I wonder how long until us regular people cannot make money online

The internet can be compared to real life in a lot of ways, similarities that I will not get into in this topic. However if you think about the old days where people would sell food or ran mom and pop businesses in their town were successful. Then the big corporate Walmarts came and took over, and customers choose Walmart instead of the run down mom and pop store. So the same applies/will apply to the internet where Google, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. will run the whole net and all of us small people will no longer make good money. I keep telling myself that I should just get a regular job again, but I keep putting it off. I am doing well with my business, but it sucks waking up and not having a clue how much money you are going to make at the end of the day.

 

Mom and pop businesses are still making money across the world. Sure there are cases were 'Walmart' took over, but there are a lot of mom and pop supermarkets in small towns where there is no Walmart (or something equal).

And the similarities also do not hold completely for internet companies versus offline companies; for one they are much easier to set up and they take a lot less resources to run (usually).

So with the web people are only limited by their creativity, while in the 'real world', the limits are more often than not money related. I don't think the time will ever come that one cannot make money online unless 'online' goes away itself.

 

Oh I am glad you brought that up since it reminded me of another point that I left out. Yes in real life some mom and pop businesses do well due to location, however on the internet every site is just a click away.

So one person with a web hosting site can compete with Hostgator, a company that has pics of their beautiful building filled with expensive servers and 24/7 200 staffed employees while offering cheaper prices? I don't think so.

 

A lot of the Internet giants were started by regular people, so I think there is still hope for the rest of us.

 

True. A lot of successful Internet businesses were started by people in their own homes with very little money.

 

very true... just takes determination and teamwork, motivation, and don't THINK you will succeed... KNOW that you will!


(and don't be lazy!! lol)

 

How long does it take for the regular mom and pop businesses to cover the initial investment? If a regular business has a good location it might start making an income from day one, but the location, advertising, furniture, stock, etc costs money and it takes a long time before you make that money back.

The same thing happens with online business, if you want to make money you have to invest in a good design, advertising, ppc, seo, etc. If you do it properly you'll start seeing an income from day one and if you provide a great service/product you'll make your money back in "no time".

If you start an online business without making a decent investment, unless it is really something out of the ordinary, it probably will never make any money unless you have some SEO knowledge and put a lot of work into it.

 

I would think that the Internet has actually leveled the playing field for mom and pop. Since, they don't need to fret so much about their location. All they really need to do is the marketing (which they have to be good at anyway) and be able to translate that to online marketing (or just broaden their reach with offline marketing).

Plus, almost everything online can be automated so mom and pop and go home to jimmy and sally earlier instead of tending the storefront.

 

Why would you want to compete with HG? You are talking about making money online for us 'regular people'; competing with HG is not really something you would want to do on that scale. I know a ton of hosting companies that have WAY worse service than HG (and I think HG is really really bad in many ways) and still make a lot of money while not competing directly with HG. A lot of them started out very very small.

It's a free market and you can compete; all great companies did at one time; no-one expected miniscule company Microsoft to beat one of biggest companies in the world IBM, still they did. Hostgator themselves as small company beat huge companies, Godaddy did as well; Rackspace did as well; most now big companies beat other much much bigger companies at the start to get were they are now. This is not new.

The example you give is a weird one though; who, in their right mind, start out, as 1-2 guy business without investment, with the thought of beating HG? No-one. You start out with the thought of making a nice living while not listening to the barking commands of a boss. And making a nice living and much better than nice, is within reach of every internet business that's being slightly creative. Making something like $100k/year is something that is not that hard and will never be that hard if you have the right frame of mind.

I'm aware everyone here thinks they have to be millionaires; bad news; statistics are stacked against you; you most likely will never make that. What's wrong with that; having a nice business and making a very nice living is nice as well, don't forget that. And I don't see much difference between now and 30 years ago in that respect.

