Ok I've been floating around the internet for a long time. About 5 years ago I finally started looking into all these claims about making money online... most of it was pure BS. Just a pile of people sucked into the game where a few vultures took advantage of a large pool of idiots. Now I can't say all of them were idiots. A few actually did manage some small successes, me being one of them. Now when I say online success I mean it was not what was promised. Basically I made a small income eventually trickled in for a while. Talk about work though... jeez. I spent countless hours building website niches and polluting them with everything I could think of to write about on the subject. I had adsense going on my sites and some affiliate marketing with amazon mainly. So fast forward to today. Only two of the sites I built are still around and they only produce a tiny income trickle every now and then. I stopped writing as it was just too much work for the $ created. I might as well went out and pumped gas or something for the hourly wage I was getting. Now of the two still doing a small trickle every now and then they were the two niches I had some interest in. One of them was infogenie.org and the other is topxboxkinectgames.com. I keep them as a reminder of those days of woe where I worked into the late nights sometimes past midnight while having to wake up at 6 am to go to work.
Out of all this chaos I have had one good thing come of it. The realisation that every entrepreneur needs to create an online presence. No matter what your business is online or offline an online presence is important. Now by online presence I mean a specific setup. You need a website and some social network platforms along with a software like mail chimp (free for 500 signups) or aweber or some other email harvesting system. This set up will create what I call a tribe. This tribe knows you for whatever it is you do in business and are able to be communicated with by you directly... this is so powerful. I have been in the manufacturing business for 25 years. There was no internet around when I started up my business. It would have been much easier if there was. So take a word of advice... create an online presence even before you start your business(s) , as it will be a great advantage each time you launch a new small business or other project.