When I set up my character, Lionel Oliva, on Second Life, the transition from bored real-life (RL) bohemian to an SL businessman was bumpy.

Back in 2005 when I first signed up, my trusty old HP had its video card permanently fused in, so I couldn't even see half of what I was supposed to in the game. On Help Island, all I could see was pile after pile of white triangles and squares, and a cool little pedestal with the SL hand logo on it. The processing speed my computer lacked ground the visuals into an excruciating one-frame-per-minute slogfest, and I had to leave SL after about five minutes. But I was astounded by the streaming voice and the potential of a 3-D world where I could sell my own creations. I resolved to come back.

On December 2006, my brother presented me with a brand new eMachine. The first thing I downloaded was Second Life, and for the first few months I didn't download anything else for fear of slowing down my one lifeline to some extra money (I didn't have a car at that point and was living 7-10 miles from any decent job). But I began learning what made money and how to make it.

If you spend enough time in-game, you can't help but figure a few things out. Second Life is supersaturated with information. Looking at a simple wave on a beach and seeing who made it can send you off on a series of tangents across owner and group profiles, sims, businesses, memorable locations, events, and one-of-a-kind creations. Between in-world help, SecondLife.com's robust resource pages, forums, Second Life social networks, and Torley Linden's tutorials, there shouldn't be much technical holding you back in at least one category of SL business. So here are a few tips to get you going...

• Get an adequate computer first. I love making money in SL, I really do. But when I'm running two applications at a time, SL suffers, and my building and script testing really drags to a crawl, taking up to four times as long when I'm stuck. The best SL creators are constantly updating their content and making new products, so if you've got an ubercomputer from the 1990s that's customized to a T, I'm sorry, but you'd be better off trying out Habbo. With new graphic improvements my computer can't pick up on, I don't know what I'm missing, so getting a new computer soon is on my list.
• Look the part. When I arrived, I was a cookie-cutter avatar. I made the mistake of trying to look like myself in real life, so I became some sort of doe-eyed bug thing with stringy brown hair. It took a trip to a poker house (back when they had them) to learn where to get clothes for the job. They told me to buy a new avatar shape, but I took the initiative to make my own look by right-clicking myself and then the Appearance menu. I've even sold my look for around L$500 over the years. My suit (L$400), by Made Men, lasted me a year before an SL glitch permanently swapped it with a Robbie the Rabbit outfit. Since I've gotten more into combat scripting, I've replaced it with a military-style jumpsuit. Yes, even though it's a brave new world, people overall do judge you when you're running a store. Even though you'll meet anyone from a giant walking hand to Elvis, it's not a safe bet while representing your business to wear 90 types of lag-producing bling and dress up like a room-filling pile of gift boxes. Alienate too many people of one kind and you'll wind up missing a big chunk of revenue; just try for your own look without being too distracting.
• Act the part. In SL, somewhere between being painfully polite, and launching cube attacks on everyone in a sim, there's an accepted way of communication. Be needy if you have to while starting out, but don't dump drama ("O woe I m a por n00b will u drop evythg and help me plz") on anyone who's taking time from her own business to help you. Show you have an interest in your friends as people, not business tools, and when you really need help they will often come through. Be gracious and accept an invite to a party or event sometimes, otherwise people will get cranky when you teleport them to test-fire your robots and such. If you don't get prompt responses in IMs, back off -- they're likely busy -- and don't spam groups your friends have made for their own purposes.
• Work for someone else for a while. To find a job most easily, browse the Classifieds, SLX and other forums, or join a super-spammy group like Ultra Mega Advertiser. There are noob jobs where you just stand around and greet people, run stores and answer questions, dance (reasonably lucrative if you're friendly and have a sexy avatar), manage vendors, and so on. While you're working for these businesses, take a look around. See what they do, make a note of the gadgets they use to welcome people, communicate, draw traffic, and vend. Brush up on your communication, management, organizational, and SL content creation skills while you are at it. Analyze the structure of the groups you are invited to. Notice how the different roles are used to further the group, and how some roles are entrusted with extra abilities. Think on how you can use those abilities in a job. For example, there is an ability which lets you landscape with Linden plants. To me it's really a fringe ability, but if you have a green thumb, for example, maybe you could learn more about SL landscaping, even come to design your own trees, grass, and other sellable outdoor items. Whatever you do, unless you are camping for freebie tools or just need a quick fix to upload content for L$10, try not to camp much. All you're doing is sitting there watching other people have fun, and building someone else's traffic count, while your computer burns electricity very inefficiently.
• Freeload relentlessly. It's all out there for you: free tools, free education, free textures, objects, sounds, clothes, support groups (scripting, building, texturing, clothes, weapons, vehicles, business, writing, role-play, services, and more). And you can resell a lot too. I tried to improve freebies when I found them; that way I was able to apply my new knowledge, and the fact I had added my own touch to public domain goods made me a few memorable sales and contacts. Once you get your SL career going, don't be afraid to start trading your services for others'. Anshe Chung, one of SL's most famous entrepreneurs, saved countless L$ by never buying services, but instead trading this way. I don't recommend refusing to pay a single L$ for anything once you start making money, but instead suggest you find a balance between convenience and barter.
• Master the SL interface and understand SL's potential. Whatever you want to know about SL can be found with a little searching. Some things, like advanced scripting, may set you back moneywise, but I've found that many support groups can help with even the most advanced issues for free. RPGStats.com/wiki is an excellent resource for scripters -- I find I use it 90% of the time, and the SL wiki only when I can't find the answer. Ivory Tower offers free building advice, and TUi (http://www.tui-sl.com/phpBB/index.php), excellent texturing education services. Many times SLExchange's forum can provide a nudge to other resources, applications, and support groups.
• Use referral links. If you blog about SL or your own store in SL, you're throwing away a lot of money if someone who's never used SL clicks on your page, visits Second Life or your SLurls (SL-linked URLs) and signs up. All you do is go to SecondLife.com, sign in (feel free to sign up here if you don't have an account yet), click Refer a Friend on the left, copy any link you like in the code box below the middle of the screen, and start using it. To make referral-enhanced SLUrls, just take your usual SLurl (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Minna/54/166/30, for example), and add your personalized referral code to the end: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Minna/54/166/30u=156ebca19ef84a2da5d7ad4aee1d2e90, for example. And snip off the code off the link, so it looks cleaner in your posts: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Minna/54/166/30 has my referral code in there, but the link text has been shortened. Most blog platforms let you peek at the HTML of your posts; that's where you do the editing, and some simple HTML changes will work on any other site you have.

