Make Half a Million Dollars by Starting Your Own Website Business

I love success stories. In this one, a guy started an online dating website from nothing and turned it into a big business. The details:

Markus Frind found launched his free dating site, PlentyofFish.com, in 2003 from his home in Vancouver, B.C. The site, which began as a side project for the full-time web developer, "grew by a few thousand people within the first few months," he says. After signing up with Google's AdSense to host ads on the site, he reaped more than 1,000 Canadian dollars in the first month. A year later, as love-hungry users flocked to his site, that monthly figure jumped to more than 41,000 dollars.

How's that for a cool half million a year? Maybe someone reading this today will be inspired and start their own business that will be even more successful than this one.

Of course, it's difficult to develop such an idea. So for the rest of us, there are more tried-and-true ways to make some extra money.

Comments

[10803]

Umm... that's half a million a MONTH now. The guy is bringing in about $6 mil per year. And works about 4 hours per week.

[Kyle]

Million Dollar Homepage is still the best internet money-making idea of all time.

[7million7years]

In the old days entrepreneurs would rent a shop, hang our their shingle and start to sell stuff to whoever walked by.

Now, the Internet is the lowest cost, lowest risk way for anybody to try and start a business so that they can increase their income ...

More income = more investments

More investments = rich

If you follow this age-old formula, the luck of having a $40k a month idea or just a $400 a month idea just affects the timing of WHEN you will get rich.

[Minimum Wage]

How do you start a money-making website if you don't have web development skills or money to hire those skills?

[DK21]

If Minimum Wage spent half as much time expanding his/her skills as commenting on this blog, they'd be in a lot better shape. It's gotten to where I play a fun game with myself guessing whether it was Minimum Wage or not when I read a snarky comment.

[Kristi]

My husband is a go-getter and I love that about him. In the beginning of our marriage I would get frustrated that he was messing around on the computer trying to come up with an online business. However, five years later that "messing around" has contributed to me being able to stay home with our kids (one of our sites has more than replaced my income) as well as a good chunk of money in savings.

Two things my hubby always tells people about starting online businesses: 1)It's rarely ever get-rich quick. It takes time, effort, and persistence. 2) Don't spend more money than you're already making on your venture. Time and time again we see people fork over tons of cash to start of a business they have a great idea for only to find out that it wasn't such a great idea. We have tried many different ideas before finding those that made money and are so thankful that we didn't waste tons of money in the process.

One more thing, just a bit of encouragement. Anyone can do it! Before we were married my husband could barely turn on a computer. We had no money to our names and made just over minimum wage doing what we love most, ministry. Through books and online research, he basically taught himself all that he knows about coding, seo, and the rest of the ecommerce world. In the process, his excitement rubbed off on me and got me on board. If we can do it, anyone can!