For the publishers making bank...

[deronsizemore]

How did you start out publishing? I know we've all heard the old saying "Its takes money to make money". I'm wondering if this is true for most in the web publishing field? I mean for the ones actually making a good living doing what they're doing...not the ones just getting a few buck here and there from it. When you first started publishing sites did you just start out with little or no money and try to build with what you had, or did you already have a little cash in the reserve to put toward advertising and promotion, etc...

Cause I love the idea of publishing sites, and I think I've got a few ideas now that could make me some money on the side. Probably nothing that I'd quit my job over, but you never know what the future holds...I just don't have a lot of extra income to throw into my ideas, so would I be wasting my time publishing without putting money into it?

[moonshield]

I sold a few domains for a few thousand dollars.

[Chris]

I started with little or no money. In fact before my sites started doing well my bank account was down to $600.

[Mike Hunt]

I started out with barely any money. One time (years ago) I barely scraped together enough money to pay the server bill ($100) to keep everything going. That was the real fish or cut bait point. It's been a long long road pretty much figuring everything out by myself (and paying attention to those smarter, more knowledgeable, or more successful than I).

[Todd W]

Started with a couple hundred in the bank, and was relying on a site to cover my server bill at $90 a month. It took me under a month to have that covered, and from there on no looking back

[deronsizemore]

Ahh...some success (or what sound like) stories. It's nice to know you all were not all millionaires before you decided to get into publishing! Makes those like me have some faith!

[Cutter]

This is definately the business where it doesn't take money to make money... but once you know what you are doing, you can do great things with that money.. if you don't know what you are doing, it doesn't matter how much money (all those busted dot com stocks as an example)

[ozgression]

I started with a donated domain and donated hosting (in exchange for helping a guy with some design stuff).

[r2d2]

"Its takes money to make money" is one of the worst sayings there is. With a $1000 used computer and an internet connection, anybody can make money today.

I started with a domain and some cheap hosting, and before long, income is more than enough to cover expenses.

[michael_gersitz]

started with a free online forum... ups and downs ever since...

[Emancipator]

started with a small movie site, and dirt cheap hosting. Once I had enough to pay for a ded-server i moved up.

[James]

http://maxpages.com/cheatsandhints was my first site. The next site I built was http://angelfire.com/co/tntcheats/, which was... 1999?
It earned $45.00 over the period of two months.

[Cutter]

Nice animated gif

Its hard to forget those days when every other website had the same animated gifs. I remember that face and the animated flames particularly well.

[chromate]

I started with less than nothing -- it was all on credit. You can start a successful site for as little as the hosting (less than $10) + initial domain name ($2.88 for a .info). It doesn't take money to make a successful site, it takes know-how and effort. Don't let expenses put you off, unless you're really against the wall.

[Westech]

As Chromate says, you can start with a cheap shared hosting account and by the time you get enough traffic to need to move to a larger account or a dedicated server you should be making more than enough money to pay for it. If not then there's something wrong with your business model and you need to re-examine it.

It seems to me that being successful at publishing websites takes more time than money.