This past year has been filled with huge advancements in the open source web application world. Big content management systems such as Wordpress & Drupal have added big technologies to their arsenal that have made them a no brainer choice over proprietary content management systems. But there have also been improvements in other areas of open source web applications which makes you wonder… how much $ could one make online using these applications?
With the open source technologies that are on hand and ready to use, there is no excuse why more people cannot find success making $ online anymore. Below is a quick breakdown of a few ways to make money online and the open source web applications to help get you there.
1. Start A Blog – Wordpress
Blogging has very much become a popular source for making money online. But people are still using online apps like Blogspot and paid services such as Squarespace. If you haven’t already received the memo, here it is. Use Wordpress for your blogging platform. All the major bloggers on the web are using it and you would be wise to as well. Blogs such as Problogger.net by Darren Rowse will help you learn how exactly to blog for an income.
2. Start A ‘Review’ Site – Drupal
Review based article websites have forever made affiliate marketers tons of cash. The problem many webmasters have is trying to keep up with writing tons of articles and having an intuitive system to help them manage the whole thing. Using a complex open source content management system such as Drupal (which is the best in my opinion) will help you create an affiliate marketing review site that is second to none!
3. Start An Online Store – Magento
This is one of the more obvious ways for you to make money online. I’m shocked to hear how many people out there are still using paid services for their online store such as Yahoo! Stores. Why? Open source apps like Magento will give you everything and more than what Yahoo! Stores does and with the flexibility to change and grow as you please. If I were selling a product online I would definitely be using Magento.
I’m just realizing as i’m writing this post how simple it actually is to make tons of money online with open source web applications! I knew it was easy, but as soon as I had finished writing this it dawned on me how easy it actually is. Can anybody disagree with me on this? How can 3 technologies such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Magento not make you $100,000 over the next year?
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Or you can start an online store with Drupal (with Ubercart), let your customers review your products, and blog about your product pipeline… all from Drupal!
even better
Yeah, I’m with Robert. If you’re already using Drupal for a cms / review site, it’s easier to go with Ubercart instead of implementing a new system like Magento.
Yes, I just finished my first drupal store on ubercart, and I will never ever go back to anything else (and i know magento pretty well). Granted, ubercart itself does not have all the features out the box, but like everything in life – the more difficult it is in the beginning, the more awesome it is on the long run. And that’s just the thing with drupal – one module on it’s own might not have all the awesomeness, but combine it with another module, and all of a sudden you have incredible power at your finger tips. It’s like combining Hydrogen with Oxygen.
Since everything in drupal is a node you can harness the power of the 10 000 modules out there to do everything the best ecommerce systems can do (ie “customers who viewed this item also viewed…”, “1 out of 10 customers found this review useful”, direct amazon integration). The trick is to combine those modules.
Good luck – hope you enjoy the journey as much as I did
Well, the tools are certainly out there to enable you to make $100,000, but you still need a good idea. This is probably the hardest bit in my opinion. Yep, you can set up a store, but gaining reputation and undercutting your competitors will be an uphill task. Also, too many people start blogs without having anything really interesting to talk about.
I’m with Drupal too. I almost went with Joomla, but I flipped at the last moment. I’ve never looked back since but that’s not to say that it hasn’t driven me up the wall at times.