How To Make Money On the Internet

In my opinion, the wisest words ever uttered by any tech entrepreneur are these:

"Make a good product and sell it for money." - DHH

It amazes me that we reached the point where those words were practically heretical. I think that the entire concept of "monetization" is a relic of the dot-com bubble and deserves to die in the same fire that consumed "burn rate". I am strongly of the opinion that if you don't know how you're going to make money, it's not a business - it's a hobby. We've been blinded to the most basic principles of business by a handful of companies that made billions by accident. You might get lucky, but luck is no way to run a business.

There are certainly lots of opportunities to make money on the Internet, though, only few do get it.

The point is to find out a niche and value your market, predict if it's going to make a ROI or not. Then work on it. You may need programming skills, you may not (copywriting, design, affiliate marketing...). However, the more skills you have the better, and the cheaper you'll bootstrap your business.

Persist. It won't be that easy and you may have to wait for months to get results.

And yes, this is really an amazing thing, to make money from the Internet, regardless of your location, language, country or education level. You are your own boss, you enjoy freedom and also an unlimited potential of income.

I've been talking with friends about founding a company and we disagree on which direction to go.

I'm going to use this chart to figure out where we each stand and how close/far from each other we are. It looks like it'll be great for that.

That was so well-drawn that I kept waiting for it to be funny but it never delivered.

Surprisingly i found that flowchart somewhat informative.

At the end of the day, you still have to:

1) Make/sell a good product or service at a reasonable price

Or

2) Be really, really good at convincing/tricking people into paying for your product/service

If you do both 1 and 2 well, you're going to do well. Just one, and you'll be okay. If you're just mediocre at both, then good luck. Competition is fierce in the basic product/service sectors on the Internet now that the barrier of entry for anyone setting up an Internet business is so low.

I think it would've made more sense if "services" was combined with "support" as a sub-bubble of "sell stuff."

so you either (1) sell something, (2) give something a way and monetize indirectly or (3) do something illegal.

That list primarily covers B2C. There is a whole set of options in the B2B market it never touches.