• Save up money with your job or reinvest your first L$10. L$10 may not really seem to go far in real life (it's only around 4 cents or so), but it can get you infinite freebies, 10 L$1 resellable freebies, or your first texture, animation, or sound upload. Once you have your first upload, it's yours for life. Keep selling it unless LL somehow loses it (I've only lost 4 items out of 12,000, but keep a backup copy till you're rich and famous)! Start promoting that one texture, animation, or piece of clothing until you have enough to rent a very tiny shop (10 to 15 prims should work, but shop around for a good price). Create a basic prim, put a nice freebie texture on it you have too, add some floating text (look it up on the RPGstats wiki), drop your item inside and mark it for sale. As you make sales, listen or ask for requests and do what you can to make items people will pay for. Bump over your first product to make room for more! And this is a good time to get into the practice of branding.
• If you're not ready to go into business even after a few thousand L$ of saving, that's fine. When you finally upgrade, or rent a large store, be sure to invest part of that in time-saving tools.
• Look for a partner or outsource. Running a store from building to promotion to security to cash flow analysis to customer service can be a lot for one person. Keep an eye peeled for people in the same boat as you. Keep your money safe while you do it, and only share profits, but don't be afraid to reach out and delegate.
• Automate, optimize, and back up. Don't agonize over slow building processes. Buy a highly rated building tool from SLX, Apez, OnRez, or any other site which features product ratings. Don't, from memory, type out a listing of your catalog to everyone who walks on the lot. Create a ThinC book with pictures and text, and copy it to your heart's content. Don't lose your favorite object because it's called "Object", or because SL eats it. Rename everything the minute you make it, and then make an extra copy of it. Inventory loss isn't really a problem for me, but the biggest loss I had was from a scripted object I saved back to my inventory by accident. All my original item scripting got replaced by the new copy, which overwrote it. And when you're struggling, don't lose your good ads to a slow week. If you have to let them expire at week's end, save them to a notecard first. Adjust them if you have to, but don't start from scratch. Your time and decisions make a footprint on SL; nowhere else is it more obvious when you hear the cha-ching of someone buying your stuff somewhere... or you see virtual tumbleweeds rolling across your neglected storefront.
• Upgrade to premium service eventually. If you rent from someone else at the start, it's good practice to see what land options your owner can change: parcel audio/video, teleport points, object and script permissions, money-making land passes, and so on. Once you upgrade, not only will you have this knowledge behind you, but you'll also get L$300 a week for expenses (almost $60 by end of year). If you pay for SL yearly ($72), you'll be paying (drumroll please) virtually nothing (rimshot) for a premium membership. If you don't own any land, you stand a good chance of breaking that L$300 into several effective ads, enough to easily turn you a profit. Check out Madddyyy Schnook's book below for the full details... he's been a great help and I strongly recommend his guides.

