I got into teaching because I wanted to not only do something that I love to do but I also wanted the security that it would give me. A steady paycheck doing something that I loved, sounds like the perfect job. Before teaching I tried my hand at owning my own small business. For seven long years I worked my butt off and saw very little in return. I was always on the verge of losing my shirt, I hated having to take care of my employees, and I hated dealing with customers even more. But there I was, stuck. Lucky for me someone came along and offered to buy my business and I jumped at it. It was the only time in seven years that I made a little money.

I vowed that I would never get into business again. I needed some more security in my life... so I became a teacher. Good ol' teaching, knowing my exact paycheck every month and summers off. Life was perfect. After a few years of teaching I realized that the steady paychecks that I loved so much were not that big. I needed more money. I wanted more in life than to be a teacher just getting by.

That was when I thought of making money on the internet. But this time I was going to do it right, I could still feel the pains of my pitiful small business adventure, so I thought of some rules...

Rule Number 1: No Employees. I hated employees, they were nothing but paperwork and taxes. Plus, they are very expensive.

Rule Number 2: No Inventory. I didn't want to be in some network marketing scheme with a basement full of products. Plus I didn't want to have to be running to the UPS Store everyday to mail things to people. Then there are returns, don't get me started!

Rule Number 3: Very Little Time. I didn't want this to consume my life, or be like a second job. Just a few hours a week at the most.

Rule Number 4: Easy Money Collection. I didn't want to have to worry about calling people and begging them to pay their bill.

Rule Number 5: No Selling. I hate selling more than employees. So no cold calling, no trying to get my friends to buy. No selling. Period.

I know that my rules probably kicked every good business idea out the door. But to me I wanted it to be the perfect business, and to be the perfect business for me, it had to follow those five rules.

Now that I had the rules I started to look at making money with a website. So I started to think, if I could sell some sort of widget that I invent, does it fit my rules?

A website selling my widget wouldn't need employees, but I might need someone to manufacture it. Which could be a pain. But lets move on. A widget would involve me having an inventory and shipping. So that's a strike. Widgets might also take time to ship and inventory and then there are the returns, that's another strike against widgets. I would only accept credit card orders so that would make money collecting easy. If the credit card gets accepted then they get a widget, if not, no widget. So that's a check mark. When it comes to selling my widget, I would let the website do all the selling. I would have to buy some Google Adwords to get people to my website, but I would never have to talk to anyone or try to sell anything to them. The only contact I would have with my customers would be through email.

So if I look back at this, selling widgets on a website passed only three of the five rules.

Not good enough. How could I sell a product on a website that passed all five rules? It was then, when I got a real stupid idea...

The Idea