A tried and true tactic to making money has been to build something from scratch and then sell it to the highest bidder once the going gets good. Just look at all of the mergers and acquisitions that go on in the business world; this should give you an idea of just how much money is potentially at stake for you. You could sell a small business to Google, for example, and net yourself $1.6 billion.

Taking the ‘real-world’ example and modifying them to something you can do in your spare time is pretty easy, conceptually. With all things, however, you are going to need to dedicate time and effort to making things work, grown, and prosper. It won’t be easy, but you can do it.

If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s a huge marketplace for websites on the internet. More than one, actually, but this post was inspired by an auction currently going on at the sitepoint marketplace.

This auction is for a premium, well established, monetized, popular website. Minimum bid: $500,000.00. Small fries need not apply. This auction caught my attention because I’ve used that site in the past. It also caught my attention because it’s being sold for at least half a million dollars.

So how can you build, market, and sell a website for a profit? The principle is easy: Build a site, build a following, then sell the site. Now, as webtrepreneurs, we all know that quite a bit of effort is required to make things work out. Starting this week, we will explore these 3 topics: how to build a website, a community, and finally, how to sell the website for a profit. Be warned: you will need to spend a few bucks to try this, but it takes money to make money.

The methods that I will teach you are tried and true; I’ve built a few sites using this plugin and the sites have already paid me back nicely. Bring a good attitude and a business spirit and get ready to jump on the online money train!

Are you interested in making money online? Then stay tuned and sign up for my RSS feed. We’ll do this step by step so that by the end of the series, you will have a website that you can build on and get it ready for sale.

Way back in 1963, J. S. Adams established the “equity theory of management”. I find his theory a bit obvious and extremely applicable to entrepreneurs and all sorts of business minded individuals, but I want to discuss this theory with you today.

In short, the theory “attempts to explain relational satisfaction in terms of perceptions of fair/unfair distributions of resources within interpersonal relationships” (1). Very simply put, this theory says that there is a tie between what you feel you are worth in a certain setting and how you feel about your worth or compensation.  In a business setting, this means that an employee may feel like they’re being treated unfairly if they’re paid too little (or too much? Yeah, right.) for their work.  The relationship between the pay for the job and the fairness of the pay based on the amount of work (”equity”) that you put in can lead to either an increase or a decrease in work satisfaction.  Click on the image below to get a bigger version - it’ll help you visualize this theory better.

So what does this have to do with blogging?  Well, it’s pretty straightforward, I think.  How hard to you work on your blog?  What kind of time and commitment are you giving your blog?  How thorough are you when you make posts?  Do you research your topic?  Do you spell check?  Do you make posts that make sense?  Are you active in your blog’s community?  Do you answer the emails that you get?   If you’ve answered “yes” to these questions, then you are definitely working hard and deserve to receive recognition or payment for your work.  If you’ve answered “no” to some or all of these questions and yet you believe that you should be getting paid to blog, then you need to wake up and smell the roses.  There’s a definite tie between the amount of work that you put in and the amount of money that you get paid for your work.

I recently received an email question from a newbie blogger asking for my honest feedback on his blog.  I know it probably was a shot in the dark to send me an email, but I appreciated the note and felt as though this person cared about my opinions.  So I took the time to research his blog, figure out what I thought about it, and compose a nice email detailing my views.  It took about 35 minutes out of my already busy day but I did it as a favor for this guy.  I never received acknowledgment of receipt nor did I receive a simple “thanks” or anything else.  I don’t mean that I felt like I was owed anything, but I what I got out of this transaction was that the blogger didn’t really care to hear about anyone else’s opinions, even though he asked for it.  I don’t think his blog will be around very much longer if he keeps up this attitude.

If you’re involved in your blog’s community and are actively putting in sweat equity into your blog, Adams suggests that somewhere down the road you will feel like you need to be compensated for your work.  And I agree.  How you can be compensated varies, but if you have any kind of audience it is your duty as a blogger to work hard to monetize your site.  Private ad sales, paid reviews, or otherwise,  you need to figure out what kind of payment you want to receive from your blog.  Don’t give up and keep writing!  The money will follow…eventually.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_theory

What an awesome, long weekend it was! I’m not really sure what to say about it because there are some legal issues to resolve before our product can go live, but we were able to accomplish something that I think is very cool.

In the span of 54 hours, lasting from Friday evening until Sunday night, I was with a group of like minded technologists, marketers, business developers and lawyers and we managed to come up with an idea, develop it, and are ready to launch it. I feel great pride in the work we did, especially because I was able to go from group to group and contribute a lot to each aspect of the project.

