Everywhere you look there are sites promoting the great wealth and riches of creating an online business. One that I seem to come across often is Mark Warren’s site. From the testimonials on his site, it appears that he’s making several people rich. What is behind it all?

I’m experimenting with several models for monetizing this site. It’s a dilema for me. I’m concerned about making a site look like it’s only about the quick commercialization; not about helping the Mac community and generating some consulting work. My initial motivation for exploring ads on this site was from a desire to offset the costs of running the site. As I began to explore the information out there, I soon realized that there are entire business models around simply generating traffic to a site and selling ad space.

The Google Adsense route seems to be the most common. I’m experimenting with that now, but wonder how effective it is. In my exploration so far, I’ve come across a number of folks who are looking at Adsense alternatives. This guy has looked into alternatives after having violated Google’s policies and becoming banned from the Adsense program.

Whether you use Adsense or not, the Google Page Rank algorithm is probably one of the most important on the web today. This article at Smashing Magazine does a fine job of explaining and analyzing Google’s ranking system. If you’re an online business and you’ve made the top-10 for common keywords in a Google search, you’ve got it made.

Lastly, although John Chow may be a little too driven by status symbols and getting rich, he does have some insightful observations, support, training, advice, and some excellent resources on his site. Check out John Chow.