KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays Read Free

multi-million-dollar Internet business.
     
    By the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have all the information you need not just to create a successful online business—that’s easy—but to create an online business that makes the most of all of the Internet’s most powerful revenue-generating opportunities.
     
    That’s not a one-off KaChing ring. It’s a constant chime that will accompany you as you continue to grow and develop your online business.
     
    Let’s start by looking at just what those opportunities can bring.
     

1
     
    The New Web Order—How the Internet Has Brought Opportunity to Everybody
     
    My first KaChing moment was not a pleasant sound. It was more like a thud than a ring. It wasn’t the tinkle of a bell, and it wasn’t even the pleasing sound that the cash drawer makes as it opens.
     
    It was the sound of a cardboard box landing on the kitchen table.
     
    But to me it was sweet music.
     
    The year was 1994, and I’d already been playing around with computers—the simplest kind, the type that are less powerful than today’s MP3 players—since 1980.
     
    Of course, when I say “playing around” what I actually mean is “playing.”
     
    I’d had all the right intentions when I bought my first computer. I’d looked at the manual that explained how to create BASIC code and tried to write a few simple programs. I even got the screen to show “Hello world!” and felt very proud of myself. But I also discovered that to play a game all you had to do was stuff a floppy disk into a slot and wait for the program to load. That was so much easier and so much more fun.
     
    I never did learn programming. In fact, I can’t code my way out of a paper bag. I leave that to those who are far more knowledgeable and talented in that arena. However, I have always had a love for computer games.
     
    Games cost money, and back in the mid-1990s, I had the sort of income that meant every penny had its place. My career until then had consisted of a mixture of disc jockeying at weddings and bar mitzvahs and selling encyclopedias door to door. I couldn’t really justify feeding my hobby with every new game that came out. That was when I spotted my first computer-related business opportunity.
     
    It happened while I was reading reviews in a computer games magazine. I realized that the reviewers were getting their games for free. They got to play all the new games, and they didn’t have to pay for any of them. I liked the sound of that. I was all for getting free games, especially if all I had to do was write my opinion of them afterward.
     
    But I didn’t have any writing experience then, and I couldn’t see a magazine hiring me to write reviews—even in return for free games—just because I liked playing them. So rather than hit the phones and hear a series of rejections, I created my own games magazine.
     
    The Dallas Fort Worth Software Review was never the most popular publication in the world. Some of the early editions might even have had a readership of ... one. Two if a friend came over and happened to pick it up.
     
    But when I called the software companies, told them I was a writer for the Dallcas Fort Worth Software Review, and asked if they’d like to send me review copies of their new games, one question they never asked me was how big my readership was.
     
    In fact, the only question they asked was, “What’s your mailing address?”
     
    When that first game was delivered to my door, and I laid the box on the kitchen table, I knew I’d had my first success. It wasn’t money. I still hadn’t made a dime. But I had a plan, the plan had worked, and I was off and running.
     
    Soon games were pouring in from all the major software companies, and I didn’t have time to play them all, let alone review them all. So I put an ad on an Internet bulletin board system—there were no forums back then—offering free games in return for reviews. That meant the games could