Part 2 of the AM Mastery Series

Eventually something starts to happen. You start to realize that your skills are so good that you can do high-quality sites for other people and charge them. You'll become a PHP/MySQL and Perl expert. You'll have taught yourself Flash, AJAX, JSON, great Web 2.0 CSS, and can use that as a way to fill in gaps in time. You'll have a great eye for photography. You'll become a Linux expert and can even build web farm projects. You'll have cash to invest in more large project sites and even new small web startups that do interesting new things in order to gain ad revenue. You may even begin to form startups that build your own ad networks where advertisers will switch from another more expensive ad network to yours if you can deliver a better return on their investment.

This is the hardest part of the game. You'll be doing so many things at once and working very hard all on your own. The trick is to not over-extend yourself, watch the site analysis numbers and strategize against that, stick with short-term stuff and grow from there, and network with people, attend seminars and conferences, in order to build these partnerships to get things off the ground.

Sites like wickedfire.com will be very useful to you in learning about new opportunities and joining others for them. Note however that at this stage of the game, you'll ultimately be taking risks in your re-investment into your business and will fail here or there because that's natural at this stage.

With a lot of effort, working with friends you meet online and strategizing, you may have enough in this stage to even pay off your house!

So, what you find is that at this stage the role of AM has opportunities for branching into other fields you might not have anticipated, such as small angel investor, PHP/MySQL and/or web design consulting, SEO expert, or even building your own ad network.