• Unless your L$ balance is what you want it to be, stay away from casinos and goofy events. Time is your most important asset in SL, and even if you just spend a dollar a day on gaming or a half an hour in a lag-filled lollygag, that can be a huge cut in your potential profits.
• Watch for scams and incompetents. Don't pay out a single L$ to anyone unless he or she completes the work promised in full. It's human nature to dub around given an inch, and SL is no exception. If you need a big project done, pay by PayPal to ensure you don't get weaseled out of your hard-earned money; you can open a dispute. When you do open a dispute and the service provider still wants to do the work, ask for your money back and give them a second chance to finish the job; don't get conned into ending your dispute accepting more empty promises. I hired someone who talked a good game to set up 90210411.com and he never completed it. He was very helpful in the beginning but toward the end, when he had bigger clients, all he did was dodge me, make weak promises, try to sell me services I didn't need, and spam me with his new projects.
• Build empirically from your existing projects. When you create a new product, it can borrow a lot off existing inventory while still providing a fresh face for your shop stock. This is especially true of scripting; my Universal Destruction Kit has lent itself to a gun kit, blog relay device, and an enjoyably morbid Halloween project I sold to Loki Ball.
• Brand and label your products. Set their group identity to your business group before you sell them on SLX, OnRez, Apez, SLSmart.com, BidSL.com. Every time your product is rezzed and in-world, it has a chance to advertise for you. Add information in the description. Brand your items with your company name, website, and central store location if possible. Divivity is a company which has mastered the art of branding.
• Visit established places in SL. It's surprising, but if you have potential, and people share your skills, SL can be a wonderful place to be mentored. While store owners can't be expected to tutor everyone who visits their stores, if one does offer you help, run with it. Whether it's five minutes of pointers or an ongoing work relationship, mentoring from someone who knows what to do -- and avoid -- can save you weeks of stumbling around.
• Build a presence outside of SL. Cultivate it with social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter), social bookmarking (Digg, StumbleUpon, ShareThis), personal blogs, and SL blogs. Post SLurls for SL insiders; explain SL to potential users.
• Join XSL. Hands-down, XSL has been my biggest source of income. Before I stepped out for a few months to focus on my RL career, I was making $1-2 every day on autopilot, with $80 for my last month. If I had stepped things up, I could have easily gotten to $10-$20 a day or more. Fortunately I have been allowed to restart with a more humble presence with my Saunders Baxton alt, and I thank XSL for all they have done for me. Use the forum responsibly and it will be a treasure trove of advice, networking opportunities, and productivity tool suggestions. If you've never been on a forum before, be prepared for the occasional sour grape. Don't bother defending your every post; if you did a good job in the first place other people will likely correct or ignore a poster with a chip on his shoulder. Just re-read your posts where you ask questions or build rapport; and maybe post once in a while, with your SLurl and other signatures set up, in a meme-type thread like "True or False" or the fairly harmless "In My Pants". Bonus points if you create a thread that thousands of people will respond to, like "Biggest Play On Words In An Avatar Name".
• Manage your time and projects. Because you can create so many different things, and jump from one lingering project to another, you will need to organize and limit your SL time into marketing, uploading, creating, packaging, and networking. Learn to walk away from the computer if you find yourself drifting; tomorrow's urgency will help you wrap up faster and you can recharge your batteries in the meantime.
• Use Busy Mode. Do not click that "IM Received" button until you are out of Busy Mode. Otherwise you may see your work day swept away in a flood of idle chatter, customer service requests, party invites, help requests, rental reminders and teleporting.
• Create a "to do" notecard. Save crucial conversations (work orders, technical tips, etc.), project goals, helpful resources, and so on. That way you don't have to sort through hundreds of notecards for what you need. If you have projects that are slowly dying away, don't be afraid to hack away at your notecards.
• Chop away at your inventory. Like kudzu, SL inventory spreads like wildfire. My way of eliminating what I don't need consists of pressing the letter "A" in my inventory search, then sorting out everything that's been pulled up with an A in it. The next day might be D, the next, 8. Sometimes digging through old stuff may dredge up an old project or some creative tools you may have forgotten about. Just keep your original purpose in mind and be sure to get rid of a lot of brain candy that will knock you off track. Landmarks are especially insidious, so recently I knocked out 600 of them. I don't miss them.
• Stay informed. Spend an hour or two a month learning what new features SL can offer and what old problems have been fixed. Even if you can't apply an upgrade immediately -- like sculpted prims or Mono compiling -- you may be able to tap into it eventually.

So, to make money in SL, you need to move around with ease with the SL interface, stay up to date with improvements, shout in the virtual wilderness, conserve your virtual cash, network with groups and social platforms, manage time, research, and automate, all the while keeping a human face on all your machinery.

Sounds a lot like business, doesn't it? :D

Lionel Oli- ...um, Houde is a rather fleshy avatar. He blogs at http://virtualmerchants.blogspot.com and also freelances.