When it comes to making money online, you have the best opportunity of making the most money with a product that you own the rights to. My recommendation is to create a product that can be completely delivered online, preferably without your involvement as this is probably your best bet at making a consistent and significant profit online.

For instance, BuySellWebsite.com is a great example of a service product delivered online since among other things, BuySellWebsite.com sold classified ad listings to people wanting to sell their website businesses. Just to give you an idea of how powerful this can be, I’ll walk you through the steps of creating this database from scratch, with no programming knowledge.

To start, I need to give a brief explanation of how BuySellWebsite.com operates. The website accepts classified listings and then displays them on its website for users to search. The pages are set up similarly to eBay’s with a number of listings on each page where you can click the hyperlink to read more about each business for sale.

The database for BuySellWebsite.com ran most of this site. This is fantastic because it’s like having an additional employee for free. After successful payment, the database took the listings, inserted them into the database, rotated the ads properly, deleted old listings, processed renewals, retrieved lost passwords and allowed users to update their listings.

The classified listings we sold were sold for $99 and cost essentially nothing to provide. Whether we sold one or one thousand, it still cost the same small amount of time and money. Since the database basically ran the website, this is why having one is so valuable. Note: I sold BuySellWebsite.com in 2006.

How did I do this? Employ a database.
When a person wanted to place a classified ad, they clicked on a payment button to start the process. We used PayPal as our merchant account provider (more on PayPal later). Once payment was made through PayPal, they were redirected back to our site where they could fill out the ad listing form that was then automatically uploaded to the site and rotated into the active listings through the database I created.

The database also allowed users to retrieve lost passwords, delete old ads, update their listings and track how many times each ad was viewed. A database can be your best friend and hardest working employee. It might sound like a complicated process to set up, and it can be, but I built it entirely by myself using my web design software’s Database Wizards. (I use Microsoft Expression Web; there will be more on web design software in Chapter 4.)

What does this mean? It means I built the entire database by going through a ‘wizard’ that asked me questions about how I wanted my database to operate, then Expression Web wrote the database code for me! This is an incredibly powerful tool. By learning the Database Wizard, you can eliminate having to pay for a database designer.

Virtually all people who work with Web developers find the process very expensive and incredibly difficult to get what they want. Most people fail to make it beyond trying to design their site because it becomes too difficult to continually explain what they want and then they run out of money. The more you are in control of your website, the better off you’ll be.

Author: Nelson Bates, Author Best Website: Simple Steps to Successful Websites
Please visit www.BestWebsite.com for step-by-step instructions to building profitable websites.