This is a bit of a long post, but I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read and respond. It would seem to me that there are two methods for the average joe to make money on the internet these days. The first is to create content-based sites with ads surrounding the content. The second is to open an e-commerce site and either sell or drop-ship products. Obviously, the ad-based sites can only rely on the worthiness of their content and the ad revenue will be slow to trickle in at first. The money coming in with an e-commerce site might be more, but the investment in time and money up front will be more and the ROI will be a big question mark for awhile. The issue I'm wondering about is whether it is really worth it to build and maintain an e-commerce site vs. just writing articles and blogging and watching ad revenue generate. With e-commerce, there are so many integration issues, legal issues, payment gateways, new products, inventory management, order management, customer service and so on. With content sites you avoid almost all of these issues. If you really know what you are doing with web technology, you can do web design, web development, web promotion, web hosting or whatever; domain reselling, white-hat, black-hat and so on. I'm guessing 99% percent of the users on this forum --including myself-- can manage some or all of these. But what about the folks just getting their feet wet? I know that I am oversimplifying things as there are plenty of Cinderella stories around (my favorite is the relaunch of babyfans.com). But these seem to be few and far between in a net over-saturated with e-commerce sites. It's possible to succeed, but a lot of knowledge, experience, trial and error went into making it happen. It doesn't seem quite as much of a struggle if you steer the other direction. Pages/threads that back me up on this, or at least give cautionary tales: Dot Conned - E-Commerce for the Little Guy 101 Is e-commerce worth it for the little guy any more? But I'm looking for your opinion and experience. Is e-commerce OR ad-based content the better bet for someone just starting out?
Another very affordable and easy way is to start your own webhosting company. As for ad-revenue I would pretty much cross that off the list right now, I've heard stories of people who have made around $200 per week of revenue at max. Never have I seen anyone that is making over $1k per week or anything like that. I would more lean towards an e-commerce store. The income is a lot better and your business grows and grows whereas an ad-revenue can only reach so high before it pretty much stops growing. Of course it is going to take a lot of work, but what job doesn't these days? I've spoken with quite a few people that actually make a living off just their single e-commerce site. And who says you can't chuck in a few ad's and content here and there for some SEO and revenue? Just my opinion.
E-Commerce business became really competitive these days. If you don't have enough money or establishment to backup the business better not take that route.