My first profitable internet business was in high school when a friend of mine showed me this computer game called “Ultima Online”. It was a multi player role playing game that had tons of players. They would beef up their characters and basically act as if they were the character. My first thought was “Why would anyone play this dumb game that you can’t beat?”

But with me being as curious as I am had to know more before I completely wrote it off. So I sat there and watched my buddy make trades, talk to people and start fights. The most interesting thing to me was the trading part of it. People would trade goods at a market in the game and people would have little stores set up in the game.

Naturally, this caught my attention rather quickly. I asked all about the trading resources part and how all that worked. He explained everything to me the best he could, but one thing that he said to me that really peaked my interest was that people were paying real money for these virtual resources. I couldn’t believe my ears. People were paying to get items that weren’t real?

So I went home and did some research. Come to find out, people were paying very good money for certain assets in the game. There it was waiting for me. An eager market that spent all their time playing this game and when they wanted something they acted quickly.

The very next day, I went to my friend’s house to get the CD-Rom for the game to install it on my computer and he gave me a character that was already paid for. And I was in business.

They used “UO Gold” to buy things in the game and the only way to get it was trade something or play for it. I started with 2 or 3 items and started buying and selling things in the game, building up a pile of this “UO Gold”. Then I found out that I could buy “UO Gold” for $20 a million on EBAY then go into the game and buy game assets with the gold that I could sell for way more on EBAY.

This kept on for almost a year and I was making anywhere from 2k – 3k a month for playing a game and making simple trades. It was a dream come true for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. The game lost a lot of players with the development of new games and the market became too saturated. But for about 4 months, I was making more in one week than a lot of my friends were making in a month.

My only regret is that I didn’t make an information product explaining how I did what I did and how others could do it too. Definitely could have made me some more money with less effort and since the market was becoming saturated anyway, this could of given me an opportunity to diversify. This was a big lesson learned.