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

won’t hear your first KaChing right away. You’ll still have to stock the site with content, plug in the systems that will pour in the cash, and let people know you’re around. That will take a little time. But it won’t require any skills more specialized than the ability to press a mouse button or choose an option in a drop-down menu.
     
    It wasn’t always like this. Although the Internet was always meant to be a place that anyone could use and anyone could build on, for a long time that really meant anyone who had the patience to read a programming manual the size of a shoebox.
     
    Today, the Internet really has met its promise of being a truly democratic space. Those with a desire to earn and a willingness to learn as they go can have the beginnings of a profitable online business in minutes.
     
    Usually, that takes one of two forms.
     
    The traditional method has always been to create a web site from scratch. You bought a domain name from a service like GoDaddy.com , rented space on a hosting service, and placed the domain on the host’s server. Then you used a special program to write the code and upload the pages. Whenever users entered the address of one of those pages in their Web browser, your page appeared on their screen.
     
    This is still how most web sites work. It’s how most of mine work. Doing it all manually provides the greatest amount of flexibility. But it’s a little tricky, as it takes time to learn—or money to pay someone who already knows how to do it—and it’s no longer necessary.
     
    Web developers have made complete templates available to anyone who wants to use them. The prices vary. Some companies offer them for free; others charge thousands of dollars for a template that’s unique, easy to customize, and filled with the latest Flash animation.
     
    Whichever option you choose—and both types are no more than a quick search away—once you’ve bought your domain, all you have to do is upload the template and fill it with your content.
     
    Alternatively, you can also use a content management system like Joomla! or Drupal. These are free programs that act as a kind of storage system for web site publishers. They sound frightening, but they’ve actually simplified web publishing enormously. Once you’ve taken the first leap of buying a domain and placing it on a server—a process that will take even the newest of publishers just a few nervous minutes—they’ll allow you to add articles and use modules and extensions to place all sorts of preprogrammed goodies, such as RSS feeds, sidebars, and automated storefronts, on your web pages.
     
    The first steps might feel a little strange. But once you have even a basic web site up and running, you won’t be able to stop. You’ll be experimenting and playing, and in no time at all you’ll have become something of a web development expert simply because you’re enjoying it. It happens. And it happens because it’s now so simple.
     
    Web site templates might have taken the sweat out of design, but there’s an even easier and faster way to get on the Web. When Evan Williams, who would later go on to help create Twitter, launched Blogger in August 1999, he continued a process of simplification that cracked the Internet wide open.
     
    A blog (short for “web log”) is a very simple type of web site. Instead of having multiple static pages, the content on blogs is updated regularly and displayed in chronological order. That keeps readers coming back to see what’s new. Older content gets buried but can be recovered from archives and by using searches based on keywords and subjects.
     
    The benefit of blogs has always been their simplicity. While you can now upload all sorts of content, including video and real-time Twitter streams, writing a blog is not much different from writing in Microsoft Word, then saving it on the Internet so that everyone can see it. The attraction of a blog is always the content. If you can say