Adam Stetzer background

Hi all! I am Dr Adam Stetzer. I have been working on the Internet since 2008 when my partners and I sold our last company (250 employees at the time) to Hewitt Associates (now Aon Consulting). See here. Since then, I have launched several different ventures that have focused on different aspects of Internet marketing including:

If you want the long and detailed history you can read about Adam Stetzer’s companies. I also wrote a very long blog entry, recounting my corporate background over on the HubShout blog.

What is IncomeStores.com?

Back in 2008, when I was just getting heavy into the Internet and looking for a business opportunity of my own. As a trained empiricist, I was taught to learn by trying. Experiment, experiment, experiment. And in 2008, that’s exactly what I was doing. I joined every possible affiliate marketing program you could think of. I blogged. I forumed. I must be a member of over 1,000 forums at this point (see me here, for example). But that was not all.

Back in early 2008, I thought it would be cool to build my own software to try and automate the process of building a turnkey website. The idea actually started in one of my forums. If you were curious, you could dig through my old posts over at Digital Point. Long story short, a bunch of us there decided that it would be cool to form a group and road-test a software idea I had for quickly deploying turnkey websites. The idea seemed pretty good. There were two other competing software platforms at the time: BANS and eBayPHP. But both required that you install the scripts on your own hosting account. So I thought there was space for a third. These were the competitive advantages I saw for IncomeStores:

  • It was a hosted product.
  • It used Amazon, eBay and Commission Junction APIs for products
  • Money was paid directly from the affiliate programs

There was enough interest in the forum that I ran a public BETA and gave away free IncomeStores to people in return for their support through the debugging process. It was a ton of fun and I learned a great deal. I also made some great connections in the forum. Communication was strong enough that a bunch of us were on the phone with each other regularly (I know – who knew that was possible?). The project was engaging for a couple of years.

The idea of a turnkey website affiliate software play gained momentum in 2009 and I sold several hundred stores. Most buyers were people who knew very very little about Internet marketing. This is why the idea of a turnkey business opportunity really appealed to them. But as 2010 rolled-on, I started to wonder if these people were really getting a return on their $97. I know I was. I had over 20 of my own IncomeStores running, and still do to this day. But the results really had much more to do with the SEO that I was doing than anything that special about the software platform itself. In fact, the more I experimented, the more I came to believe that WordPress could do everything better than my own IncomeStores software platform. Furthermore, I saw a much much bigger problem.

Lack of motivation on the part of store owners

Yes. The age old problem. People wanted to make money from home on the Internet, but had this crazy idea in their head that this could be done on auto-pilot. It was as if they believed that the great secret of the Internet had somehow not gotten out to the public at-large yet. Hello! Did these people notice the dot-com bubble? Apparently not. And I’m not trying to be too harsh here because theses are fine, fine, people. But their expectations for what a turnkey business really is was WAY off. So where to from here?

I decided to continue this project as a blog for now. That may change in the future. I’ve toyed with the idea of turning IncomeStores into a websites for sale listing service. Or perhaps I can offer my own business opportunity consulting services through this portal (though my time is extremely tight). In summary, I’m not quite ready to drop the topic. It is clear from the massive traffic to this website that there is a strong appetite for a turnkey business opportunity. I am eager to find a method to both satisfy that genuine entrepreneurial spirit while also educating the reader that there really are NO EASY PATHS to online income. Every single claim of “easy money” is a scam. EVERY SINGLE ONE! Don’t believe me (or don’t want to believe me)? Stay tuned as we explore the possibility of easy money online together.