“Most people miss the opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and it looks like work.”

Thomas A Edison

You may remember the late 90s when it seemed that anyone with a computer and Internet access could become a millionaire overnight. Those were the days of the dotcom bubble and bust. But that was only the first phase, the hype and sensation phase, of the Internet revolution. The dust has cleared and we can see things much clearer now, hopefully.

By some accounts, we are now in the consolidation phase. And at this stage, it’s much easier to distinguish a good, real money-making business opportunity from a bad one conceived and created in a con artist’s lab.

Start small and grow big as you go

Given the state of the economic mess we are in right now, it is much more difficult to raise capital for any business venture, whether online or offline. But this is the very good news. You don’t need millions of dollars in startup money to start benefiting from the online money making ideas we’re talking about.

What you must understand is that the Internet is a means of communication par excellence, the most effective and reliable way of transmitting information. And just like the telegraph, telephone, and television before it, it has expanded the consumer and commercial marketplace by making it easier and cheaper for people to buy and sell things.

Some of those writing the first online success stories

And some of the savvy entrepreneurs who understood this and jumped in early in the first phase achieved fabulous outreach. Just take a look at some of these early artists who built billion-dollar fortunes from their online business ventures Jeff Bezos, creator of Amazon.com; Jay Walker of Priceline.com; Pierre Omidyar and Margaret Whitman of eBay; Joe Ricketts of Ameritrade, Steve Case, Barry Schuler, Robert Pittman and Ted Leonsis of America Online; and Silicon Valley venture capitalists Johan Doerr and Vinod Khosla.

Then there are the “Latter-day Saints”: average people who are creating great wealth online, as I write to Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskvitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin, the founders of Facebook.com; Reid Hoffman and his group that founded LinkedIn.com; Jack Dorsey and others founded Twitter.com.

The least known among them

Others like Bill Bonner, founder of AgoraInc.com, one of the world’s largest and most successful consumer newsletter publishers, my own business mentors, Michael Masterson who recently “retired” again as a business builder, Jay Abraham, Bob Bly, David Cross, Rich Schefren, Mary-Ellen Tribby, and many other savvy entrepreneurs have also created great wealth online. These people are writing their own Internet-based business success stories.

Unfortunately, not all of the lucky billionaires mentioned above, especially those in the early phase of the Internet revolution, created good businesses. Some of them got rich simply ‘selling a great idea in a frenzied market’.

What this means is that there are all kinds of ‘success stories’ out there. And if you want to build your own fortune online today, you need to choose the success story that’s right for you. You have to find a proven online business building model to follow. Two of my favorite recommendations come from Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues who founded Facebook.com and AgoraInc.com. The Agora model is by far the most successful online business building model I know of. It’s a model developed in part by my main business mentor, Michael Masterson. This is the model we have adopted and are refining in our own business. And it’s what makes us the destination of choice for those who want to start and grow a profitable Internet home-based business today and don’t have a large bank account to use as start-up money.

You really don’t have to reinvent the wheel. All you need is to learn from a successful model and adapt it to your particular situation.

So, are you ready to finally start building your own small fortune online while there’s still a chance to do so, even when you don’t have as much money?

Remember, nothing happens unless you take action. The best time to start creating your own little web fortune is NOW!