I am looking to make a living online (40,000$ a year)  I can work 40+
hours a week.  I have strong computer skills, server administration
skills, graphics development, some web developlent, etc.  I just want
out of the office rat race and I want something that I can basically
do from home.
I am looking for the following requirments:
a. Legal
b. Available in my area
c. Reasonable start up costs, less than 10,000$
d. Has the real potential to make at least 25 to 30 
   thousand dollars the first year with hard work.
Basically I am looking for someone to recomend some web sites that I
have a reasonable chance with in terms of what tere online business is
( i.e. you should use www.joes-work-at-home-selling-fruit-on-e-bay.com
because there are 125 people that have used his site and they all made
35,000 last year)  The mre details the better.

Thank You!

Freelance web design? The market for that is horrible at this point,
but with your set of skills and the amount of money you're willing to
invest in startup capital, that's about all you're left with.

If you're willing to risk more money, you could start up an ISP, or
run a subscription based website. Pornography, if it isn't against
your religious beliefs, is really the only reliably profitable venture
online. There's a lot of it for a reason.

HI,

hmm....  Freelance web design....

Ok well here is my backgroud:

In 1996 I started a dial up ISP, ran it till 2000 -- merged with
another computer, because dial up is almost dead in the area, in my
opinion.  I stayed with that company and ran the ISP until about 4
months ago.    So I triend the whole ISP / Web design business.  What
I found is that most people that do web design either suck or they
have a team of like 10 people, they make awsome web sites and there
basic sites start at $5000+.  Now nothing against the type of web
site, that a single person can put together, but I just have not been
quite able to figure out how to market it in my area.  People seem to
either want the $99 special or they are actually willing to hire the
high end design firm.

What it comes down to is that I would be willing to do the ISP thing,
or the freelance web thing is I could figure out a nich market to sell
in.

I would also be happy to do a porno web site.  But where do you get
the photos from without stealing them or finding people to take the
photos of???  I could proboly come up with a couple people to take
photos of, but I am not sure I could find enough to make a whole site
and to keep it going.  I though about doing one of thoes sites where I
put up a ton of links to other sites from my site and try to get
people to go to other sites and signup, but I am not sure how well
that works.

One the plus side,  I have free web space and bandwidth (enoguh to run
about 20,000 to 30,000 hits a day depending on the content, and I can
double the speed I have available for another $80 a month).  Plus I
have great options for more cheap bandwidth in my area!  I run my own
server and I use the bandwidht I have available on my DSL.

I though about doing web hosting, but everyone wants everything with
support for $5.95 a month, and it just isnt worth being on call 24X7
for 5.95 a day.  Even if you dont offer 24X7 support you still have to
monitor your system 24X7, because people get pi**ed off when something
they are paying for is down.

Sorry to go on and on... any additional comments questions, thoughs
are more than welcome.

Thank You.

Jamie Dolan

If you're interested in getting into the online porn industry, here's
a story about how one guy got into it, what kind of money he made, and
where he got the content:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/29/9314/1484

"I've "dabbled" in internet porn previously. I wrote widely used TGP
and CJ scripts, and ran a TGP that was getting appx. 50k unique hits a
day with a conversion ratio (one sponsor) of 1:500 at $5/pop. The
internet porn industry is very saturated, so how could I get those
kind of numbers? It's called niche porn. Target your audience and they
will target their money. But I doubt they tought you this at porn
school. Of course, providing tips and tricks to adult webmasters is as
much of a niche as ebony anal. You're a consumer."

If the above comment posted on the web site that was referenced in the
last post is correct, does anyone have suggestings on the "Niche"
Markets that I should shoot towards?

What are the current legality issues regarding Porn and the "Must be
18" Disclaimers? In the USA

hosting:
"Once you've created your TGP, you have to upload the pages and images
to a web host. Of course, this is not as simple as you would think
either (noticing a trend here?). You can't use a regular web host for
this kind of thing. Bandwidth requirements run upwards of 10GB/day and
even a slow day is going to be around 1GB (on average, for a 150KB
total size TGP submitted to 40 TGP Lists). Even if it wasn't against
geocities acceptable use policy, they wouldn't want you anyway.
Regular commercial web hosts are no good either, as you'd be hard
pressed to find a hosting company that would want you, at an average
of 300GB/month without wanting a fortune from you. Fortunately, there
are a number of free hosting companies out there who specialize in
adult web hosting. They will usually give you unlimited bandwidth,
storage space and (hopefully) great uptime. In exchange they put their
banner ads at the top and bottom of your TGP. Uptime is particularly
important, because even 5 minutes of downtime can mean being
permanently blacklisted from a high profile TGP list. There are a few
commercial hosts that will do this for a price, without the banner
ads, but there's not much point in using them, as the extra banners
are expected by TGP List operators. Yet another problem- free hosts
come and go, like anything else on the internet. Every TGP has a list
of free hosts which they have banned, usually due to problems with the
hosting quality, or shady dealings with the banner ads (virtual girl,
and any kind of popups are considered particularly evil). The host
you're using today might be banned tomorrow (I used to use
Bestsexhost.com)."

Well I can push about 2.5 gig's a day right now, and 5 gigs if I
double the speed of my connection.  This is still a LOT of traffic. 
Does anyone have any experiance with these numbers?  Does a small site
still end up running up around the 10 gig range?   For example:  a
site with say 15 rotating images and 3 or 4 banner ads.  If you use
optmized images - say 20 - 25 k each, * 15 images plus misc stuff each
visitor users about 350K give or take.  That means that at 10 gigs you
are talking about 30,000 visitors a day... Could this be right?  This
sounds like a ton of traffic?

How much advertising does it take to generate this kind of traffic? 
How long does it take just using free listing in search engines to get
this kind of traffic?

Did anyone here make any money with a site like this?

Thanks to everyone for comments and help!!!!

Re your: "I though about doing one of thoes sites where I put up a ton
of links to other sites from my site and try to get people to go to
other sites and signup, but I am not sure how well that works."

Don't bother.  Do you ever follow those links and buy anything? 
Neither does anyone else.

Good luck with your porn niche :-)  You're going to have to work hard
and spend $$$ to beat the competition, and every niche has lots of
it...but it is where the $$$ is.

Check out http://make-a-living-online.com/ for non-porn suggestions. 
Of course, if it were easy to make the amount of $$$ online that
you're talking about, everyone would be doing it.

Also, have you checked out places like eLance.com?

Check out the discussion on online phone card businesses at

https://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=25872

https://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=104453

Sounds like a good deal to me, if you can make it work.
-dannidin