Who are your heroes and role models ?

[Kyle]

michael - You remind me of incka. Perhaps you aren't learning anything new because Chris's latest articles aren't tailoring to your level. What do I mean by this? Well look at the websites in your signature. Nothing about them strikes me as quality. Plus they engage in practices Chris certainly would disagree with, like interlinking completely unrelated projects. You are in it for the money FIRST, which is a bad place to start. Most young people, like myself when I got started in 1996, did it for the fun/passion.

Chris mainly tailors to long term, focused webmasters.

His blog posts are the most valuable. They are often indirectly motivational, and provide unique SPECIFIC publishing ideas. Most webmaster blogs don't release specific topic ideas.

michael - Where's your long term site? Where's the site that shows your passion for creating?

Let's have a look at what Chris has publically shown us...

- Many examples of public domain content manipulated into unique, high quality sites.
- E-commerce sites on something as niche as swords, doing extremely well (if your remember his vague yet specific forum posts regarding cbswords success).
- Affiliate/commission success, although limited and up/down.
- Now, one product ecommerce ideas.

He shares everything with everyone...

I don't know of any other webmasters this successful at producing QUALITY, unique ideas who share this much. It shows his confidence in his established sites, and not afraid of competition from copycats.

Your signature shows me that you have learned nothing from Chris...

[ZigE]

I definitely respect chris for what he has achieved with all his websites. And how he has offered a decent platform & valuable information for anyone looking to get into the web business (I have learned alot over the past few months from this site).

Where he could have easily just pondered along doing his thing, this is a small community, but god, look at forums, like digitalpoint, where there just seems to be mass of absolute degenerates.

[Kyle]

I definitely respect chris for what he has achieved with all his websites. And how he has offered a decent platform & valuable information for anyone looking to get into the web business (I have learned alot over the past few months from this site).

Where he could have easily just pondered along doing his thing, this is a small community, but god, look at forums, like digitalpoint, where there just seems to be mass of absolute degenerates.

Or webmasterworld... where a thread starts with "anyone noticing fluctuations on Google?" then its followed by 3981982 replies of people saying "YES I AM!". "ME TOO!!!!" "OMG ME TOO!!!!!"

[michael_gersitz]

michael - You remind me of incka. Perhaps you aren't learning anything new because Chris's latest articles aren't tailoring to your level. What do I mean by this? Well look at the websites in your signature. Nothing about them strikes me as quality. Plus they engage in practices Chris certainly would disagree with, like interlinking completely unrelated projects. You are in it for the money FIRST, which is a bad place to start. Most young people, like myself when I got started in 1996, did it for the fun/passion.

Chris mainly tailors to long term, focused webmasters.

His blog posts are the most valuable. They are often indirectly motivational, and provide unique SPECIFIC publishing ideas. Most webmaster blogs don't release specific topic ideas.

michael - Where's your long term site? Where's the site that shows your passion for creating?

Let's have a look at what Chris has publically shown us...

- Many examples of public domain content manipulated into unique, high quality sites.
- E-commerce sites on something as niche as swords, doing extremely well (if your remember his vague yet specific forum posts regarding cbswords success).
- Affiliate/commission success, although limited and up/down.
- Now, one product ecommerce ideas.

He shares everything with everyone...

I don't know of any other webmasters this successful at producing QUALITY, unique ideas who share this much. It shows his confidence in his established sites, and not afraid of competition from copycats.

Your signature shows me that you have learned nothing from Chris...

Good post. The quality of my sites in my sig is not a good representation of my business as a whole. Acctually, they are not a representation of anything, except for 5 hours of free time I had one afternoon when I made them. I have been here for 4 years and know whats on the tizzy. Just bought my second dedicated today for a huge project of mine that will send me into retirement hopefully!

I do not like your line about how he shares everything with everyone. This is not true. And it cannot be. His list of websites has had the same basis for a few years, and I know he has plenty of them in the works and has a few running in the shadows that no one knows about.

[Chris]

My list of sites has been the same because I've instead focused on some big projects that had been cursed with slow developers. I've also spent the last year redoing many of my sites (such as this one).

But really? compared to any any person out there I'm as transparent as a window.

[Kyle]

What difference does it make if Chris doesn't show _everything_? The amount he does show is not only a large complete list, but a varied list on many different topics/project strategies.

I would guess, if Chris were to start online-literature.com in 2007 as a new site, he'd probably keep it quiet until it grew and got established. Once it reaches an 'escape velocity' where competition is not much of a concern, then he'll let everyone know about it.

[Generalissimo]

After reading this thread and being on this site since almost the very beginning I've come to the following conclusions:

- A hell of a lot of people lie about their success in order to gain followers and make money. I think possibly Mook Jon and others mentioned might be doing this. I'd trust Chris on this issue.

- Making sites that you don't put effort into won't make you any money in the long run. Making sites that have potentially a reasonable audience that you put a lot of work into and keep legit (I've been stupid enough to do some tricks with Google Ads that got my site banned from their advertising network, something which will effect long turn profitability) you should make a reasonable amount of money. Making tiny sites as part of a get rich quick scene will leave you vulnerable and in the long run, poor.

- Chris is completely transparent. A few years ago, when Chris would be described as a hero by myself, I did a massive search for extra sites he wasn't telling us about. I found google-watch-watch, which isn't a site designed for making money off, and one other one that wasn't designed for making money.

- And finally, no one, not even Mr Gersitz, should have ever had me as a hero. What I was doing was nothing out of the ordinary, and the money I was making was not very large. My sites were not very original. My posts were largely like his have been in this thread (if not worse), and I generally annoyed everyone. I even fell for the putting images above google ads is legit con and got my major site banned from AdSense. No way am I someone to look up to as a hero.

If your new to website publishing here is my advice: read Chris' articles. Find a topic you are interested in and has a large potential audience. Make one site for it (perhaps making a few smaller ones just to promote the bigger one on the same topic). When that site is making you more than $50 a day, perhaps diversify and make another similar site. Don't do what I spent a lot of time doing and make tens of small sites based on affiliate programs, AWS, tiny amounts of wikipedia content, etc - it will get you no where. The success I had was mainly with one site, that site is still paying my rent and living expenses even if, because of the lack of effort I've put into it because of education, I haven't put much work into it in the last year.

Nice to be back and to see people here haven't changed

[Kyle]

Nice post Sean.

[AshS]

Andy H, reason why i started making my game last year when i was 14 because his game truly made me think i could do it to and well now its kinda getting going it really cool!

If you read this Andy then you've made me release i can do something with myself an be good at something i sucked at everything else! Cheers dude.