Edit: Ofcourse Location still counts for most businesses. Businesses in your town would rather do business with a hosting company around the corner than with HG. Try it; even if you are 10 times (or 100 times as I know some hosting companies) more expensive, they will pick you over HG any day if you make the effort. The world got smaller but for 'real' companies making 'real' money who are not IT companies it is location that matters. Like for instance a company making metal sheets for industrial engines I have around the corner here; they are hosting their static page site where they are selling *nothing* online; only information, on a ~$2000/month dedicated server. Or a real estate agent hosting a simple PHP site with almost no traffic on a $250/month reseller account. And both are very happy with that.

 

Hypothetically Speaking you could! You could start with a couple of servers and lots of room to grow, buy the servers and bandwith as you need it and make sure you rent a space with a back up generator. For the staff you don't need 200 to start, you'll only need you, your partner and a couple of friends willing to work 12 hours a day for a couple of years until you can afford to outsource the live support service to India.

For the customers you'll need to learn SEO or get a company/individual to join your venture. There are several million searches a month for hosting, web hosting, etc. If you play it smart and start targeting realistic easier to rank keywords for the first year or two you could get your brand noticed, start making an income and have cash on hand to upgrade your servers and bandwith.

After a few years of hard work, you'll be able to outsource your support staff to an offshore company that has more than 200 employees 24/7. By this time it would be easier for you to rank in the top ten for the really the competitive keywords and just by being in the top 3 maybe you won't outgrow hostgator but you could be making a killing. The key is to be persistent and never stop.

Just to give you an example look at Webhostinggeeks.com, it was registered in 2005 and look where they are in 4 years, I'm sure that they make a really good income only referring customers to web hosting companies.

The sky is the limit, you can make as much money as you want online. It all depends on the amount of work you are willing to put into your business.

 

Yes, but timing is everything. If another site like Myspace or Youtube came out, people would just say "oh, it is just like Myspace" and not join it. Plus if you re-read my post you will see that I am not referring to now, I am stating that in a few years after every niche is covered on the net, pretty soon the dominate corporations will control everything. Especially if the government adds more tax laws and regulation to a point where the regular person cannot afford to host a site, like it is so expensive to run a business in the real world.

I was only using HG as an example of a great company that customers are confident to buy from due to their good reputation, compared to a new site that people accuse of being unreliable only because it is a new site.

 

People always think of new things and some people don't like massive. Like a lot of countries have their own 'myspace' or 'facebook' clones which, in that country, is more successful than the big ones. And all is very dynamic; people don't like change when it is inconvenient or difficult, but on internet changing habits are not that hard.

And even when changing is hard; take enterprise software; there are only a few systems for running companies and most companies change their systems every bunch of years even though it is essentially pointless and costs millions. That'll never change I don't think.

 

the advantage 'mom and pop' will always have is that they can move fast, and try things that larger corporations wouldn't dare.

 

"Google, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. will run the whole net"

Google actually already is considered to have been running the whole net, but we all know that, google only show results from other websites in their search engines. They do not show their own sites in search results. So I guess, we small site owners will have little bit of business in the future too [I hope so]

 

What biz you're on?
There are many way to make $$ online that big boy such as G cannot offered such as programming/design/SEO.
And this job will be left for us regular people to do it.

 

microsoft is planning to compete with google,lets see what they bring in the market

 

Of course, one of the problems might be outside entities getting in our way. For instance, I live in New York, and because they're forcing affiliate programs to collect taxes on any sales I make, I've had a lot of affiliates drop me. That impacts me, to a degree, and if others follow suit, there go my business opportunities.

 

or whether their new thing get good response or not.

 

you will never make money online

 

Yeah... For the past 5 years... They put billions of $ in Live search to 'compete' and that got us... Live search. The pain...

And now with cloud computing which is, in their case, nothing new so far, just some way to add to the ongoing cloud hype. And then online apps; besides hotmail/live mail they're doing depressingly bad in that space as well.

But yeah let's see what they'll 'think of next'.