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There are tens of thousands of examples of people who have created a successful online business from their passions and expertise. Here are some case studies, from super lucrative examples to the more moderate success stories.

Making Money from Wine Gary Vaynerchuk took his passion for wine and helped turn his father’s liquor business from a $4m to $45m in 8 years. He used his personal branding and the viral power of social media and new media to revolutionize the wine industry with Winelibrary TV, a video blog of unconventional video reviews on wine without the stuffy approach of the wine tasting industry. Wine Library TV reinvented the concept of wine tasting for a new generation.

Vaynerchuk raised his profile and received recognition from the business world for both his business acumen and the fresh personal branding approach by leveraging social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter and using new media to deliver his content.

Gary’s viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day and led to numerous television appearances, features in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and consultant for Fortune 100 companies, and a keynote speaker around the world.

Gary points to his extreme passion of wine, but more importantly was willing to work “super hard” to make his business succeed.

For more information visit:

http://dailygrape.com/

Choose Cars Alborz Fallah actually started three different blogs whilst working a full-time job based on different passions. There was a blog focused on the Windows Vista operating system which was still to be released at the time. Another blog focused on going out in Brisbane, Alborz’s hometown and lastly a blog exclusively about his biggest passion - cars.

It was the car blog that Alborz chose to focus on which was eventually valued at $5 million, as well as earning substantial monthly advertising revenue.

The blog focused on car road tests and reviews and captured an audience hungry for car content in Australia. He regularly posted content, on average two posts a day, and captured traffic from Google with SEO techniques. Initially reluctant to put advertising on the site, Alborz was eventually presuaded by friend and mentor Yaro Starak to start testing Google adsense ads which brought in a healthy revenue stream and became the bedrock of the blogs’ eventual income growth.

For more information visit:

http://www.caradvice.com.au/

Travel Blog Success Dave Lee has used his love of travelling as a base for a whole new online business. Dave blogged his way around the world for 20 months and publishes the Go Backpacking Blog (http://www.gobackpacking.com) which has been syndicated by Lonely planet and receives 120,000 page views per month.

Dave also publishes more niche focused travel blogs like Medellin Living (http://medellinliving.com) and even runs a membership website that helps others launch their travel blogging careers.

Travel Blog Success offers travel blogging lessons grouped into modules as well as the opportunity to ask questions and get blog critiques. Premium members enjoy access to audio interviews with blog experts offering practical advice and monthly group coaching calls.

The product is available on the clickbank platform that handles credit card payments as well as affiliates who can promote the site for a commission, all of which will be covered in later chapters.

Dave’s earnings from his blogging ventures have recently reached a healthy $5k a month enabling him to live anywhere he wants. He currently resides in Medellin, Colombia.

He is currently planning to build on his expert status in this area and publish guides for the Amazon book market.

Dave says, “All my blogs, and the membership site are built on WordPress, which I’ve been using since January 2007. I recommend bloggers buy their own domains, self-host their blogs through a web hosting company (like Hostgator), buy premium themes (to present a professional appearance) or have their own designed if they can afford it and use email lists to help build their readership. I use and recommend Aweber.”

This is a great example of someone taking their passion and turning into a product focused online business combining blogs, membership as well as audio to deliver great value to his customers.

For more information visit:

http://travelblogsuccess.com

Guitar Jamming Marty Schwartz has been passionate about music all his life and soaked up all the knowledge he possibly could about the guitar. Laid off from a job he loved doing in 2008, Marty turned to his teaching skills and the Internet to continue his passion and build an online business.

Guitar Jamz offer a membership for guitar enthusiasts as well as a large range of physical DVDs that teach people the guitar from beginners, blues, acoustic and more.

He uses 1shoppingcart for the ecommerce delivery and Shareasale for the affiliate program. He also has a list building opt-in form on his website offering casual visitors a lesson packed guide for free. Marty has a large YouTube presence which helps drive traffic to his website and has been referred to as the “Jack Black of YouTube guitar teachers.”

Marty has over 5000 followers on Twitter and also makes clever use of a Facebook social plugin for testimonials and comments that feed back to Facebook as well as appearing on the website.

For more information visit:

http://www.guitarjamz.com

Speaking Español Ben Curtis and Marina Diez both live in Madrid, Spain and have combined their passion and skills to create Notes in Spanish, a series of teaching aides. Marina, an original Madrileña, designs and develops the courses and Ben, who also writes and podcasts about Spain for the BBC, Lonely Planet, and Fodors, helps produce the Notes in Spanish podcasts and video content.

