This is the beauty of online forums. You can share ideas and insight.
My thoughts on the ability for someone to make money online is
1. If you want "full-time" type income from the internet you can't work "part-time".
2. Stay focused with your online venture. Pick a niche market and stick with it.
3. Don't chase trends unless you truly are on the "ground floor" of something. One of the problems I see in everyone's approach to making money online is that they get into the market "late". I hear comments that "Porn and Gambling" sites are "what's making money. Yeah, that might be true to the top 10% of these sites. The bottom 90% of these sites are simply feeding off the crumbs dropped by the bigger sites.
4. Ask yourself this question "How much time do I really have to devote to this online project"?? If you have less than a couple of hours a day to work on the project, look for "self contained" online businesses. These would be affiliate type sites, whereby immediate customer service on your part would not be required. If you're in this group, you will want to do your homework as to the best affiliate program out there. This does not necessarily mean the one making the most money "right now". Look at up and coming sectors to determine which affiliate you should use. Again, don't chase markets which are already saturated. Once you've got the affiliate program set up...optimize, optimize, optimize. Your couple of hours a day should be devoted to this. Also checking to see where your traffic is coming from. This is a big part of optimizing, is to finding out who your market is. One last thing. Make sure you have some information/educational related information on your site. A affiliate only site is a non-starter. These used to be called link-farms.
If you have at least four hours a day to devote to your online project, I would go with a 50/50 mix. Sell a small product line and have affiliate advertising on the site. Again, have information/educational links. Half your time should be spent optimizing, the other half dealing with customer service issues (i.e sending products/answering questions).
If you have more than four hours a day to devote to this project, I would recommend a 90/10 split. Sell a middle to large product line, and keep affiliate advertising (why not!) to 10 percent of your business. You don't necessarily need affiliate advertising, but in the early start up phase this is a good idea to keep money coming in. After your site is established I would will still keep your affiliate advertising stream, but certainly affiliate advertising isn't the only thing you could do. Maybe in the space where you'd normally advertise other affiliate products, that you would in fact yourself advertise for affiliates to promote your products. This would be smart since the bulk of your business would come from selling your OWN products. This type of business model is by far the biggest consumer of your time, and as such nets the biggest results (if done right---right product, right site, right time)
5. If you made it this far you should begin to understand why you are not making money online. If you only have 2 hours a day to devote to a project, and are chasing a market trend whereby you are the 1,000,000,000th porn site it's a no-brainer why you are only bringing in a few bucks each month. Even with optimizing a site in this type of market it's hard to break into the top 10% with only 2 hours a day to work with. If you really want to succeed, you'll need to increase the amount of time you spend promoting your site (trading links, online forums related to your market, etc, etc)
6. If you are going to sell your own products, just one rule of thumb---don't sell things you aren't really that interested in. Also if you are not a natural sales person, hire someone to do this for you. Try to get affiliates to do it for you. Trade links.
The main reason why people aren't able to sell their own products is because of their lack of interest in the product(s) they are selling. The other reason is because they don't now how to sell. Take domain reselling for instance. There is a reason why some sell o.k names for a fair price, and why others have good names that "just aren't moving". Moral of the story in this particlar case: If you really hate selling "domain names"---don't sell domain names. Find something you are really enamored with that does have some market appeal. As in the case above, even so-so products can be sold if you "believe in the product" and have some natural ability to sell.
7. Don't give up if this is something you truly want to do. Eventually you'll succeed. Success is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration. Write that somewhere and don't forget it.
