Hello Everyone

[mark2000]

Most of my career has been in the hospitality industry, first serving as a GM for a couple of hotels and than heading a small hotel firm in Central America. As we were a small outfit, and needed to maximize our marketing effort with little money, I taught myself internet marketing around 2000 (read Corey Rudl's course, plus others). I applied this knowledge to the hotel sites in our firm and had very good results, especially due to the ignorance of our competitors regarding marketing effectively on the internet at that time.

Right now I'm an independent investor looking for business investments that do not require much time of mine to run. Ie, that are basically absentee businesses. Although I've been around enough to realize that this is a very hard trick to pull off (at least in my experience), my reading about muse businesses in Tim Ferris's blog (4 hour work week) and other testimonials, has me curious whether I can start or preferably buy a site that is highly automated and - truly - only takes that famous claim 'less than 5 hours a week to run'!

I'm glad I found this forum. I've had difficulty in getting the real skinny on internet investing, etc., and in just a couple of days of looking over the posts here, have learned a lot and feel like I'm connecting with a forum of legitimate, serious, businesspeople and related.

[crabfoot]

Welcome! The answer to your musings is that it is entirely possible to build/buy sites that provide passive income, and if you have the skills to market them your field is one of the best - commissions for holidays and hotels are much better than for a lot of other niches.

In today's market it is considered opinion that relying on just one site is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Do you have writing skills or site building skills? We always ask questions of new people, it helps us to help you ...

[Kay]

Hi Mark

Welcome to Experienced People. It's not easy to find these websites which offer a passive income for not much work and when a good one does come up, it seems as though there's a lot of competition to get it. Would you consider going down the route of something similar to being a Dragon? (Dragons' Den is a TV prog where investors put up some capital and some mentoring in return for equity.)

I hope you enjoy EP and find it useful.

[Clinton]

Nice introductory post, mark2000. If only every new member took the time to make a post like that! I feel we know you already.

May I add my welcome to these forums.

[mark2000]

Thank you all for the welcome!
In answer to your questions, I write clearly, but don't have a flair for it. As for site building, I did use Dreamweaver several years ago but haven't done anything since than. I would though be comfortable using content management software, and doing basic site management if it was required.

My tentative idea right now would be to buy a promising site of the kind I mentioned and build it up using outsourced graphic, copy, seo, coding, etc..

I hadn't heard the term "Dragon" before but it sounds similar to Angel startup investing? That's certainly interesting to me as well.

Along the lines I've seen in many of the posts on these forums, along with the features I mentioned before, I'm only interested in selling great products and/or content that truly helps the buyer, with full guarantees etc.. I'm willing to 'pay more' in order to have that quality.

I live in Boca Raton Florida and it's about 11pm here so will say good night! Thanks again.

[KenW3]

Mark, Welcome to Experienced-People.net.

I hadn't heard the term "Dragon" before but it sounds similar to Angel startup investing? That's certainly interesting to me as well.

Dragon's Den is a TV show that originated in the UK. Here in the states, it is named Shark Tank, and the third season just started tonight on ABC. Tonight, they had a ghostwriter from California wanting to start a business and two women starting an online company, plus a couple others. It's a popular business show because it is often filled with great ideas from interesting entrepreneurs.

There is also a Dragon's Den version aired in Canada. The investors are called Dragons in the UK and Canada, and here they are called Sharks due to the difference in names. Those three are about the only "reality TV shows" I enjoy, but there is one new one worth a look. I am also finding Shipping Wars interesting. Shipping Wars is about companies that bid on moving loads over at uShip.com and then details their final bids (the winning shipper at uShip is the lowest bid to a customer), what their cost of doing business was for the shipments, the trials they faced, and then details expenses and shows how much money they made.

I'm glad I found this forum. I've had difficulty in getting the real skinny on internet investing, etc., and in just a couple of days of looking over the posts here, have learned a lot and feel like I'm connecting with a forum of legitimate, serious, businesspeople and related.

We are also always glad when like-minded business-people find E-P You will find members here that are very helpful. There is a lot to learn in business, and everyone is at different parts of the learning curve. This can take a lot of study, but is worthwhile. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

I never could get used to DreamWeaver. It was just to complex, but FrontPage was okay, and this allowed easier adaptation to Microsoft Expression. You don't need either of those programs to set up web sites, though, and can start with something like WordPress. WP has content management built in, and is very much like a word processor with a few extra features.