HOW TO MAKE SIX FIGURES WITH AIRBNB: Some clever entrepreneurs are making good money with Airbnb.com:

Airbnb insists it’s not a hotel. Even while admitting that its hosts should be responsible for hotel taxes. While defending itself in New York City–where the attorney general demanded user data on 15,000 hosts in order to crack down on “illegal hotels”–the company pointed press to a survey showing, at least by its own measure, that 87% of Airbnb hosts are the primary residents in the homes they rent out to guests. In San Francisco, it’s 90%, according to another survey.

But among the other 10% are people like Bradley, who very much sees being an Airbnb host as a business. “With trading, you look for arbitrage opportunities, where you have an opportunity to buy things for cheaper and sell them for more,” he says. “In the same way, I was like, I can rent apartments for $2,000 a month, but if I were to rent them on Airbnb, I get $150 a night.”

At 90% occupancy, Bradley can make about $4,000 per apartment on Airbnb. He pays about $2,000 of that in rent and utilities. That comes out to about $2,000 profit per apartment per month, or $24,000 each year. With six apartments, he could make up to $144,000 in a year.

It’s a good read–the full article’s here.

WHO LIKES FREE MONEY AND POINTS?: Frequent Miler reminds us that there’s still money to be had at Staples:

1. Register credit card with Plink.  Add Staples to your Plink Wallet.
2. Go to Staples.com via uPromise.
3. Buy a single $100 Visa gift card for $106.95.

If all goes well, you’ll earn $5.35 cash back from uPromise and $3 worth of gift cards from Plink.  Let’s value the gift cards at 95% face value so that we get a rebate of: $5.35 + $2.85 = $8.20.  That’s pretty cool since the combined fees for the Visa gift card came to only $6.95.  So, you earn $1.25 profit plus 5 points per dollar.

Why worry about your cost per point when you can actually get paid to take points off peoples’ hands?

UNITED GETS MEDIEVAL ON “MISTAKE” FARE USERS, SORT OF: Some folks on Flyertalk found and exploited a glitch with United’s website to book themselves $80 tickets to Hawaii, and United has responded by shutting down the frequent flyer accounts of the guilty parties. It seems as though only new accounts set up for the purpose of exploiting this software flaw with United’s site were shut down, so I’d say that’s fair.

TIMESHARE VACATION OFFERS: If any brave souls want two nights in Vegas (or three in Orlando) plus 10,000 HHilton HHonors Ppoints and a $200 certificate, all for just $199,  here you go. This requires sitting through a timeshare presentation, so don’t go unless you’re fully prepared.

WHO LIKES BANK DATA?: Nate Tobik, who runs the  interesting and well-written stock blog Oddball Stocks, has launched a new service focusing on bank investing. The site is called CompleteBankData.com and you can get a free 30-day trial here.

12 UNUSUALLY PLACED SPORTS VENUES: Cool pics, bro!

MONEY-SAVING TIP: Cooking at home is a great way to save money! If you don’t know how to cook, here’s an easy recipe to get you started: How To Make Ice.

What can I say, it’s Friday… enjoy the weekend!