Making money on the Internet, to many people, conjures up images of the gold rush. You put up a website and out pours money. This was, no doubt, the image conjured up in the 90′s with the dot-com boom.

Today, this attitude has evolved into one of skepticism with a little dose of confusion mixed in. The thought of making money in your pajamas on your computer is enticing. But, when you look into it further, you’re liable to run across an endless parade of long-form sales letters all promising the sun, moon and stars. Everybody makes themselves sound successful as if they alone hold the secrets to online wealth. And they’d be happy to charge you some price ending in 7 to get in on those secrets.

But, how much money can you really make online? What is realistic? If you try to do it, what kind of expectations should you have?

Prepare For An Answer You Might Not Like

And that answer is: it depends.

Yeah, I know. Seems like a cop out. But, it is true.

You see, the answer depends on you and you only. Your wealth potential on the Internet is purely up to you. The Internet is more or less a blank slate and what you paint on that slate is up to you. And how well you do depends on what you paint.

But, let’s give you the gamut. And we’ll start at the top.

There is a good-ol’ boy club of internet marketers. These guys interact together and each has reputations in the field of internet marketing. Names include John Reese, Jeff Walker, Yanik Silver, Rich Schefren, Ross Goldberg and a host of others. These guys all make their money by selling information which shows others how to make money online. It is an uber-competitive market online and it is peppered with product launches that are fairly legendary within this group. For example, John Reese is best known for his launch of Traffic Secrets in which he brought in over $1 million in a single day. Eban Pagan is known for making around $20 million per year with his online businesses. As far as independent businessmen online, these names are in the top rung. And, interestingly, most of them seem to do it by selling how they do it.

There are, no doubt, a lot of people making similar figures online and who do so in markets having nothing to do with how to make money online. But, these names are not quite as “out there” because they’re not necessarily trying to get known for how much money they make.

OK, let’s take it down several notches. Let’s take a professional blogger like myself. Darren Rowse operates ProBlogger where he talks about the in’s and out’s of blogging professionally. Darren Rowse blogs full time and makes six figures yearly doing so. In a way, Darren did this by combining blogging with making money because much of his audience is seeking to generating income by blogging. Jeremy Shoemoney has a famous photo where he is holding a check from Google for $132,000 for one month working with Adsense. I, too, make six figures yearly as a full-time blogger.

Now, we’ll go down to the lower rungs in terms of income levels. These are people who are making money online but not enough to live off of. They probably have regular jobs that they have to keep to pay the bills. They’d like to make more but they’re not there yet. Most people fall into this category.

So, you can see that the Internet is a slate and people fall into all levels of income online.

The answer to how much money YOU can make online can only really be answered by yourself. You can learn the techniques of others. You can even pay a lot of money learning and collecting those techniques. But, what it ultimately comes down to is your ability to act.

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