Dear all,

As stated in a previous post one of my new year resolutions is to generate an Internet based income of around $200 - $400 AU ($150 - $300 US approx) per week. This is to help my mother out who cannot work due to medical reasons, however is being hounded by our government and is therefore getting more and more stressed - which isn't helping her medical condition any.

I have had some thoughts on how to do this. Primarily Amazon (AWS) based, targetting specific area's.

For example she is somewhat interested in makeup etc. I thought perhaps of making targetted AWS sites to things like:

• nails / nail care / nail products (nail polish etc)
• hair / hair care / hair products
• skin care / products

Each site would be unique - as in have it's own domain name, and possibly create a forum that people can go to (possibly a generic forum encompassing all the htree sites), to ask questions get tips/hints/advice on various aspects. Also articles could be wirtten, or pulled from free places that have these sorts of things. I'm not sure how these wikipedia's work but I believe you can pull data from those somehow.

I realise the big comapnies all have these sorts of sites, but I thought perhaps marketing them as non-biased might help.

Also putting google ad's etc on the site is another way to generate income.

What do you think? Play devil's advocate for me and tell me the floaws in this idea. How can this be expanded on / improved? Am I looking at the wrong area?

Obviously I don't expect these sites to be making money instantly, but I figured after a few months (or more) she may be making enough to get the government off her back, allow her to take time to recover, stress MUCH less, and not have to worry any more. As she said to me the other day, if only she could make around $200 (I put in up to $400 because she deserves more than 200) a week, she would be more than happy.

Thank you for your time, advice and help.

Nathan, First off -- if you are serious about making real 'consistent' income online then do NOT rely upon Ad-Networks and affiliate programs. Yes, Use them! They are a wonderful way of making that extra cash! But don't just rely upon them!

Please don't keep your mom in illusion that internet is an easy way of making money. Internet is just another way of doing business!

Well, this is a really-really huge industry! Start a forum about it... [Take a look at http://forums.vogue.com.au ... Yes. they have the backing of their print publication but just for ideas take a look at their site!]

She could be more of a personal consultant online!

Give me another day or two to get back to you again about it!

What other way is there to make money on the Internet apart from ad revenue and affiliates?

I understand selling actual products - doesn't that assume you have the ability to make a product to sell?

Thanks for taking the time. It's appreciated

Well, There are information products, direct consulation, retailing products etc. Ad Revenues and affiliate programs can be and certainly are a source of income online but what I am trying to stress is that you should not have them as your sole source of revenue!

If your mother was willing to work a couple hours a day, I would suggest dropshipping products over affiliate programs. Your profit per sale is usually higher at around 25% and you don't have to maintain inventory or ship packages. Many eCommerce packages are available with some of the best being open source.

This wouldn't be work like making products but answering a few emails, finding backlinks, adding products to the site. It doesn't even have to be her alone but could be a family endeavor to kick it off the ground. My retail business is going to gross me $25,000 (US) for 2004 and I probably will net $15,000 (US) and I only spend 4 hours a week on it currently. I also maintain my own inventory, package goods, ship them and evaluate new products. Next year, I plan on opening 4 new online stores with different products. Three of those will be dropshipped products and the last an AWS store. I don't plan on putting in much more than 4-8 hours a week on any of them but will increase my time on my main retail store to 20 hours a week with active promotion instead of passive promotion in order to increase yearly sales to around $100,000.

If you can only do one site, I would suggest a combination site. There is a lot of information in the form of public domain books that you can base a site off of. This would allow the content to draw people and then you can promote a variety of income through affiliate and dropshipping to your visitors.

Hi Wayne, thanks for replying.

Dumb question time - what is "dropshipping"? Answering email's is not a problem for her, and she has stated in the past she would love a job that involved research or basically spending time looking for "things" on the net. She loves researching and loves to find things.

You mention public domain books - I'll look for these, if they are public domain though are you allowed to take their content and use them?

You make $25,000 a year from your sites? Wow! Just wow!

Thanks again for taking the time. Off to do some research now.

Dropshipping is similar to affiliate selling but you accept the customer's payment in your name and then the supplier mails the product to the customer. Basically you act as a middleman and make a little profit while doing it.

As for Public Domain books, being able to use it is the definition of the word. Basically anything printed before the Titanic sank is in the public domain. Actually, I think anything printed before 1924 is public domain. This means all of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain (to name a few) is in the public domain. You can make these available on your website as their complete text, sell copies of them and not have to worry about royalties to anyone. There are thousands of books both fiction and non-fiction that can be used for this. Being in Australia, you can probably use books detailing the voyages of the Pacific such as Charles Darwin, Sir Frances Drake and others to build content and then sell related items.

I know one guy who built a site about raising chickens based on a book written in the 1800s and sells copies of it on eBay.

So you can sell a public domain book? What would make people want to buy a book from you that they can get for free elsewhere?

Dropshipping sounds interesting. I'm going to find some makeup related sites that do dropshipping.

Actually, Even more recent stuff can be in public domain. Take a look at this page http://www.lawrence.edu/library/guides/pubdomain.shtml for more infromation about finding public domain content.


One good source of PD content is Project Gutenberg. You can even order 9400 books on DVD for free (They sent me two DVDs a week ago!!!) . http://www.gutenberg.org/cdproject/

Another example of how a lady is earning big bucks from public domain content is [url="http://www.scienceofgettingrich.net/"]] Science of Getting Rich

I'll answer a part of this question. Yes, people DO buy PD content. You have to cash on the psychology that most people are very lazy... most of the time they will prefer to spend some cash rather than spend time and effort hunting for that thing or they simply don't know how they can find that stuff for free!

Also, most of the times people make value additions to these PD stuff.