Notes in Spanish help teach people Spanish, from beginners to advanced, using media such as audio podcasts, PDF transcripts of the audios, videos and worksheets.

They also give away a fair amount of content, making use of email autoresponder Aweber for their free newsletter as well as podcasts available via iTunes.

The Gold Seasons membership is another great example of a higher ticket product offering which includes Real Spanish Conversation audio followed by analysis as well as other bonuses and tools to add value for a higher price.

For more information visit:

http://www.notesinspanish.com

So far I’ve focused on niche markets and interests but there are many information publishers and marketers that help people with products related to online marketing such as getting traffic, blogging, email marketing and all the other areas covered in this book.

Hippy Marketing Based in Yorkshire in the UK, Tony ‘The Hippy Marketer’ Shepherd is a firm believer in financial self-sufficiency through multiple streams of income from the Internet as well as other offline interests.

“I tried to build a complete online business – to go full-time online in ONE attempt. Well after the tears, the drinking and the anger against all things internet had finished I sat down and tried to work out where I’d gone wrong.”

Tony then focused on small steps to make enough money from his online business to pay the electricity bill every month. Once he was able to do this he aimed to pay the car insurance from his Internet earnings before moving onto target the mortgage and so forth.

Tony now works 2-3 days a week, earning a 6 figure income doing what he loves doing!

He uses a variety of tools and platforms for his information products including Wordpress and RAPS (Rapid Action Profits) to deliver his information products as well as manage affiliates and has recently moved into developing wordpress plug-ins and iphone apps with his business partner, Tony Newton.

To find out more about Tony Shepherd visit:

http://www.tony-shepherd.com

Partners, a world apart Simon Hodgkinson and Jeremy Gislason have been online business partners in the informational publishing market since 2005. The amazing thing is at the time Simon lived in the UK and Jeremy lived in Japan, yet their combined products, websites and software applications pulled in, and still continues to pull in, millions of dollars.

Simon is a best selling author and business consultant. His company Hodgkinson Publishing currently operate over 120 active websites in multiple market sectors and he has directly sold in excess of $14 Million Dollars worth of products and services.

Simon Hodgkinson went from running a web design company to creating info products with resell rights for other publishers in niche areas such as gardening and cooking. This soon turned into a main source of income and on partnering with Jeremy Gislason business really boomed. Their combined membership sites have generated $3 Million plus in digital membership sales and been accessed by over 120,000 business owners, marketers and entrepreneurs worldwide.

Their powerful membership platform Memberspeed has helped hundreds launch their own membership websites.

Jeremy Gislason came from a American mid western entrepreneurial family and worked as a VP of marketing at ISORegister Inc before founding his own company Surefirewealth Inc.

From his time in Japan Jeremy has subscribed to the mantra “Okyakusama wa kami sama desu” which literally means, “Customers are gods” in Japanese. This has been the driving force behind his company’s products and services.

For more information on Jeremy visit:

http://www.surefirewealth.com/blog/

For more information on Simon visit:

http://hodgkinsonpublishing.com/

Amazon Income from Australia Wanda and Paula, two friends from Australia, learnt about natural search and niche websites from several mentors and used this knowledge to build a series of websites focused on earning affiliate commissions from physical product review websites and blogs.

Wanda and Paula initially struggled as affiliate marketers, but found their success in writing in-depth detailed product reviews for Amazon products which eventually led to a $10k plus a month income.

“The best way to use Amazon is to use text links within a review of a product. Don’t bother with the widgets or the banner ads – they won’t be anywhere near as effective. Use text links and your click through rate will be much higher.”

They also blog about their online business, the various methods they use as well as writing product reviews for other information products and software applications.

For more information about Wanda and Paula visit:

http://www.affiliateblogonline.com

You may have noticed the last two case studies were partnership duos. Many people have found that teaming up with someone who compliments their skills and talents can have a momentus effect on their progress. Bouncing ideas off each other, working as a team and pulling each other up by the bootstraps when things aren’t going well is a great reason to take this route.

There are many more examples of people from all walks of life that have got into the information publishing arena and built a successful online business from it.

Equally for every success, unfortunately, there are hundreds of failures which could be down to many different reasons; wrong mindset, impatience, not following a system or jumping from one idea to another. Shiny object syndrome, where someone jumps from one ecourse to another that teaches them different systems is a common problem and something that many newbies get caught up in. However there is absolutely no reason why you can’t succeed!

Focus and determination is a common trait amongst successful infopreneurs.