FlowMark - Making Money Online

Diversity, consistent branding and creativity across many web sites will be key factors in starting and maintaining your laptop business empire. No money? No worries. This article will get you started for little or no start up capital depending on the path you follow.

If you’re a person who creates art, can write articles, blogs or make short films (or can do all of these) then this article is for you. Many web sites are paying for content from their users. This is a golden opportunity for you to start your laptop empire. The best part is that most of these web sites are free to join and are a lot of fun to create content for.

Getting Paid…

Before you start you’ll need a paypal account (www.paypal.com - check to see if there is a local paypal site for your country too). Paypal allows you to be paid no matter where you are in the world. Most web sites prefer to pay you either by cheque or by direct transfer to a paypal account.

Step 1: Find a customer

Step 2: Keep the customer

Wow? Who would have thought of that? People who come to my mind are the likes of Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Ola Ahlvarsson, and Reed Hastings to name a few, but back to the topic at hand, building a lucrative business, better still, an ethical and sustainable lucrative business on the web.

The first step is finding a customer, which means we need to create a product or service that other people will need or want. At last count, there are approximately 1.2 Billion potential customers available on the World Wide Web and while this number is growing in leaps and bounds it is still less than 20% of its potential. All of these potential customers want or need something that you could provide. Herein lies the opportunity, and the only limitations are your efforts and your imagination.

Effort and imagination challenged? Then let me give you a small hint here of how that might work.

• There are 9 Million home aquarium owners in the US
•  Small polished pebbles, preferably natural, are a common fixture and sell for about £25.00 per bag, retail.
• On average aquarium owners buy 2-3 bags/year on cleaning.
• The annual “replacement” market for aquarium rocks is roughly £5,000,000.00
• Capturing .5% (yes, one/half of one percent) of that market by ecommerce could yield an annual profit of $100,000.00, and if your rocks are good enough, you can expect that to grow annually at around 6%.

There are 3 great books that anyone serious about building a lucrative e-commerce business should read:

• “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson,
• “The New Big is Small” by Seth Godin and
• “The Maui CEO” by John Tennant.

Using your own unique ideas to create and keep a customer, Google to advertise, your own web site or Ebay to sell, your supplier to warehouse, FedEx or UPS to deliver, EPay or PayPal to collect your revenue, Salesforce.com to keep track of your customers and what they liked and did not like, and Quicken to keep the books, you are up and running and on your way to financial and personal freedom.

Sure, there are enough “get rich quick” methods, pyramid marketing schemes and letters from Nigeria to keep that puzzling population who want something for nothing busy, but the real power and opportunity of the Internet and Web is the ability to tap some niche of a huge market better and more effectively than anyone else. It comes with some effort and it might take a year or so before you can make that down payment on the summer home in Cape Cod, but it works and, most importantly, it is sustainable, particularly if you provide a product and a service that keeps customers coming back.