Success Stories of the Online Business

In the past, people who get rich and become successful are normally older than the present batch of millionaires or even billionaires who make money based on information technologies. The past was known as the industrial age where people make money by conducting brick and mortal businesses, which usually involved substantial start-up capital and needed much longer time to build up the businesses and get rich. The average time to success could be more than 20 years. In the information age, many people become billionaires in their 20’s or 30’s, some even in their teens. The time to success in the information age could be as short as five to ten years.

Henry Ford was 40 years old when he founded the Ford Company, by the time the successful Model-T was introduced in 1908; he was already 45 years old. Dale Carnegie, the famous writer and motivator in the last century, he was 49 years old when his book How to Win friends and Influence people became bestseller in 1937. The pioneer IT Company, IBM or the big blue was founded by Thomas J. Watson in 1924 as he renamed his former company Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation into International Business Machine. He was more than 40 years old when he went on to build IBM into a giant IT company, which is still one of the leaders in the IT sector.

Comparatively, the current richest man in the world, Bill Gates was a 17-year-old teen when he first started a business with Paul Allen, making traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. When he founded Microsoft in 1975, he was only 30 years old. He became the youngest self-made billionaire in American history the following year, and by the year 2000, he became the richest man in the world at the age of 45 with a net worth of $46 billion! The time to become rich was becoming shorter with the advent of the Internet and the web, where more and more businesses are conducted over the Internet. Jerry Young and David Filo founded Yahoo! when they were critical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University in 1994. Within two years, the company was able to raise $33 million through its first initial public offering in 1996. It remains as one of the most successful Internet Company till today. Yang was 28 while David was 30 at that time. However, its success was eclipsed by Google, the biggest search engine in the Internet. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and it was incorporated as a privately held company in 1998. The company managed to raise $23 billion in market capitalization through its initial public offering in 2004. Both founders were only 31 years old at the time. By the year 2009, its market capitalization reached more than $180 billion, making it one the largest corporation in the world! It is currently ranked 150 in Fortune 500. 

Benefits of online business-Freedom

Operating an online business let you enjoy that kind of freedom that traditional brick and mortal businesses can not offer. You can choose your own working schedule that is ultra flexible, you can even do your business in your pajamas or while watching TV or engaging in any kind of leisure activities. Virtually there is no time constraint. You are 100% your own boss.

You can enjoy this uncommon freedom is because you can run an online business on automation, especially if you are selling only digital products. Digital products such as e-books, software, music, songs, video clips, recipe, information, reports, formulas, newsletter, pictures, photos, paintings and the likes are downloadable and do not require physical delivery of the products, even order processing and payment can be completed online, thus free up time for online business owners to concentrate on building the core aspects of the business. 

Downloadable Products

In the previous post I've mentioned downloadable products, what are they? Downloadable products are products that have been digitized . They can be uploaded and transmitted over a telecommunication network such as the Internet, and then can be downloaded by any user of the network.

One the best digitized products is e-book. Anybody with a reasonable good writing skill can write an e-book and then sell it over the Internet. If the book is well written, the book will sell like a hot cake and you can earn passive income at the comfort of your home. I have written three e-books and they are selling quite well by my own standard.

What to sell online?

There are many things you can sell online. In fact, what you can sell in the traditional brick and mortal business, you can sell them online.There are advantages and disadvantages of both types of businesses. Personally I think the online business have more advantages than the offline business. The biggest advantage of an online business is its global reach. By engaging in online business you are able to sell your products to the whole world. The beauty is you can do it even though you don't have big capital!

Another advantageous aspect of an online business is that you can even sell certain kind of products that don't need physical delivery, they are the downloadable products.. You can operate this kind of  business from home, earn money while you are sleeping, just like what I am doing at the moment. Basically what you need is a laptop and a broadband connection.  So, what do you mean by downloadable products? Let's dwell deeper into the topic in my next post.

Ideas, Ideas everywhere......

Some people think that getting business ideas is a very difficult task. However, as a matter of fact ideas might just appear from deep down your subconscious mind, or you might just come across an idea by listening to people's conversation.

The other I had lunch with an old friend and who is a dancing coach in a social club. As it has been a long time we have not met, naturally I was curious to know what he is doing right now. You know what did he tell me? He is making some money through the Internet, and he even has buyers who come all the way from overseas to look for him. And he is already in his 60s! But he is doing something many younger people were not able to do. 

You guess what is he selling? As I've mentioned earlier his interest is dancing, line dancing to be more specific, his business is selling dance steps created by him. To be more accurate, he is selling his own line dancing guide book through the web.

