Starting with this post, I am going to explore these issues further in an ongoing series of posts.

By far the easiest most automated way to make money on the web is to provide information – lots of it.  If you could build a site that has 20,000 to 30,000 pages of unique information on a single topic or various topics you could easily make $200 per day on your web site.  The problem is, it is impossible for one person to write that much information.  Even if you pay someone $5 per article you would go broke before ever got a decent amount of content.  So you are probably wondering how some sites out the get 20,000 or ever 100,000 pages of content? There really is only one way to do it, have your visitors create the content for you for free.

A short cut to a content site is an article directory site.  You can use free website software like Article Dashboard and even use a free article feeder program like Article Marketers that will give you 100s of articles a day.  Using this strategy you will quickly have 20,000 pages of content.  The only problem is that most of the articles you will  have will be duplicated on 100s of other article sites. Search engines like Google, only need to list and article once, so one site will get ranked well for the article and the rest of the article sites will only get a random hit here or there.

So what’s the point?  Well even with an article site that is full of duplicate content, if you get enough content, you will get enough random traffic to make $5-$10 a day.  Not much, but it’s something, plus you will start to get an idea of how the web works.  There are various article marketing tips and tricks that will help you make a bit more, but unless you are one of the big 5 or 10 original article sites, you are only going to make some spare money on your article site.

Going back to what I said before.  To make big money, your site needs to have original content, and to get original free content you need a compelling idea that get’s visitors excited about giving you content.    So if your looking for a website idea, try to think of sites that would draw people in to create original content for you. Sites like lifetips.com and epinions.com figured out a way to do this, if you can, you will have the Golden Goose – and a nice retirement plan!

Stay tuned for more online money making for beginners brain dumps – err posts.

Two unexpected events messed up my well laid plans. First I sold my website LinkXL as I had an offer I couldn’t refuse and it allowed me to diversify further from text link ad sales. The other thing is a two month rewrite of LinkAdage is now in month SEVEN. I fired the first developer, the second gave up, and now I am working with a 3rd development company that so far seems to be doing a great job. Unfortunately, the LinkAdage rewrite has consumed much of my time.

I have also started a site in an area I have lots of interest in and have a bit of a golden touch -> Penny Stocks. This penny stock market site has pulled my attention away from the social media site and content site I was set to build. My penny stock site is a much easier task and should make money much faster than my other website ideas. It will have chat, forums, blogs and other features related to penny stock trading. One goal of the site is to become a Timothy Sykes super affiliate.

In the meantime, I took the social media site and content site and kind of mashed them together in my requirements doc which is completely finished. Once the LinkAdage rewrite is done and the stock market site is rolling, I will finally turn my attention to building out Chatii.com.

Other goals, Twitter – lost interest in the SEO chest puffing tweeters I follow – I can’t stand the mind numbing tweets from this  bunch of know it alls so I have pretty much stayed away except for the very occasional tweet like my auto tweet of this post. I have, however, created a penny stock specific Twitter user id that will come in handy when building business relationships with  people interested in penny stock trading.      Digg – I discovered while it would be amazing to become a power Digger, it would be a full time job. I worked at it for about 3 weeks and built up my account quite.  Unfortunately I soon found I was getting nothing else done. I guess I’ll need to pay a pro Digger if I really need something Dugg (or is it Digged?)

I am also starting several independent blogs about some of my personal hobbies so I can start writing off all the cool stuff I review and write about

At this time and in this economy I feel it’s best for me to work on 4 different $5 – $10k  projects rather than go for broke on one idea.  So unfortunately my social media website idea has been moved to the back burner until the time comes when I am willing to take the financial risk.  Until then, I just need to hope someone else doesn’t beat me to the idea.

For project #1, I decided to go with a far more conservative idea.  The plan is to put a new spin on the article site business which is spewing  more and more duplicate garbage content all over the web.  I want to provide more value to webmasters looking to spread their ideas without the seedy underbelly of the current article site/duplicate content business.

It’s amazing that some crap articles sites make $1 per day while others make $100s per day.  How much one of these sites earns is a direct correlation of how much Google love they get.  Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why one site with garbage duplicate content is showered with Google love, while another is completely ignored.  I good friend in the business believes it is all about website authority, but how can a site that churns out duplicate content have any authority with Google?

Without giving away my idea, essentially this new business model will freshen up the Article Site business model while at the same time give Google exactly what they want and the web what it needs -unique, quality content.

I estimate that with me doing some coding myself, jobbing other coding out, and a minimal marketing plan, this new site will cost about $5,000 in the first year to build and the breakeven point should be about 1 year after launch.  The beauty of this new site is no matter how slow the site starts out, long term, it will constantly improve on monthly revenue making it a nice “blue chip” website in my portfolio.

I estimate time to launch will be about 3 months.  I invite you all to follow along as I create a new money making website on a shoestring budget.  I’ll post updates here as I go along, and reveal more about the exact nature of this new content site business model as it gets closer to going live.  You’ll gain insight, real-time as the site is created from the ground up

For now, I have put up a place holder (coming soon) site to get the ball rolling.  Feel free to drop a link to it to help give the site a kickstart.

Introducing my next bootstrap Internet venture:  Chatii.com

Bottom line: “If you’ve never failed you’ve never lived”

This video is an inspirational message for anyone in search of their dream to live by.

If you haven’t heard of Ning, it is a site that allows you to create your own social marketing network. There is a good article in Fast Company you should read if you are not familiar with them. Take a look at Ning, and if you think you may have use for it in the future, try to secure a good sub-domain. It doesn’t cost anything, and who knows, if you get a good sub-domain, there may be a market for it in the future.

Ning is one of those ideas that takes big money to get started. One of the founders of Ning is Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape, who sold out to to AOL for $4.2 billion dollars . After one big win like that, he now has enough money to throw website ideas against the wall until one sticks like a well cooked piece of spaghetti. To start Ning, Andreessen put $15 million in ‘pocket money’ in the company to prime the well.

Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of money to do the spaggetti test on my website ideas so I have learned how to build sites cheaply with various bootstrap marketing methods. Fortunately, building websites that make money on the cheap is what I like to do best.

On a side note, Ning is free unless you want to get rid of their strip of adsense ads and replace it with your own adsense (or other) ads. To host your own ads you need their premium service priced at $19.95. So before you go premium, you need to make sure you are getting good traffic to at least cover the cost of membership.