I know what's better, being your own boss! You're in change of everything, so the sky's the limit! Make more money AND have more time for the things that matter to you while you build a business you love.

Sound hard? No way, it's easier than you think and I can tell you all the secrets to a great Internet startup. You don't need to be 22 years old or a computer programmer to get off the ground. All you need for great success is hard work and a great idea.

If you've ever said "I wish someone would pay me to do that!" now you can make it happen yourself, on your own terms. The Internet is full of great business opportunities, if you know where to look. I do - and I can tell you all about it.

Starting Up Your Start-Up

You don't have to be an expert HTML programmer in order to get a functional and attractive website up and running. In fact, if you have no experience with websites, you can hire someone to set it all up for you. Many times, website hosting companies will offer a lot of these services along with your domain name and hosting set up.

For fully navigational content, you will need a database. Many hosting companies, such as godaddy, offer this service. Be aware that it can be a rocky road trying to get everything on your website to work just so. It's highly recommended that you consider hiring someone to construct your database for you. From there, they can instruct you on how to update and add to your database. This way, you pay for their services one time and then are able to do the rest yourself.

Because this is a relatively short guide, I won't go into how to set up your own database, there are many sources out there with detailed explanations you can use. However, I will discuss how you can go from having a bunch of free-floating content and information to a fully-functional website that you can make a profit from.

Step 1: Pick a Domain/Hosting Package

As previously mentioned, you will need to choose a domain name and hosting service for your website. This isn't the most difficult process in the world, but you should put some time and effort into the decision. Your domain name is important, because it is the address by which people access your site. It should be memorable, brief and descriptive. Remember the keyword search we discussed when gauging the popularity of a particular subject? Try that again and look to see what words are most popular for your data source topic. Once you have a nice list of words, try putting them together in creative ways. You want a domain name that both makes sense and is easy to remember.

With a few good names in mind, select a hosting service. From there, you can check to see if the domain name you want is available and what package of hosting services will best suit your needs. Remember: you need plenty of web space, bandwidth and database capability (PHP, MySQL, ASP, etc). You may not deal with that aspect of your site personally at first, but you still need to make sure it's a part of the package when you buy hosting. The best web developer in the world can't help you if you've bought the wrong hosting package.

Step 2: Come Up With An Organizational Strategy

Even though you may not be coding the database or building your site yourself, you still need to communicate effectively to the person who is just what you want your database to contain. How do you want it to be organized? What sorts of information do you want presented, and where? Let's take a very common public data source as an example of organizational options: lyrics. There are a ton of lyrics sites out there right now, so it may not be the best move to use this data source for your site. However, it lends itself to the perfect example data source. Let's say you're making a database filled with lyrics to country songs. You have all of the content you need but just throwing it all at the web guy isn't going to help matters.

Instead, think of how you would like this information to be organized if you were searching for country music lyrics. Of course, you would want the information to be searchable. But what else would you want? Would you want to be able to browse the data as well? Would you like it be listed alphabetically? By artist first name or last name? By song title? By year? As you can see, there is a lot to take into consideration when it comes to site organization.

Good luck with your new adventure in creating your new website using free content!