KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays

Chapter 8. Case Studies

You're not the first person to want to make money online. That's good news. The pioneers had a lot of work to do. They had to figure out which tools worked the best, how to use them, and what sort of content they needed to serve in order to build audiences that they could monetize. They had to decide how to build the web sites, lay out the ads, and format the articles. They had to create the Internet that we take for granted today.

It was a process that took time, lots of experiments, and plenty of failures. Occasionally, as you're surfing the Web, you'll come across an old-style web site, complete with flashing horizontal lines, cheesy animations, and cursor trails, and you'll wonder how on earth a site like that ever managed to attract visitors. The answer is that there wasn't much else on the Web at the time.

Now that there is a lot more on the Web, those sites aren't making money. The sites that are making money are the ones that follow the formulas that work.

In this chapter, I describe a number of web sites that make great models for entrepreneurs. Now I don't know whether these sites are making a lot of money. I know that some are making some money; I suspect that others are making giant piles of money; and it's likely that still others could be making a lot of money if they really wanted to. But perhaps that's not the main reason they were created. How much these sites are actually making isn't important. What is important is how much you could be making ...