There's a new book out. It's called "Building Your Business with Google for Dummies." It purports to be the "first-ever book to show businesses step by step how to capitalize on advertising programs offered by Google, the world's #1 search engine." Brad Hill, the author, also writes the search engine marketing blog at WebLogs, Inc.

The point I want to make is this: Someone can build a business through the intelligent use of one Internet application, in this case Google. Think about that for a minute. Does that sound as revolutionary to you as it does to me? To think that one search engine has not only become such a cultural phenomena that its very name is now a verb used in our vocabularly (We don't search for something, we "google" it.), but that entire business fortunes can be built using it alone! It would take people with far more grey matter than me to probe the depths of the significance of that fact.

But, wait, there's more!

The same can be said of eBay. An entire economy has built up around the auction website. Just "google" the phrase "ebay economy" and see how many returns you get. And I mean good ones too! Businessweek.com, USA Today, and Forbes were the first three from my search. If my facts are right, in 2003 at least 30 million people bought and sold over $20 billion in merchandise -- more than the gross domestic product of all but 70 of the world's countries.

More than 150,000 entrepreneurs will earn a full-time living selling everything from diet pills and Kate Spade handbags to $30,000 BMWs and industrial lathes. More automobiles sell on eBay than even No. 1 U.S. dealer AutoNation.

People have always bought and sold, bartered and traded. My father goes to a little auction house in his hometown nearly every Saturday night and bids on trinkets and junk. He loves it. So do millions of others. The Internet has just given it scale. And it's not just mom or dad sitting at their computer in the living room breathlessly waiting until the last moment to "snipe" the other bidders and win the prize. There is an entire B2B economy that's grown up around eBay as well.

I talk to people almost everyday who dream of making their fortune online. Heck, I'm one of them. Here are two proven "yellow brick roads" we can all go down. Buy Brad Hill's book, then tell me what you think of it. I'm trending toward eBay myself.