Anyone who wants to make a lot of money online should study the business strategies of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Steve Case (AOL), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Jerry Yang (Yahoo!), Pierre Omidyar (eBay) and a host of other internet billionaires and billionaires. They have strategies that, when replicated, could make one big money online.

What are they?

Mainly they can be grouped into seven categories:

1. Recognize a trend and take advantage of it

2. Start the business from the bottom up

3. Work without pay

4. Be innovative

5. Have a solid mission

6. Offering free services

7. Reinvest the income in business.

Now, let’s see the strategies:

Recognize a trend and take advantage of it

Internet millionaires and billionaires didn’t just get rich. They were prepared for it. This preparation allowed them to seize the opportunity when it occurred.

When these guys started their businesses, the internet was just a fad. But recognizing its potential, they set out to harness it, and their foresight paid off.

If you want to make money online too, you need to keep an eye out for trends; then accept the change and use it to your advantage. This is what distinguishes successful entrepreneurs from their average counterparts.

But know that there are no shortcuts to business success. What it takes is hard work and the right positioning. This way, if opportunity knocks on the door, you can meet it and take advantage of it.

Starting the business from the bottom up

We all know that wealthy Internet entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page didn’t start out rich or make money online overnight. They started small, from the bottom and made their way. You are allowed to dream big, but if you don’t have the means and don’t start where you are, you will never get anywhere.

Remember: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jerry Yang, David Filo, Sergey Brin, etc. they started their Internet businesses from the dormitories of their schools. Jeff Bezos even started Amazon from his garage.

Now, is it the idea that worked for you? No, says Mark Cuban. According to him, if they were ideas everyone would get rich since everyone has ideas. The winning streak was the task that lets you know if the idea would work in a particular industry. Then prepare to turn the idea into reality.

In other words, when these internet millionaires and billionaires came up with their ideas, they didn’t wait for a big investor to put them into practice. They started with their meager resources and continued until they made money online.

Are you ready to do the same if you had a great idea? Of course you must, if you also want to earn money from the Internet.

Working without salary

Another quality to learn and practice is the capacity for sacrifice. Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he and his colleagues did not work for the money. What was important to them was that they had created a flow of information for people.

You should also be prepared to work for your idea for free in the initial stages of your Internet business. Like those millionaires and billionaires, don’t worry at all if you don’t get a penny. Like them, focus solely on developing your business idea and keep sacrificing for it. Success will surely come one day. This is similar to failing to gently kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Be innovative

Innovation is key to success in any business, perhaps even more so in Internet entrepreneurship. We said earlier that internet millionaires and billionaires were well positioned for sixteen opportunities that presented themselves. But this does not mean that they were pioneers in their niche.

Many of them were even late, but the difference was the innovation they brought to the industry. Larry Page once made it clear that his goal was innovation and he believed that mobile apps were essential.

See: before Google and Yahoo there was the search engine ask.com. Other small independent online bookstores existed before Jeff Bezos created Amazon and positioned it as the largest bookstore in the world. Facebook wasn’t the first social networking site either; MySpace was already established. Goal Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook. Thanks to the innovative spirit of these Internet entrepreneurs, you know the rest of the stories.

So you don’t necessarily have to be first in your industry to succeed. You also don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The most important requirement for success on the Internet is that you bring innovation (improvement) to an existing idea.

Have a strong mission

Mark Zuckerberg made this clear when he said that what really mattered to him was the mission to open up the world.

The above mentioned millionaire and billionaire internet entrepreneurs and others believed that they had a mission to accomplish with their internet businesses. Not just any mission, but the one that would allow them to have a positive impact on humanity.

If you also want to give yourself that mission, at the beginning of your internet business, you must ask yourself why you want to start the business. So never lose that focus as the business grows.

Didn’t Jeff Bezos emphasize that the most important goal for him was to be obsessively customer-centric, to be the most customer-centric company in the world? This can make the difference between success and failure. This is because a business mission helps maintain focus, keeping the entrepreneur on the right track.

The business mission must also be strong. That will help you stay successful when you arrive. Perhaps this is what made the difference between MySpace and Facebook, as the latter’s stronger mission became the driving force that caused it to outshine the former. The same goes for the phenomenal success of Google. According to Larry Page, his mission was to organize the world’s information and make it useful and accessible everywhere.

Offering free services

How much did you pay to use Google search or have a Yahoo, Google or Facebook account? Any.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, by allowing family and friends to stay in touch, was fulfilling a vital need. Offering the service for free made it much more attractive and accessible. Google provided vital information for free. Since people love free services, they undoubtedly flocked to these sites and the service providers reaped more and more money on the internet. Didn’t Rich Dad say that if you want to be rich, you just serve more people?

So if you want to make money online too, offer a valuable service to people for free or at least for a fee that many can afford.

Reinvest the income in the business

The seventh secret of success for Internet millionaires and billionaires was that they reinvested what they earned in their businesses. Jeff Bezos, for example, did not pay dividends for five years; Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked hard without any gratification. By reinvesting their earnings, time, and resources, these internet guys stayed engaged and expanded their business through strategic acquisitions. They certainly became millionaires and billionaires.

If you also want to get to where they are now, reinvesting in your business would be critical to business growth and expansion.

Now that you know the Seven Success Secrets of Internet Millionaires and Billionaires, why not make them your roadmap to success to reap wealth on the Internet, too?