It was a very fruitful lunch for me having learned a new idea. Initially I thought you need to be IT savvy in order to start an online business, but in actual fact is you don't have to. You can just think of something related to your interests and it can become your online business. My interest is computing so I created the computing website and selling my own e-books. If you are a chef and even a housewife who is good in cooking, you can sell recipe online. 

So, start thinking of new ideas today and tomorrow you might become a successful online entrepreneur!

Steps in starting an online business-part 1

Business means selling products and services, whether brick and mortal or online. Deciding what to sell online is the single most important process you have to go through!


You might want to ask where and  how to get the business ideas? Experts may suggest a few ideas generation methods such as brain storming, the Delhi method, focus group and problems inventory. Yes, while you can still use these methods, it is time consuming and not suitable for an online home business. 


For online business, the best source of ideas is the world wide web! Do a search in the search engines for online business and you will get billions of related links. From those links you should narrow down your search to those websites that match your interests and skills. For example, if you are a doctor by profession, you can create a website that provides medical info as well as promotes medical services and products. For a teacher, you might want to build an educational website that guides parents how to teach their kids at home, and you can use the website to advertise education products and services. Besides, you can also build a website based on your hobbies. I like computer and programming, so I created Visual Basic Tutorial website more than 10 years ago. Now it is ranked top in Google search and it is generating a steady and substantial stream of  passive income for me.


What do I sell to enjoy such income? How to market my website? I will share with you my experiences in future posts. 

Factors of Success in online business

Before I discuss the actual online business, let me share with you a few critical success factors to become successful in whatever thing we do,including the Internet business.

The other day I read a book by Zig Ziglar, an American top motivator. In the book, one of the quotation summed up what it takes to become rich. The quotation says" The profile of a wealthy person is this: hard work, perseverance, and most of all, self-discipline".

Yes, to be successful , you need to work hard, persevere and have self-discipline.However, working hard is only at the initial stage, once your online business is up and running, it literally runs on auto-pilot and generates passive income for you. Perseverance is also very important at the initial stage, don't give up when you don't see positive cash flow for sometime. You have to keep on adding contents and market your business until your website ranks high in the search engines. When you reach that stage, money just keeps pouring in.

Off course you need a lot of self-discipline to be sucessful in online business. Managing business at home might makes you lazy as you are living in a very comfortable environment, there is no one to push or motivate you. The only person that can push and motivate you is you yourself!

Okay, will tell you what to sell next time.

Starting an online business

Starting an online business is much easier than a brick and mortal business. Online business offers a few advantages over the conventional business. Some of the advantages are:

• Zero or small start-up capital
• Easy accessibility  to global market 
• No time and space limits

Usually you don't need a big capital to start an online business. If you know how to design webpage yourself,you might just need to pay for the domain name registration and hosting fees. Domain registration fee is around $3 to $20 dollars a year and hosting fee might be only a few dollars a month. These fees are really nothing compared to a normal shop, where rental alone can come to a  few hundred dollars a month!

As Internet connects everybody in the whole world, doing business in the virtual world means you have global reach in the online market! Even a niche market is infinitely big at global scale.

And the best part is you are not bounded by time and space . You can conduct your business anytime anywhere as long as there is Internet connection. The products and services can automatically sell themselves 24 hours a day, even while you are fast asleep or enjoying a vacation.

Then what can we sell online? That is the topic for next post, right now I 'm going to take a nap while I let my Internet business runs at autopilot mode.

Starting a business-offline and online

Starting your own business is a very good idea because it can increase your wealth. However, starting a brick and mortal business is not an easy task. First, you must think of an idea. You can get ideas from your hobbies, the existing products in the market, the existing companies in your surroundings(take a walk down the street and observe the things they sell) and more.

Next, you sit down and write a business plan, which includes what you want to sell(products or services), the business objective, the name of the business and more.

Then you can discuss your plan with a consultant, preferably an accountant or businessman. After that you must decide what type of company you wish to form, whether sole ownership, partnership or limited liability company.

One of the most important aspects of the business is the source of finance, how much financing is it coming from your own pocket, and how much from loans, and where to obtain the loans, either from banks or other sources.

Last but not least, you must consider the location, which means you need to do a survey. There are many more things you need to do before you can actually start a business, but the aforementioned steps are the most basic ones.

However, there is an alternative to the brick and mortal business, that is the online business. Starting an online business is much easier, you can bypass many of the above steps, and with much less capital too. There is no location problem as you can work from home, and the market is global! 

Can you make money online?

Traditionally, to get rich by doing business, we need to sell some physical products or services. To do that we usually need to buy a shop, set up a  factory or rent a a building, and set up all necessary equipments and facilities. On top of that, we have to invest money to buy raw materials and maintain the inventory and pay the employees. All these need substantial initial capital outlay. So, not everybody can start a business, most of us end up as employees, working for other people whole life and never have a chance to get rich!

