INTERNET ENTREPRENEURS: LIVING OFF THE NET

A new type of career has surfaced over the past few years, but you won’t find it listed on Careerbuilder or Craigslist. Its most accurate title is “Internet Entrepreneur” and it can pay up to millions of dollars a year. Brandon Rowe is one such entrepreneur making $50,000 a year, and he expects his newest website (http://www.linkexperiment.com) to rake in the cash.

Rowe, at only 23 years old, is his own boss and collects his monthly checks from various online endeavors. “My friends’ joke that every month ‘The Internet’ sends me a check,” says Rowe. In his first month as a full-time entrepreneur he made $1,000. “That’s when I realized I could actually make a career out of this thing,” says Rowe. Brandon’s endeavors include selling advertising space on his websites, earning commissions on selling items, and for his newest website, selling links.

The concept of Rowe’s newest website is to sell links on his homepage to the highest bidder and display the amount the site has earned in bids. He believes as the total amount the site earns increases, its popularity will increase, which in turn leads to more bids. “I think people like a story about an ordinary person making a lot of money for a simple idea,” says Rowe. That’s the appeal that Rowe is banking on for his newest endeavor. However, Rowe says that it’s not as easy as some might think for a website to succeed.

According to Rowe, succeeding online is about creativity, hard work, and persistence. “A lot of people trying to make a living online expect it to be easy and to sit back and just watch the money roll in,” says Rowe, “You have to work hard and be persistent. For example my newest website made 21 cents its first day. A lot of people will look at that and say ‘this isn’t working’. I look at that and say ‘great’ with minimal work I made 21 cents now I’ll put some work into the site and I’ll be making two dollars a day.”

When asked how much he thought his newest site would make, Rowe responded, “I’d say in the thousands of dollars… Websites like this one are how I make my living.”

Rowe’s newest website ( http://www.linkexperiment.com ) features 100 links sold to the highest bidders. The site was launched on May 15th, with a starting bid of a penny for a link.