jayeff

I know everyone starting out wants to believe the fairy tales, but Paul's post is the one to which you should pay most attention. Even in this business, which still enjoys a very favorable supply/demand ratio (and as someone has said, 5+ years ago, "money grew on trees"), failures still dramatically outnumber successes.

You may work hard for long hours if you are successful, but that is not enough to make you successful. And now that easy money is the exception and not the rule, taking the advice about copying someone else's business model will guarantee that any success you enjoy will be modest at best.

Anything is possible, but being possible doesn't mean it is likely. And what you do, not statistics, is what will determine your future.

Wanting to be successful is part of it, but not enough. Choosing porn (or anything else) solely because other people have been successful with it, is lousy reasoning. Hey, "I can do that", is not enough: you need to see something unique which you can bring to whatever market you tackle. It doesn't have to be unique in a big way, a small twist can be enough. It can be something visible to which your customers will respond, or it can be behind the scenes, something which allows you to work quicker or cheaper.

Sometimes the market and your skills or talents are such that you don't need to be different, you can be better than the majority. The point is that without something to separate you from the crowd, you face lots of established, experienced competition, head on, with nothing more to offer than your labor. Labor is the cheapest, most available commodity around, so if that is all you have, you have almost nothing.

By all means grab an existing business model to use as a vehicle for your ideas, but once you know it well enough to use as a foundation, stop focusing on what other people do and apply your own ideas. Almost all the advice you get from others will be misguided, out-of-date, self-serving, even deliberately misleading. You have to learn to trust your own judgement and work to your own standards. Those standards need to be ones to which your customers will react favorably and unless you are selling products or services to other webmasters, webmasters are not your customers.

Hero-worship is a major factor in this business: avoid it like the plague. Either someone has something you can sell or they don't. You will not make one cent from their board reputations nor the parties they throw and if anything, you should be extra critical of the people who work hardest at keeping a high profile, programs which offer outrageous prizes and the like. If you are going to be an affiliate, check out every tour with a very critical eye, first as a surfer (would it make you buy?) and if that looks okay, go back and look again as an affiliate (are there traffic leaks? do all the links carry your referral code?). Recurring income can be excellent, but very few sites are good enough to keep their members for long and these days it is common for poor programs on limited budgets to go this route. So if a program offers recurring income, buy a membership and check out the member area. If you cannot afford to do that, at least refer to a couple of the more reputable review sites. Otherwise stick with pay-per-sale (and learn the difference between pay-per-sale and pay-per-full-membership).

The same rule applies to designers, scripts and content providers. Use your own judgement before parting with your money. And yes, traffic is gold, but most people trying to sell you traffic are offering you the grit left after the gold has been washed out.

Whoever you work with, don't tolerate poor service. If you have to chase a sponsor to reply to a question, or run after a designer to get a site finished, that is eating into your time. If you are a solo operator, time is a precious and limited commodity and there are plenty of alternatives to those who do not work professionally. Don't flog dead horses and learn to recognize whether bandwagons are headed towards or away from you. This is still a young business and it is constantly changing. If you do not make change a part of what you do, you will be left behind. Put your eggs in a few baskets to spread your risk, but not too many: once you have found a few sites you can sell, learn how to sell them better.

Etc. Etc. And good luck