I figured I'd share my "how I got started story", some long term plans, and the path I'm currently going down in regards to my online ventures. For me, it really started a couple of years ago when I threw up some google adwords on one of my websites really with the goal of providing a few more relevant links for visitors to my B&M site that might not be geographically close to me (it was a budding industry, so I was ranking pretty well for general terms even though I was local to So Cal). The business ended up not working out for various reasons, and it turned out that I could make a decent amount of passive income by leaving the site up and adding adsense to all the pages. It wasn't huge, but it was enough to get the wheels spinning in my mind. I started to think towards other niches and how I might be able to scale the same idea to something that might provide more traffic and therefore more revenue. When I did that, I saw success, but I ended up a little bit jaded as far as the real scalability of the business model - as my initial solution was not repeatable and I foresaw problems with the kind of content that I was building, and how much value I provided to visitors. I toyed with a lot of ideas - from building a ton of MFA sites, to building a small amount of inter-related sites; buying and improving the revenue stream of existing sites; various product development efforts, etc. Probably all the things that have crossed your mind. In the end, I decided that the best thing to do was to build myself a quality infrastructure and map out plans for promotion, content development, site building and management, and scalability. There's a lot to be said for "Just fucking do it!" but try as I might to liken myself to that mentality, I consistently held myself back on ideas until I could see the forest through the trees. I think a lot of paths that you can go down end up being paths where the revenue stream is inconsistent and heavily dependent on SEO magic that may or may not work out for a guy. I fear that using a single anecdotal SEO tactic would render an entire network of sites useless insofar as revenue generation, so I held to the attage that content and repeat visitors matter most and everything else is secondary. Choosing this path meant that I ended up losing out on a good deal of revenue - doing a lot of background work with no immediate payout, but the end result being the ability to repeatedly achieve consistent revenue streams in a manner that offers near linear scalability with manpower, software, and server power. The end solution is obviously still eluding me - else I'd be starting one of those "How I made $10,000 in one month" threads. Instead I'll be posting a different kind of thread later this year - "$12,000.00 in 2 years and how to get to that level in a month and a half, repeatedly, and grow your income exponentially" Or maybe I'll be selling a few sites in the B/S/T section You never know.