Talking about making money on the internet has a bit of a stigma about it these days. This is probably because of all the hyped up ‘get rich quick’ schemes that are advertised so heavily on so many less than desirable sites, however, the fact of the matter is – Yes, you can make money on the internet. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry.

Now before I continue: Don’t worry I’m not going to try and sell you anything. There’s no affiliate links, no CPA products, no ebooks, nothing. The only way we will profit off this blog is if we one day decide to advertise.

So now with that little disclaimer done, lets get to the reality of the situation. As much as would-be internet millionaires who try program after program trying to make their millions so they can live on a beach and never have to work again don’t like to believe, for all intents and purposes making money on the internet is just like running any other business except, you guessed it, on the net.

There are several ways people can do this, whether gaming Google with blackhat SEO techniques (not recommended!), eBooks (which can range from extremely informative to just plain rubbish), selling products on eBay, or mastering the art of getting cheap google AdWords traffic through split testing and optimisation; at some point along the line you’re going to realise “Hey, this is hard work!”.

You’re going to be making spreadsheets and entering all sorts of data to calculate which of your numerous split tests is performing the best and deserves your full budget. You’re going to be sending and receiving emails every day to customers, product suppliers, or content writers. You’re going to be carefully managing your finances because every time you run that $10,000 campaign you stand to lose thousands of dollars.

But the news isn’t all bad, you’ll get to work your own hours, be your own boss, and be able to tell people that you are that guy who actually did it. Also, being that you are by definition an entrepreneur you’re not constrained by the chains of a ‘salary’ and can stand to add a couple of zero’s to that bank balance and pay off the mortgage.

There are of course two distinct reasons why you’d take a normal business and put it on the internet.
1. The increased connectedness brings together people with niche interests in a way that they never before could. If there’s a cat collar enthusiast community, suddenly it might become profitable to create luxury cat collars and sell them to the community. The product has nothing to do with the internet, but it’s being on the internet that makes the entire business viable.
2. Internet ads are much more efficient than the old print and television ads. You can target very specific demographics including individual users who have visited your site before but not purchased. And once targetted you can measure the exact performance of your ads with statistics as useful as dollars spent vs dollars made (if you give the formula the value of a sale). The power of online advertising is killing traditional media and bringing normal non-internet industries online.

Your limit rests only on that one factor, how hard are you willing to work for it? This scares off 99% of the people who are typically attracted to internet riches. The ones who are attracted to it for the wrong reasons. The question is: which type of person are you?

Your turn
If you’re just starting out leave us a comment with a question about anything at all, we have heaps of experience and want to see new players succeed. Also feel free to sign up to our rss

Good luck

http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-recognized-as-official-religion-in-sweden-120104/

Here’s the official press release:

“The Church of Kopimism is recognized by the state of Sweden 

Just before Christmas, the Swedish governmental agency Kammarkollegiet registered the Church of Kopimism as a religious organisation. This means that Sweden is the first country to recognize kopimism as a religion. 

The Church of Kopimism have tried to become registered as a religious organisation by Kammarkollegiet for more than a year.

- Since Kammarkollegiet has been strict with formalities, we had to apply three times, a happy Gustav Nipe – board chairman for the organisation – says. He continues, I think it might have something to do with the governmental organisations abiding by a very copyright friendly attitude, with a twisted view on copying. READ MORE »

I’m working on some checklist / light process management software for small business.

I’m trying to put a lot of effort into the way it looks and feels, the way it guides the user to do exactly what they want to do at that point in time and not display any extraneous / useless data that will just clutter the screen. One of the key pages is their task list / checklist.

When it got to the point of writing the code to help users through their first login and initial setup of their environment I was thinking hmmm…. well there’s actually a few steps, do I need some kind of wizard for this, but where would it go? And I don’t want to force them to do all the steps right away. Maybe some kind of…….. checklist?

Then I realised, it’s checklist software, it’s sole purpose is to handle your list! Just make the setup tasks the first tasks on their list when they log in : P

Sometimes it’s hard to practice what you preach ; )

I thought I’d post a -very early- screenshot of some software I’m developing.

‘Teams’ within an organisation are displayed hierarchially, and drawn dynamically onto the screen. The elements can be dragged and dropped to change the hierarchy, organisations edited and the focus changed to move up and down the chart.

Doing the chart this way instead of showing the whole thing really puts the user into the context of the organisation they’re focusing on. What is my boss doing? What are my subordinates doing? This page will soon be improved with chart lines through GWT Canvas.

Many more features to come. I hope to make it a 100% free, web-based team and task management tool, with many useful additional features. Release 1 coming soon!