From now on, every week I’m going to attempt to bring you an inspiring story of ordinary people being sucessful with online businesses. Here you won’t find pitches for products to make thousands overnight, but stories of pure sweat equity.

The first story is about an individual named Justin D’Angelo, pictured to the upper-right, whom I read about at CNN Money.

He’s the owner of PoofChairs.com, where he sells a line of comfortable, bean-bag like chairs. But for his business model, he doesn’t keep any actual inventory. He takes the orders on his site, and then he forwards them to a company which manufactures and ships the product to the customer’s door.

This is called drop shipping and it’s a great business model. The trick, if there is any, is to find a market that isn’t oversaturated and with prices bottomed out from competition. But as Justin says, the few hours of work a day for a payout of $150,000 a year is amazing. It’s important to not get discouraged if you don’t reach this amount initially or with your first drop ship site.

Typically, these types of sites will start off slow, so PPC campaigns and paying for traffic from comparison shopping engines are generally needed to get the ball rolling. Also selling your wares on eBay can generate some traffic and reputation for your business.

Personally, I’ve done some drop shipping, but not to nearly this extent. If you’ve only done affiliate marketing/Adsense, please be aware that a project like this generally requires more patience and paperwork. Most states will require to you to collect sales tax for at least in-state purchases, and you’ll generally need what’s called a “Vendors License” to collect and remit sales tax. To obtain one, you should contact your state tax department for more information.

But don’t let this discourage you. Personally, I feel these types of mom & pop operations will be around for sometime.

If you’re interested in learning more about drop shipping, I highly recommend that you check out the Drop Ship Source Directory from World Wide Brands, Inc. It’s a great source to find manufactures of thousands of types of products that will ship your orders to your customer’s door.