Assorted Thoughts on Website Buying, Selling and Monetizing

Many years ago when I decided to ditch the day job and make a living from the web I didn't realise just how much time it takes to manage the average website.

If it's a blog you need to make regular posts, clean comment spam, engage with users who are commenting, read other blogs in the niche and comment in there, update Word Press regularly, update plugins... and while all this is fun for someone who's running his blog as a hobby, I was intending to make a living from this interweb and every minute I spent was time at the office rather than time at the beach.

So I decided not to go down the blog route. I'm glad I did. Some bloggers have been very successful at what they do and have made a lot of money. They have also worked very hard. Bloggers who make money from, for example, talking about making money from blogging are constantly testing new programs and monetising methods, split testing affiliate programs, trying various ways of driving traffic to their sites. Then they blog about it with detailed posts on everything from what titles work best to the art of making controversial posts to get more people commenting. Many of them also attended seminars, took notes, went back and tried what they learnt. They spent time preparing presentations of their own which they wheeled out at one venue after another.

Too. Much. Work.

Hats off to them for doing it, but that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to make millions just like they did, but even before any of them started their blog, I recognised the blog road was filled with a lot of hard slog.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with working hard. I spent more than a couple of decades of my life running B&M businesses, working seven days a week and often, 100 hour weeks. I am not averse to hard graft. My parents always taught me that you needed to work hard to get anywhere so I worked hard. Sorry mum and dad, I don't believe that any more. I agree that if you want to win Wimbledon, get a Nobel Prize or discover a cure for cancer, you're likely going to have to work your socks off. But to make enough money to be very comfortably off ...things have changed since mum and dad were kids.

Prior to the dot com boom I knew of people who made millions from something as simple as buying the right domain name. During the dot com boom, many people made a lot of money by being in the right place at the right time. Since then I found that people were getting stinking rich also by coming up with the right idea, having the right contacts, making the right bets. So it was simply a matter of finding the right way.

And I did. It made a huge difference to my life. Subscribe to my feed and I'll go into more detail next week. And, I promise, just like everything else on this site, it's free. There's no ebook to buy and you don't even need to sign up to my newsletter (I don't have a newsletter - it's too much work).

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For those of you who are new to this site, you really should visit the forums. Some of the smartest brains in the business are there discussing buying, selling and creating of money making websites - people who earn a healthy living from the internet. And you could tap into all their knowledge and experience for free. Browse around and you'll see what I mean. There are top quality discussions and no spam. If you're smart you'll register there and join the party to share what you know or to ask some good questions.