When people think of starting an online business, usually the first thing that pops into their head is to sell either a physical or digital product or service - for example, books , ebooks or web design services.

These can all be profitable businesses, but they are not truly hands-free income.  Selling physical products requires order-taking, packing and shipping, customer service, and some refund or exchange processing.

The same goes for digital products or services - there is always a customer involved in the process demanding more and more of your time and effort.

Neither of these business models are truly scalable without adding more and more people to the equation.  The more stuff you sell, the more people you need to hire to ship it and work with customers.  Take a look at Amazon.com and their huge distribution centers being built all over the place...

I've come to the realization that I value free time over money - time to spend with my family, golfing, hanging out with friends - whatever you're into.  I believe that being tied down to a business (even though it's YOUR business) 10 or 12 hours per day, 7 days a week is not life is all about.

So how do you run a business online without products or customers?

Here's a brief outline of the strategy, and if there is enough interest in this rough idea, I may write a full-fledged ebook about this process and set it up on autopilot using PayPal and a few custom scripts I've come across.  If you like what you're about to see, and would be interested in an entire book about it, send me an email at joe.kowal[AT]gmail[DOT]com - if I get enough emails, I'll start writing the book.

The crux of this strategy is building sites filled with tons of content about any subject you happen to be interested in.  You can also write about stuff you're not interested in, but you will soon find that it seems more like a chore than an exciting business.

Once you have some good content, you apply to the Google Adsense program and start posting ads on your content pages.  These ads will be selected by Google to match your content.  You also apply to SearchFeed, as they have a similar type of program that involves text ads.

When visitors to your site click on these ads, you get paid.  The money flows into your account and then gets deposited to your bank account automatically.  Hands-free income.

Once you get enough pages and sites generating this type of passive income for you, you can just kick back and make money all day long while doing other things!

My advice is to NOT kick back for a while.  Keep banging out the content and the sites until you seem to have much more income coming in than you really need.  This will give you a cushion to fall back on in case a few of your sites get jostled around in the search engine rankings.

I could go on and on about the specifics of this strategy - where to place the ads for the best click thru rates, how to make the searchfeed ads seem like "real" content on your site, which site themes are the most valuable in terms of advertising dollars...it goes on and on!

So, the next time you're thinking about creating a new business, make sure you consider these ideas first.  You may just end up with some automatic money machines and lots of free time to enjoy life.

Online Business Ideas