Gather Little by Little

A while ago, Larry wrote a very interesting post about how to start an online store. He well defines the right way to start your online store. I also share his point of view on making more money in order to pay back debt faster. While reducing your expenses is always a good budgeting exercise, you still have to stay alive and hopefully enjoy life along the way. To me, this is where online income comes into the equation.

While my main job is used to pay for living expenses and the mortgage, my online income is used to pay back the loan from my parents (due in November 2010) and to give my family the opportunity for my wife to stay home and take care of our 2 children.

Compared to other alternative sources of income, online income is my favourite for many reasons:

#1 It requires little to no cash down to start

As mentioned in the above mentioned article, starting a website doesn’t require much money. If you have a computer and internet connection, you can setup your first website with a budget of $100. You won’t get the latest technology and your website won’t include animation and flash applications, but you don’t need those to make money on the net!

#2 You don’t need to have something to sell!

Since you can sell goods through affiliate programs, you don’t have to invent a product or maintain an inventory. You don’t even have to take care of shipping! Being an intermediary may reduce the amount of profit compared to being the manufacturer yet it reduces your input to the minimum.

#3 It’s easy to get paid

Another great thing about online stores is that you get paid instantly. Merchant credit card processingservices allow your business to process debit and credit card payments for orders made through the internet and/or a physical location, such as or PayPal.

So within a few seconds, your merchant account shows the money earned and you can easily transfer it to your regular bank account within a few days.

#4 Your online store works while you don’t!

Websites are one of the very few businesses to be open 7/24/365 without having to pay for someone to run the business while you are sleeping.  ;-)  It is not rare that I wake up in the morning and I realize that I just made $50 while sleeping. It is important to spend time building your “little money making machine” that works without your daily input. You have to maintain the website and make sure everything runs smoothly, but this doesn’t require you to work all the time on your website while you can make sales any time of the day or night.

Unfortunately, nothing is perfect”¦

While many people write about how they make so much money on the net, making money online is far from being easy. Since anybody with a computer can be a competitor, there are a lot of people trying to get a share of the pie. Therefore, as is the case for any other type of business, you need to work really hard at first before making your very first dollar.

I remember when I started my first blog; it took me a good 6 months of work before making my first $10 of profit. For the first 18 months, if I would have divided my monthly income by the hours I had worked, my hourly rate would have been equal to kids working in sweatshops.

However, the thing I really like about the online business model is that your efforts create exponential results. At first, you don’t really feel it but at one point, the effort of one hour work is multiplied by 10 through the power of your websites.

Then again, even if it’s part of a new economy, Web 2.0 requires the same thing to succeed as any other kind of business: talent, determination, perseverance and a lot of work!

Author: Mike.

Image source: Don Hankins