Hello

[Orca]

Hi. I found this site weeks ago and have finally decided to sign up and stop lurking!

I'm most interested in building sites from scratch at the moment, but am also interested in buying and developing in the longer term. I don't have enough experience to do this yet, so am hoping to learn some stuff here.

[Clinton]

Hi Orca, welcome to experienced-people.net.

Have you actually started building anything yet? What ideas have you played around with so far for site building?

[Orca]

Hi Clinton. Thanks for the welcome.

I've been involved in affiliate marketing and building small, keyword-targeted sites for individual products and product types. This was at a time when everyone in affiliate marketing seemed to be chasing keyword-rich domains, washingmachine.com or dvdplayer.org or whatever, and building a highly targeted site around it based on the monthly search volumes. I found this interesting for a while, but only really did this on a hobby basis and didn't have enough interest to keep on developing these sites as much as I should. I also quickly learned that search volumes in the Google Keyword Tool are not really accurate enough to be reliant on.

At this time I thought affiliate sites were the only real way to produce a solid income. Adsense, for example, was in my mind just pennies, and a waste of time. But a few months ago I found Scott Jones and Al Carlton's Selfmademinds site. The idea of buying and developing sites as an investment was new to me, and the type of sites discussed there made me realise I'd been too limited in my thinking. The fact that Scott bought an astronomy site which made (I think) £20k a year in Adsense completely changed my mind about what could and couldn't be profitable.

So now I'm hoping to learn a bit about site buying and development, as well as the different revenue streams available beyond the obvious ones. I'll also try not to ask lots of questions that could easily be answered by a quick Google search, since I know how annoying this is.

Thanks for reading through all that, and thanks for creating an interesting site and community here.