So whats this all about then?

I’ve been a strong believer in the potential of using the internet to make a reasonably serious income without too much input for years now. The marketing potential available from your keyboard is incredible and your original investment can be extremely low. I’ve been designing web sites for about 10 years now - all self-taught from the internet and a few selected book titles - and a couple of years ago someone introduced me to the wonderful world of affliliate marketing. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a system whereby you ‘introduce’ customers to a range of retailers’ websites and, if that person makes any purchases within a given timeframe, you are paid a percentage ‘commission’. From a retailer’s perspective, it makes total sense in that they only pay out when a successful sale has gone through. For this reason, your percentage commission can be substantial on high value items. How you introduce customers to the retailer is the fun part - and is partly where this web site concept came from!

There are a number of different ways to refer customers across to a retailer via the internet - the most common way, and perhaps the most familiar to regular internet users, is the humble ad banner. You post the banner on your website and should any of your web visitors click through and make a purchase, you get paid! A second method is to build up an email list (legally of course!) and send regular emails with offers and discount codes together with links to the relevant retailer’s web site. A third is to download the database of all the retailer’s stock and then create your own website around that data, maybe combining the data of a number of retailers into a price comparison website.

I tried all three to a greater or lesser degree of success, eventually settling on a couple of price comparison sites specialising in football strips and mp3 players! What got me thinking was that these couple of sites themselves bring in £50-£100 a month with a minimal amount of effort. The main input from me is the updating of all the databases which can take a few hours each time. I’ve learned alot more about structuring and designing websites since then and am ready to give it another push.

Which leads me to the reasons behind starting this web blog up. In searching for fast ways to make a million on the internet, it eventually becomes apparent that …. you can’t unless you are extremely lucky. So, plan B was hatched - why not run it as an experiment? So here is the deal:

I have set myself a target of having a business that generates a minimum of £1000 per month within 24 months. The timescale is to keep things realistic as it can take several months for a web site to get established and start to attract serious traffic. I’ll blog all my preparations and progress via this site, as well as other things that I come across over the next two years and lets see if we can crack the £1000 per month before the end!

So, if you are interested in following my progress or, even better, helping out then great! Get me bookmarked and we’re on our way. For everyone with their own blogs, it’d be a great help if you can trakback to me as well as DIGG my articles etc - what goes around comes around