Markus Frind. For people who are even somewhat familiar with the happenings of web business models, they either cringe or gleam when they hear his name. Love him or hate him, he found a way to become a multi-millionaire with very little experience and a dash of arrogance.

Markus’ website, Plenty of Fish (plentyoffish.com), is simply a free dating site. However, the stars were aligned for this fortunate, unassuming, mid-twenty something when he decided to start Plenty of Fish on his spare time while working a dead end job. His site serves 1.6 billion webpages per month, which puts it in the top 15-20 sites in the United States. Pretty amazing for a site scattered with minor bugs and run by an amateur businessperson.

It just so happens that when Markus came up with his brilliant idea back in 2003, a free tool named Google AdSense was just released. (I’ll provide more details on what Google AdSense is all about in my next post.) Anyway, Markus was able to leverage advertising that wouldn’t normally be easily available to a no-name guy like himself. Now, at age 30, he is on top of the dating site space.

Since Plenty of Fish has somewhat of a cult following, it’s really hard for copycat sites to put big dents in his moneymaker. Granted, I’m not trying to tell you that you can make $10 million in a year. We can’t all catch lightning in a bottle; after all many companies pour millions of dollars to do things that some individuals do by accident. But there are lessons we can take from Plenty of Fish:

  • When it comes to online marketing, there really is no limit as to how much you can earn.
  • Anyone willing to put time into their personal web project can learn to make money online.
  • Depending on what you’re looking to accomplish, there are bound to be free (or very affordable) tools at your disposal.

We may not all dream to be like Markus Frind but I’m willing to bet that we all dream to have his bank account!

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