What's been your most successful online venture?

For the past 16+ years, I have been promoting PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required by the users to complete an offer. All they have to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals(niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay around $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. However, you don't want to get caught up solely on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same and possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

Bottom line, it is far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

For the most part, I drive traffic to offers by acquiring 3rd party email data. Which is data that the users have shown an interest in a specific vertical(niche) and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record for each user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

Basically, I monetize the data using PPL offer because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversions and converting the data to cash producing assets.

Online lead generation is a multi-billion dollar industry. Done right it can be far more profitable than many imagine. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that may sound like a huge range, much comes down to one's abilities to scale and effectively build/manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Something to think about.

Selling stock photography online from 2006-2010 was so easy and profitable - I made over $100k doing it, but sadly, the market is so saturated now that it's impossible to make money doing that anymore. Those were good times!

Mine most profitable by far is selling shoutouts on instagram. I clear over $150 on average every single day selling hourly and 24 hour shoutouts on 7 accounts.

I mainly sell 1 hour shouts at $10 - $20 per shout, it takes me about 5 to 10 minutes from start to finish and I've currently got another 5 accounts growing so I expect to double my income within the next few months.

Before this I have made decent money selling my own info products on ebay, originally shipping the items on disc.

But I soon figured how to completely automate everything, all I had to do in the end was answer questions and maintain my listing.

I also made an income equivalent to a monthly wage back in the day when MFA sites ranked with a handful of back links.

But google completely wiped that out so fast it was unbelievable.

Freelancing was a great way to make living back 5 years ago. Right now is a crazy competition.

I wrote some B2B software that sold well for 10 years.

A membership site was good for a while but I was rather too late to the party there.

I can confirm that TraderScooter is right - stock photography used to be great. At one time my own personal website ranked in the top #10 on Google Images for "peacock". But then everyone got iPhones and the web became saturated with images!

I am really struggling these days but I am having a go at creating forums. A lot of amateurs are giving up running them but they are still popular. What I bring to the table is fanatical interest in some niches plus the programming ability to keep the spammers/scammers out.

I sell to my private list and make 25-50k when I need to...

Setting up an FBA business on Amazon has been the most successful thin that I have done so far. I have also done some affiliate marketing but FA has worked the best for me.

Blogging in non mmo niches along with CPA and List Building. And in the last year Product Creation

affiliate marketing and paid traffic, i own nothing and do nothing

My main business is hybrid between online and offline so I'll disregard that and say the Ebook Publishing Company I set.

Several years ago as a thought excercise I created a small publishing company. I created 54 books that targeted one set of customers.

I then promoted through forums, Facebook groups, giveaways and q and a sites.

Year on year the book sales grew to the point where other than doing a few free days and a couple of selected press releases I didn't do any work.

Anyways at the back end of last year I sold the business off to our main rival.

That's been my most lucrative personally.

I've done pretty good growing my list with Udimi and Safeswaps. Thinking about trying my hand with some Facebook ppc but we'll see.

Building a website with resume templates and working with several affiliate programs - ResumeRobin, SimplyHired and JuJu. ResumeRobin has been the most profitable one, netting me $15k/month at one point. Now it's down to about $7-8k/month.