It requires quite a lot of effort and money to get started, and planning is definitely important with it. Making the necessary calculations to be sure that you can manage a year or more without really making any money from your business is something that any starting offline business has to do. This means that you have to have a years rent, and running expenses like water, electricity and so on before you even start the damn thing. If you can manage for more than one or two years, it is likely that you are going to make it a good and profitable thing.

Depending on the type and size of business, initial investments usually range from $10 000 all to way to $1 000 000 – although small businesses aren’t usually started with the latter amount of money. If you start your own store you need to have it at a good location to get customers without investing too much money on advertising, if your store is located somewhere where it is hard to find, no-one will come by even if you spend a fortune on advertising. Good locations cost a lot of money, and if you want to have your own small store, you are going to spend about $2000 a month on rent alone at a decent spot. Multiply that by twelve and you have your first years rent. Feel free to overestimate your water bill, electricity, book keeping, advertising, to be sure that you make it. It is not going to be the best way to get money without doing shit, unless you have a revolutionnary business. If you are going to sell clothes in NYC, you are off for a rocky road, but if you are starting a dentists practise in Nashville you are most likely going to make a fortune without effort.

Making money online has the exact same problems that a real business has but if you haven’t been planning starting a real business you don’t even realize it. I started my online business about a year ago, and at first I was doing it by building websites on free blog hosts. These are like the shops at a crappy location and basically no-one will ever find them unless you do some serious advertising or kickass SEO – and some people won’t even come then. They see that you are hosted on blogspot, and they avoid it like the plague. So if you want to have your website looking like it’s the real thing you are most likely going to need to get your own domain for it. This is not necessary though since most internet marketers are actually looking to look a bit unreliable so that the customer will get the heck away from their “shop” – click out through an ad or just close the browser. If you are going to sell affiliate products you need to convince the visitor – customer – and for that you will most likely need something else than a garage sale. So for one online store you are going to need a hosting account and a domain name. The latter will cost you less than $10 per year, and the hosting will cost you just about at much as you are willing to pay for it. It is like investing in the foundation of your house – the more you are going to add floors to the building the better foundation you are going to need. Starting with a crappy shared hosting account will most likely get you started, but I can bet that once you have more than ten websites, you will find a reliable reseller hosting account like the one on the sidebar there, a lot more useful. Also since you aren’t working in someones basement they can’t kick you out if they don’t like the way you handle your business.

The difference with an online business is that you don’t have so much expenses especially if you know your game. Choosing the right domain name, doing some SEO will get you far, but with online stores the conversion rate is always going to be a lot worse than with offline ones. If you take time to go to a store in your town or nearby, you are most likely going to buy something anyways regardless of the price – unless you are a woman and you are going to shop for clothes. Online stores have a lot of visitors who don’t buy anything because they are just there to do a quick price comparison or see if you have the exact product that they are looking for. Offline stores sell a lot more per visitor but also have a lot more running expenses. Online affiliate product websites sell even less and the comission that you are going to get is marginal compared to the amount of money that the company paying you is going to make.

Making money without investments is possible if you do it online – well at least with minimal investments – but if you are going to start a real business then you are most likely going to have to take a loan and spend a lot of money to get started. This is by far the biggest reason for so many people trying to make money online, but also the fact that everyone seems to think that you can do what the fuck you want to make money online, or not do anyhing at all. If you are going to game the system – SEO – then you have to be quite certain that you aren’t making it too obvious. Building websites simply for the purpose of displaying Adsense – owned by Google btw – and gaming them on the top of Google – owned by Google btw – search results is like stealing a Police car.

Last week a famous MMO blog got deleted from blogger and deindexed from Google search results and the MMO crowd got wild with speculations. At the same time Ben reported losing a $100/day worth of thin adsense sites, and the soup was pretty much ready. Griz was the first to blog about this and I intended to write something about it then, but was pre-occupied with some “real” stuff.  What do I think that happened? It was a coincidence that Ben and Alan had simultaneous problems. I think that Ben got a visual review for his account for hitting a specific daily earnings limit, and since he wasn’t doing anything against Adsense TOS, he didn’t lose his account, but G thought that his sites weren’t valuable enough to be kept in the index, because quite frankly they were most likely a perfect example on how to game them. I just read about a finnish nutrition blog that got flagged as spam last thursday and the owner got a “your blog is spam” email. He complained about it and got it back and the e-mail in his gmail account disappeared. Maybe they did some updates on their spam monitoring at Google, and that blog got flagged because it was updated frequently, and got a lot of natural links – forums and other “spammy stuff”. Who knows!

The point of this is that you can make money online without investing a lot of money, but don’t be a cheap bastard and try to get everything for free. Get a hosting account, and a few domain names, and you are still spending a lot less than you would if you were running a real offline business.

For you guys who are asking me in the comments how my snipers are doing.. There are no problems with them – at least not yet. I always inteded to spread them out when I got them up and running, and I am slowly adding more posts and making them more and more unique. Also I am removing adsense from some of them that don’t make too much from it, and trying out other stuff to see what converts. I have a lot going on right now as I am negitiating deals offline, and trying to get some online work in there as well.