Is there any money left?

Welcome to my Beach Web Design blog, a kind of ongoing technical and internet business experiment. As I work in freelance web design and web development, my customers are generally looking to make money on the internet. I figured it never hurts to find out more about that, so this is my continuing mission to investigate what’s out there, boldly going where 100000s have gone before…

I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to build things on the internet, but I’ve never directly tried to make money out of it. But surely ‘everyone knows’ there is a fortune to be made, isn’t there?

The early dot commers famously made fortunes, but now we hear the bubble has burst, so is there any money left? Every day, little adverts appear to offer me instant easy wealth, and most seem unbelievable. Do any of them contain truth?

2008: One year on…

In this blog I have been checking out various (legal) money making schemes on the internet, and also finding some of the scams (that’s the ‘scams‘ section). True to habit though, I’ve tended to build the sites (that’s the ‘technical‘ section), see how they might work, and then move on to the next thing instead of promoting them and making any money (sigh)…

So in one case at least I have forced myself to promote a site (a web directory I developed in my spare time and practised things on for work). I thought I really ought to know the lifecycle of a website. So I launched it, and promoted it, and I kept a diary of things that happened along the way (that’s the ‘Stairway to Devon’ section, along with the ‘Joomla‘ and ‘Directories‘ sections).

I experimented with several forms of on-site advertising, including adsense and affiliate programmes.

A former games professional (and long term Everquest fan!), I’ve also been dipping into the virtual world of Second Life (not surprisingly, that’s the ‘Second Life‘ section).

Finally, I experienced a month of extreme email spoofing, followed by hacking attempts, which gave rise to the ‘Spam‘ and ‘Security‘ sections.