Fortunately, the advent of the Internet technologies changed all that. Now, almost everybody can earn some money from the Internet, part-time or full time. Some of us can even become a millionaire. The reason why anybody can start an online business is because we don't need a big initial capital to start a business, we can even start with ZERO capital! I repeat, ZERO capital!

But you may ask "What products can we sell online?". I will tell you in the coming post.

Think and Grow Rich

In the previous post I was talking about virtual assets which can be acquired or created completely free or with very little capital..You might wonder can virtual assets match physical assets in terms of financial value? You can be rest assured that not only virtual assets can match physical assets in terms of financial values,they might worth much more than physical assets.Great examples of virtual assets are software created by Microsoft, social networking website like Facebook, online video streaming center like YouTube and search engines like Google and Yahoo! all worth billions of dollars.

In this information age, people are getting rich faster and at much younger age. Many of the new found billionaires today are in their 20s and 30's, and most of these people become wealthy by creating virtual assets based on Internet or Information technologies. Most of these billionaires have one thing in common, they are very creative and innovative, and started their businesses while in their high school or college years, and used very little initial outlay. Their greatest asset is their brain, they generated great ideas by using creative thinking.

Years ago I read a book called 'Think and Grow Rich" by Napolean Hill which gave me great inspiration. He wrote this book based on his research on a number of successful people who created great wealth in their lifetimes. Although this book was published  in 1937, I think it is still relevant in this sophisticated Internet age. According to Hill, great ideas can be conceived through thinking, and those ideas might bring you great wealth! In this information age, converting ideas into wealth is even easier and faster, often required only a PC or a computer notebook, or even with a cell phone! HOW? I shall share with you in the coming post.

Virtual Assets

Most people struggle to earn enough money to fulfill their needs and wants, let alone enjoying financial freedom. In this time of financial and economic crisis, the situation has become more severe. Many people are jobless and they have to do odd jobs just to survive.

The problem exist simply because majority of us don't know the art of financial management. Not many people keep track of their household income and expenditures, and they always end up spending more than necessary, and accumulate more debts than savings. In fact, most of us find that we will never save enough!

To step out of this vicious cycle, we need to master the knowledge of financial management. Financial management is not as difficult as most of us think, it simply involve the management of assets and liabilities. Assets are something that we own that can generate monetary value while liabilities will cost us money. For example, if you are getting rental from a real estate property, and you are making a profit out of it, this is your asset. However, if the rental from the same piece of property not enough to cover the maintenance and mortgage payments, it becomes your liability.

Acquiring a physical real estate is not easy, you need quite a bit of initial capital outlay. Besides, you need some investment knowledge too, otherwise you will end up losing money. However, I'm not talking about physical assets here. What I want to highlight here is something call Virtual Asset. The beauty of virtual asset is it doesn't required big initial outlay to acquire, it can actually be created for free! You will sure ask me: HOW? OKay, I will explain it in the next post.

Creating wealth

Most of the people in this world are employees. They work very hard for the bosses but they can never get rich. In order to get rich, you need to venture into business. However, you may have this doubt in your mind: How to start a business without capital? Can you really start a business without money?

Yes, I agree with you, you need capital to start a business, because capital is an economic factor. However, does capital means money? In the conventional business world, capital is money. For me, capital has a new meaning in this information age, it means KNOWLEDGE! It is the big K that's important in business, that's why the economists call the Internet economy K-economy.

With the advent of the Information and communication technologies, you can create something of value by using your brain. With a little creativity, you can conceive great ideas that might help you to build a big business, with literally zero or very little initial monetary investment. A couple of young men in their 20s or 30s have become billionaires in this manner. For example, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook is only 25 years old! So are the founders of Google, Sergie Brin and Larry Page, both are only 36 years old.

So, it is all in your mind! According to the author of Rich Dad, if you choose to be rich, you will be rich and if you choose to be poor, you will be poor! And it does not take money to make money! So, you must start changing your thinking from now, unless you prefer to stay in your comfort zone.

In the next post, I will share with you my experience on how to create earnings and better still virtual asset out of sheer ideas and a little hardwork, without or with very little initial capital outlay.

Can you get rich doing online business?

Is it possible to become rich by doing an online business? The answer is a big YES!!

The other day I read a book on Investment by Robert Kiyosaki. This book offers very different view from most of the investment books, the author says that it does not take money to make money! Then what it takes to make money? It is all in your mind! Can you get rich without a penny? Yes, according to the book. I was wondering how at the beginning but the answer becomes clearer as I read on, it has got something to do with the present information age.