Expect profit in your third year if you do everything right. Don't expect profit from day one. So many people are expecting to earn money from day one.

Because of our exposure on Yahoo! now - I am one of the featured merchants - people have been asking me for advice. There was someone who bought $20,000 worth of inventory before they turn their site up and I tell them no, no, no. Get your site up first.

Start with little dollars as possible. Spend as little as possible on inventory. See what the market is out there. One of my friends who is also very successful now started with one product. They got it going. They began to have a feel for the inventory. They got that going and added another product -- a similar one -- to expand their line. They did a nice job of growing their business. Within two to three years, they will have something to quit their jobs on and work for themselves.

But it's difficult to have an idea today, especially in e-commerce, that will just go through the roof and allow you a 6-figure income within six months and away you go.

If you're looking to sell a product, go to a search engine first. If there aren't a lot of listings under that keyword, then you may do all right for yourself and you can start to compete. Take for example scooters. If you type it on a search engine, you're going to get yourself listed as 780,000 of 790,000 on there. You will be at the bottom of the list and no one will ever get to you. But if it's left handed yo-yos, then you might find something. But of course your market is less.

That's the issue: you have to look at the overall market, and what percent of that market you are going to be. If you have 100% of the left-handed yo-yo market and if it is a million dollar industry, then fine. But if you're a .00000001% of a multi-billion dollar industry, then there's almost no sense getting in.

Avoid those who give you empty promises, particularly those selling advertising. Remember, your best friend is your calculator. I say shoot for the stars but start with a ladder.

We're looking to diversify, maintain steady growth and slowly build the business. We're projecting 30% revenues for this year, growth over last, and we're at 60%.

Right now we are actually trekking at 80% but we had a slow start due to eToys going out of business. They slashed all their prices and that hurt us in the first quarter. We'll be somewhere between 60-70% by the end of the year. We're expecting probably about 20-30% for the next few years, which we're comfortable with for this product line. If we bring out other lines that start out to become more successful, we'd probably push the percent up a little bit.

We're not looking for a big kill. We're looking for little small things that add on to what we're doing well now. So if we find 20 things that give us a 5% boost and there's a 100% growth, then fine.

This is the advice I give to everyone who is growing his or her own business: Think of the true Amazon River when you go to build something. It is built by many little streams and rivulets and little dripping dews that falls on branches that all curves and trickles into making this large body of water. Amazon.com spent billions of dollars digging up a trench for everything to fall into because they have that kind of money.

You can truly build a large revenue stream by just finding something that might give you one customer a month. You should have that goal of finding a revenue source - be it a link, be it a small little banner where you have a reciprocal agreement with another site from -- just keep looking for places that will give you one or two customers a week, a month, a year. And keep building on those. And some of those may get big, some of those may get small.

It's the same kind of strategy on acquiring a product line. You have a low level of expectations on those products, but keep an eye on them. Work with them well - some of them may get big while as an aggregate to all may very well work together.