sean - 12:45 pm on Jun 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

Sorry about the delay, I was busy with another thread last night.

By the way, I liked your first post, it had the sound of someone who might be ready to break on through to the other side, not so sure about the second post. Profiting in this area is a state of mind.

Anyway, you are right to set your sights on 100-200 because once you have enough money to buy back to your time, the balls starts rolling and it does not stop.

Fastest... "fast" is still a realistic goal, if you are more patient than the proverbial Nigerian prince of email fame, if you are thinking more like six months or so... hey it is still better than offline. On the payment side, find merchants who pay monthly, but add another month to your estimates for accumulating sales, plus check processing.

On the revenue side, factor maybe a month to build the new site(s), and another month or two for promotion and waiting for Y! and G. Or jumpstart it with PPC, you do not need much if you can hit a high ROI, and if so you will find a way to float it. Or, for less money and less wait, build something cool and/or useful and get it linked from high traffic sites, blast press releases, old school promotion style.

The journey starts with picking an industry. I am partial to competitive ones. Sure, there are countless competitors, but at least you know visitors convert and merchants who can hardly wait to pay you. Besides, no matter how many competitors you have, the majority of them have identical strategies, leaving you plenty of room to do you thing. You can dabble in untapped industries once you have more resources.

On your side of the fence a six month wait is probably uninspiring. But for people on the other side the time-to-money element might be the biggest barrier that keeps us from being flooded by competition. Aside from the realistic motivated few who are planning cash flow, there are plenty more who could be doing this stuff are not because the time between effort and stimulation longer than a few minutes. :-)