Noob: making money?!

Guys looking to make some slightly more income than 6 LD for an hours work

Is there any money in building, designing stuff? I know that land is the best, but it is so expesnive right now.

If you have developed the Skills with the SL Building tools then Yes, there is a Lot of Money to be made from Builds.

A.

what about using Blender?

There's a way to use Blender to create importable SL style prims. It involves the use of a Blender script created by Jeffrey Gomez and either an import LSL script or a LibSL bot program with object import functions. Assuming the import functions still work. A search of the building forum will yield more info along those lines. It won't be like doing normal modeling in Blender and importing it into SL, though; SL's prim based modeling system is unique and proprietary and not at all like the modelling systems used by mainstream 3D modelling programs.

An easy way to make some decent money is to look for cheap land -- land need not be expensive if you buy the right sized lots. For example, buying 16m plots cheap and reselling them to people looking for "ad space". Once you make enough money, you could progress to larger lots and so on. Unless you're quite skilled, it's very unlikely you'll make more money doing anything other than land. I sold nearly $5,000USD worth of land today in sizes from 16-17,488smq. I was liquidating my assets because I'm interested in investing in a few islands and some full mainland sims -- something that would have driven my monthly fees well in excess of 1,000USD had I kept the land I had earlier today and proceeded to do that.

Buying/Reselling land need not be about taking advantage of people or profiting off them. There are plenty of people who have similar situations like me on a daily basis and we really need people who are hard working and willing to buy our land at a discount because we simply have too much to sell at conventional prices.

e.g. Buy a 16m plot for L$250-300, resell it for L$400-500. With profits of L$200 per trade on average, it won't take you long before you're dealing 512s and making L$1000 profit per property. Just be careful what you buy, buy on the low end. Make sure you get nice flat lots and don't pay over L$16/m -- that way if prices fall you'll be able to resell your land at cost and emerge unscathed.

Well, I hope this helps. Maybe gives you an idea of what to do if other things that have been suggested fail. I do wish you the best of luck with whatever you try, there's not much you can't accomplish if you put the time and work in

The very best way, and please consider this from the 'whole' perspective, is simply to buy $L. If you have a minimum wage job in the United States (what is it, let's assume 7 USD/hour nowadays?) that makes roughly $L 1800 an hour.

So... it's a matter of how much you value your time. If you enjoy doing something on the grid, by all means do it, then offer your creations/services/ingenuity for sale.

The time-value of money on the grid is really distorted, insofar as there are so many hobbyists willing to do things simply for the love of it.


If you can't buy $L for whatever reason, selling creative content is probably the easiest.

One classified ad and a few prims for a vendor, and you are all set. The real secret is simply to do what you enjoy, get it to the world at large, and go from there.

It's certainly possible to make money building and designing stuff.

You do need to bear in mind that if you want to make a lot of money, you'll probably have to devote yourself entirely to doing that - which you may not want to do. You can earn enough money to do lots of stuff in SL without needing to do that, though.

What Desmond describes above - doing what you can enjoy and getting paid for it - is the "American Dream" of SL, but it's a lot harder than it used to be; many of the markets for popular activities now have members with years of practice, some of whom were professional artists to start with. This is where the tricky division comes in - if you enjoy making the items anyway, then you can go ahead anyway and accept the fact they'll have lower sales, and that since you're making the things you enjoy anyway, you have less need of money anyhow. Or you can go in and compete with them - but in that case you usually need to either have a new spin on the ideas that market depends on (even if you in yourself were happy with them before), or try to start your own market - which is entirely possible, but it may take a long while for other people to become interested.

In brief then, it's possible but it's tricky, and like every other choice, it does have tradeoffs.