While the field is no longer the domain of those who approach it as amateurs, yet there is scope for everyone who is willing to bring a certain amount of professionalism and patience to their work online. Moreover, developing a business-like attitude towards the venture will further ensure that adequate attention is being paid to the work at hand.
A brief summary of the variety of online activities in which regular folks find success follows:
Information websites/Blogs/Vlogs: Probably one of the most common wealth building techniques online is to create an informational website or blog or video log (vlog) that slowly builds content and traffic (through natural search). Monetization of the traffic is through advertisements from Google AdSense or Yahoo!. Other monetization techniques include becoming an affiliate for merchants/vendors who sell a product or service related to the site. Furthermore, developing an e-mail list to which some of the new content is sent on a regular basis can be monetized through advertisement placements in the e-mail message. Good information sites can pull in north of $10,000/month, though the average successful site pulls in revenue closer to $1000/month.
Pure affiliate sites: These are websites that are very specifically directed towards potential customers of specific merchants with whom the website owner has an affiliate relationship. The site does what can be called as a "soft-sell", helping the visitor realize the need for a certain product or service, and finally, pitching the affiliate vendor's service as an ideal solution to the problem. Strong affiliates develop revenue in the $10,000-$20,000 range - but it requires a lot of work to earn revenue at that level. However, once established as a hard-working affiliate, future opportunities follow you. This is different from an information site, where every new site has to be begun from scratch.
Membership sites: If you have specialized knowledge about a field that has market demand, you could charge visitors for that information. This is the notion behind membership sites where members pay a small sum every month for access to your site (say $10/month). A few examples are restaurant.com, bmyers.com, artisticthreads.com. The income potential here is in the neighborhood of $40,000/month for successful sites. It is extremely simple to fail here because of the availability of so much free information on the Internet. So choose your niche carefully before launching into this area.
Product sales: You could develop your own products (DVDs/CDs, paintings, furniture, dolls etc.) and sell them over eBay, Amazon and your own website, or, alternatively, sell someone else's product and simply drop-ship the item from the supplier's site to the customer's address. In both these situations, the actual sale of the product is happening between you and the customer, and thus you must be prepared with customer service and support. This is different from the affiliate relationship in which the product sale continues to be between the merchant and the visitor, and you get a percentage of the sale. Income potential varies widely - but you can generally expect to sell 200-300 units of each of your own products, and significantly more when selling a brand-name product.
Site building company: You could choose to start your own company that builds websites for others, or builds membership sites for others. This requires technical expertise in the available technology for building websites, and often can be time-consuming. If you choose to enter into this area, you will need to niche yourself and seek a certain segment of the market. This work brings you into big league, where failure rates are very high, and rewards can be huge as well.
Playing with the Big Boys
There are other ventures, which need your involvement full-time, and often venture capital support, in order to succeed.Developing a niche Search Engine - say searching medical websites only, or electronic stores only, or other hobby based search engines. Obviously the depth of technical skills needed and the marketing acumen, money and patience required are large - but the payoff can launch you into the big league all on its own.
Travel booking in a niche area - say, specializing in international travel. Most international travel that requires more than one leg of travel continues to be dominated by agents, since they can consolidate the tickets and produce a single, lower fare. This is one niche area of online travel that is very fertile. Additional areas may be to focus on top tourist destinations only and provide with the best fares and associated service. Becoming a Pay-per-click expert - This venture requires multiple years of study and a close relationship with Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Competition is intense, but the services remain expensive. Moreover, this is often not an area that a merchant wishes to specialize in - so they do seek outside expertise - thus market demand is high. The challenge here is to establish credibility, and develop reference accounts. The pay-off, as expected, can be phenomenal.
Information Summary Provider: This service seeks to reduce the information overload that all of us suffer from. Providing a summary of the latest news, views, books and magazines in a niche area will overcome a long-felt need. This will be similar to the Executive Book Summary series provided by a few firms today. Selecting the right niche, and marketing and quality of service will be the differentiators in this task.