I would get if I spent the same amount of time each week working a minimum wage second job in the real world. I do it becuse it is fun, and it does pay me a small amount for the work that I do.

My advice:

Make sure you have a product that people want. That is the key thing. Why do they want to pay YOU and not someone else? There are thousands of people selling dresses in SL. Your dresses have to be pretty good to get a share of the market. Make something unique that no one else sells and many people desire, and you own that market. Most products are somewhere in between those extremes. You need both quallity and something that differentiates you from the herd.

Start small. You do NOT need to own your own land to run a business in SL. Most SL businesses start out with a vendor kiosk in a mall, paying L$50 a week or so. Sell a couple cheapo t-shirts each week and you'll easily earn that much back. Save your profits, invest in the minimal costs of making new products (texture downloads and snapshot costs, mostly), and you'll eventually have enough profits to expand.

Once a single location is profitable, diversify locations and spread out. Being in just one mall limits the number of people who see and can buy your products. Being in several increases the cost, but the increase in market exposure is worth more than the added cost. It's also cheap insurance against the sim your store is in being down or the mall closing without notice.

Advertize. Even a minimal cost L$50 classified ad will usually increase sales, if your ad and product are good.

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It sounds like you leaped into this without doing enough research to determine what your actual costs and expenses would be.

It costs money to buy land, whether you are on the mainland and buying direct from Linden Lab, or on a private island and subletting from another Player who owns one or more sims. You only need to be Premium to buy Mainland. Anyone can buy land on private islands, though there is slightly more risk as there is another Player involved who must keep up their own accounts to keep it all running.

It costs money to maintain land, as well. Once you own land, you still have to pay a monthly fee to keep it - like a property tax. Premium members have the monthly tier on the first 512 M2 of land that they own on the Mainland pre-paid as part of their monthly dues. LL likes to say they give it to you "free", but you're directly paying for it as part of that membership fee, even if you own no mainland proterty at all. But mainland or private island, someone has to pay the monthly maintenance to maintain those servers, and the cost rests on the shoulders of the land owners. If you don't keep up the monthly fees (roughly $5 USD per month on 512 M2, for example) your land can and will be reposessed, with no compensation for what you paid for it.

Since its a group of friends, I would see if you could somehow split the cost between your friends. Either a) - each of you chip in US$5, or, b) pool your stipends over the next month until you have enough. At $400/week - if there were 3 or 4 of you, you'd have enough in about a month if you spent your lindens on nothing else.

A third option, which is a bit more complicated - is set yourself out on a mission to make that L$5-6k in-game. There are *lots* of events out there where people give out L$cash as prizes. Why not take a week, and see how many events you can attend that offer prizes - you might be surprised what you come up with, and perhaps have fun in the process!

Good luck!