I started in the user experience / usability group and we worked hard Friday night until about 2am on Saturday to define the product. Saturday morning 8am was our next meeting time and it came around way too quickly. I met up with other UX people at a coffee shop to start working on wireframe models of how we envisioned the site to look, how we envisioned it to work, and how we envisioned the user’s experience to flow. The group was working well and we fed off of each other to come up with new ideas and flesh out details of our master plan. It was pretty impressive, especially because we had just met each other the night before. Some of the team already knew each other from school but for the most part we had all just met. By noon we had everything pretty much mapped and sketched out. It was time to pass our plan over to the legal department, the business development team, the marketers, and of course the coders and developers.

Meeting with each team was a bit of a challenge as we were not able to have 1 representative talk to each group; this process was so time-sensitive that we needed to have different people talk to each group and in the end some details got a bit skewed and there was a bit of confusion among the groups but that was quickly fixed and all the different teams got our vision and got to work on their respective tasks.

At this point, the UX team started thinking about usability tests for users and I decided to move to the marketing group. The marketing group was composed of some really talented individuals who are true professional marketing people. They do marketing campaigns for a living and also do graphic design and copy writing for a living. I was glad to be part of that group and I got to brainstorm and contribute valuable content to the copy writers and helped out with the marketing campaign by brainstorming taglines and ideas. The day quickly came to a close and I went home to catch up with my wife and our friends. They brought over a nice growler of Bloomington Brewing Company’s new Brown beer. It was delicious and hit the spot. Bed felt great and Sunday morning arrived before long.

Sunday was a fantastic day for me. The marketing campaign was going well, the UX team had their plans in place and I headed over to the development team because they needed a few coders. I was intimidated at first. After all, I don’t code too much anymore and these guys are all professionals. There was a front end developer and several backend PHP people. I joined the PHP team and was assigned a few tasks. After shaking the rust off my fingers, I was once again in my element and helping code the pages that will go live in the next few weeks. A day’s worth of coding always goes by fast and so the day flew by.

After getting home I got to reflect on the experience of the weekend and one thing is certain: I’m glad I went. I made some great contacts in the SEM industry, the SEO industry, met new school colleagues, met a few alumni from my program, and talked shop with people that I would probably otherwise not have met. Highlights included meeting the founder of Startup Weekend, Andre Hyde, seeing and playing with my first Macbook Air, being outnumbered by Mac’s (I’d say 80% of people at this conference had a Mac), being surrounded by iPhones, meeting new people, learning new things, and founding a company!

This experience was fantastic and I’m looking forward to the day the lawyers give the “go ahead” to launch our product. It’s not as revolutionary as Digg or Twitter, but I’m confident that it’ll make the lives of some individuals a bit better.

I’ve been feeling more and more entrepreneurial lately, and with that feeling of excitement and exploration normally comes some sort of opportunity. Reading the local newspaper last week my wife saw that our city was holding a “startup weekend” and encouraged me to join. So, without skipping a beat I ran upstairs and signed up for the Startup event.

“What is Startup Weekend you ask? Startup Weekend is a intense 54 hour event bringing together brilliant tech minds (developers, designers, marketers, ect.) together to create a company from concept to launch!”

So, this weekend will be VERY exciting and very busy. There’s an online community that is abuzz with ideas and chatter about what we will be founding and building this weekend. Anything is possible; there will be 99 others with me with skill sets ranging from programmers to legal aid, cooks to user experience, we will all be working hard to create a stellar idea and launch it by Sunday night.

I’m in one of the bigger groups, the user experience group. Together with about 20 others, we will come up with a solid design concept, user interaction components, usability innovations and anything else that we can imagine to make our idea pop.

Past Startup Weekends have started the following companies:

• Skribit: “Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.”
• VoSnap.com: “It’s group voting…in a snap! Ask questions and get answers fast using text messages and emails. With vosnap, it’s decided.”
• Favoreats.com: “Favoreats is a great way to share local food recommendations with your friends. Simply put, it helps you find the best dish in town.”
• TipDish.com: “TipDish is a social media directory and wire service that is designed to connect influencers. With this service, leaders in social media including bloggers, podcasters and videocasters (Dishers) receive the latest news, information, products and info from companies, organizations, PR and Marketing Professionals (Tippers).”
• ScrollTalk: “Scrolltalk is a new take on chat. We like to think of it as Interest Messaging. It cuts through the noise of regular chat rooms and allows you to engage in relevant conversations. Your conversations are ever evolving, and move in a direction that suits you.”

And more! I’m excited to be part of this event and am looking forward to starting something up from scratch. I hope that the 99 others will be at their most creative this weekend! I’ll tell you all more about it…on Monday!

Have a great weekend, I know I will!