This article is nothing more than an advertisement. The company that makes freelanceswitch also owns the sites listed: FlashDen, AudioJungle, ThemeForest, iStockPhoto

The author clearly mentions this in his post, so I don't see why that is an issue.

I think the issue is that AFAIK it is not that easy to make $2000/y with selling stock photography. Actually, it is a hard, persistent work. So he was propably just lucky, so they picked him up to advertise them.

Envato doesn't own iStockPhoto, Getty does. But otherwise you're right. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/istockphoto

Or you can live in Alaska.

In 2008, the oil dividend was a record $3269 per person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

And they still take the biggest Federal handout per capita... Such a scam.

In Alaska, milk is $7.00/gallon. We need people up there to run the industries but the living is tough.

There are scams operated by the government far worse than Alaska.

Should not the companies that are in the industries then pay higher wages?

Well from their point of view, there is no reason to do so since the government is taking care of it.

I'm sure they'd gladly pay what is needed (and still profitable) if it came to that.

I'm probably not enough of a graphic designer or artist in general to do exactly that, but this post made me realize how I should really think of ways to make some money on the side.

And also that, just trying can sometimes be enough!

What would you see as the closest thing to stock photos for a programmer? You can sell your software of course, but it feels like it needs a lot more investment and that a few hours at night on one small bit of software won't make it.

I set up djangohosting.org, which was just a static site w/o any server side programming. Affiliates are making me about 90/mo.

It did take about 8 months for traffic to slowly build up to this point though.

You should set up DNS for www.djangohosting.org also...

Thanks! I never even noticed, I'll set it up with a wildcard subdomain.

Nice idea! Looking at the links on that page, it seems that WebFaction is the only one which is an affiliate link. Is that the case?

Yup, I use WebFaction for all of my hosting.

To make more money I should probably add referrals/affiliate links for Dreamhost and Slicehost. All 3 hosts are the most clicked on the site.

Thanks for the article. Its good to see people making a "good living". Not everything needs to be get a rich quick deal.

Sounds like a description of every government employee in a third world country.

Many investment bankers made 1M every year without doing much

Other than massive amounts of TPS reports and ridiculously optimistic financial models.