Is it still possible for anybody to successfully learn how to make money online with a web business? Yes, if you follow the business models we show here.

$100,000 a year – on Auto-pilot?

Let’s say you want to have a web business that generates at least $100,000 a year in profit.

You want your business to be pretty much self-sustaining. You don’t want to have to worry about handling orders, maintaining inventory or shipping products – you just want the site to generate at least $100,000 a year.

Is this still possible?

The answer is yes, but only if you follow the right strategy.

By ‘right strategy’ I mean one that eliminates all the potential negatives of running a web business while capitalizing on the most profitable aspects of this type of business.

For example, the first negative to eliminate is the selling of any physical products, which you would have to maintain in inventory and individually ship to customers. While it is true that some businesses have found success selling physical products from web sites, making a profit this way can be difficult (ask Amazon).

Another negative to eliminate is any low cost product that requires your hands-on support. For example, if your site sells low priced software that your company has developed, along with a support package for that software, you may find the costs of providing support far exceed any revenue generated from sales.

Removing just these two negatives will eliminate the two most common problems faced by commercial web sites.

Emphasizing the Paths to Profitability – Real ways to make money working online

The second part of the ‘right strategy’ needed to generate your $100,000 is to build a web business in which every aspect takes advantage of the strengths of the internet.

For example, a part of your strategy should be to recognize that, for the most part, people use the internet to search things out – either solutions to a problem or products to buy.

For that reason, your web business should be tailored around the idea of helping people find the solutions or products they are looking for. When they do find those solutions on your web site you should in some way generate a profit in return for the service your site has provided.

Here’s an example:

Model of Success

According to recent reports, there are over 300 million web sites on the web. At least 90% of these sites are hosted by commercial web hosting businesses.

Unfortunately, many people with web sites are dissatisfied with their current hosting service and would like to switch to another host. Because of this it is conceivable that at any given time 20 million or more people are looking for a new web hosting service.

That creates a pretty big opportunity for any site that provides reviews and recommendations of hosting services (and yes, there are plenty of these sites already).

The way these sites make money is simple – they have an affiliate arrangement with every host they review or rank. Every time a visitor to the site clicks on and does business with one of the listed hosts a small affiliate commission is generated for the site operator.

Imagine a site that ranked the top 100 hosts on the internet (within 10 different categories so each host becomes a top ten within at least one category).

Furthermore, imagine that the top 100 hosts site gets 1000 visitors each day. Imagine that out of these 1000 visitors, just 10% click on affiliate links leading to a host provider.

If the affiliate commission provided by the host were $30 (which is common with hosting services), and just 1% of the daily visitors to the site signed up with a host, the site would generate $300 per day in commissions.

And $300 a day works out to over $100,000 in annual revenue.

Building Your Own

While researching this article I found over 40 different sites that were using this same business model to make money online.

Several were ‘top hosts reviewed’ sites. Others also offered reviews on things like ‘eBooks’, ‘affiliate programs’, ‘merchant accounts’ and other products or services where affiliate programs existed.

The review sites themselves were quite professional, but most contained fewer than 50 pages and most would have 10 product reviews (with affiliate links) on each page.

The majority of these sites run on auto-pilot, requiring little or no intervention from the site owner after their initial set-up.

Promotion is achieved primarily through search engine optimization and, in some cases, search engine advertisements.

The Magic Carpet to Profits?

Are these kinds of sites always profitable?

Absolutely not. In fact, unless the site has a look that instills confidence in the visitor, these sites can be just another dead-end for the internet entrepreneur.

However, the risk in running these kinds of sites is small. Other than the time it takes to create the web site itself, there are few costs involved with running this kind of business. (The annual costs to host a ‘review’ site as described above can be as little as $100 a year.)

Considering the small overhead and the large profit potential, it is a wonder that more of these ‘review’ sites don’t exist.