How I never made money on the internet

Pre-amble

I remember once many years ago, I met a middle aged guy who didn't seem to work and yet he had a nice car, nice house, etc. I asked him what he did for a living and he replied, "oh! a bit of this and a bit of that". When I pressed him further he told me he did "a bit of writing, a bit of painting, a bit of photography, whatever I feel like". It struck me that he had a decent, contented life. I have been trying now for nearly twenty years to replicate this. So I did a bit of writing, a bit of painting and a bit of photography. Just as well I didn't leave the day job!

Now that we are in the digital age my attention has turned to the internet.

Getting started

Not making money on the internet actually can take a lot of hard work. Simply do an internet search on 'make money on the internet' and you will find hundreds (nay millions!) of sites offering you supposedly free information on how to make money. I have done a fresh search on google before writing this article and it returned 189,000,000 results!

All of these schemes have one thing in mind. To make money for the person who is writing the article. (Why do you think I am writing this!)

They will all promise to show you schemes to make money within hours and of course many of them will show you screen shots of their paypal accounts and/or bank accounts showing how much money they have already made. I would show you my paypal account with nothing on it but I wouldn't want to depress you!

Of course if you are reading this page the chances are you have already seen these sites. Maybe by reading this you can avoid the pitfalls and mistakes that I have made and you will actually make money! If so then please let me know how you did it. In fact you can even make a donation to my paypal account to show your gratitude! Sorry for using so many exclamation marks - my son will hate me for it!!!

I have also included a few of my own websites so that you can see what I did right and what I did wrong. Use the menu on the left to view them.

I can however show you a few things that may help you:

I CAN show you how to get a copy of Dreamweaver CS4 or NetObjects Fusion for FREE.

I CAN show you where to find a great book which apparently will help you make serious money on the internet.

I CAN show you where to get access to affiliate schemes.

I CAN give you a link to where you can apparently get free Google Adwords advertising.

AND I CAN show you where I went wrong.

And hopefully you can have a bit of a laugh along the way.

Once reading this you will realise why I have not used my own name but anyone who knows me knows who Georgyman is.

If after reading this then you are one of the people who actually go on to make money then why not consider a donation in thanks?

eBook

One piece of advice I must give you is to buy How to make a fortune on the internet" by Ajay Ahuja. As you will already have guessed it hasn't helped me yet... But it is jam packed full of good advice and I have to say it is very inspirational.

I paid £9.99 for my copy in PC World but you can buy an ebook version of it for £7.99. Once you have bought it you will get passwords to extra information on his website to allow you to re-sell the book and earn 75% commission (as I am trying to do here!)

Click here to buy a copy or simply to visit his website.

Website design and FREE web design software

This is probably the easiest part. All you need is an HTML editor and a template. CoffeCup is a very good editor which is available as a free version and there are many sites which will give you free templates. Some of these are un-necesarily complicated. This site has been built with Adobe dreamweaver CS4 and you can get a free copy of this or NetObjects Cold Fusion by simply taking out a hosting package www.1and1.co.uk - simply click here to find out more.

Naturally you will need to host your website somewhere. The one I use is www.1and1.co.uk and I must admit it is one of the cheapest I have found.

You will also probably need a domain name. A domain name is the name you call your website as in www.nevermademoney.com. Probably a dot com or a dot co dot uk address is the best but there are loads of suffixes to choose from. Finding a good name is the tricky bit as most of the good ones are already taken - epecially the short ones. However you can use this domain name checker to see if yours is available:

Internet tips and tricks

If you look at the source code for this site (right-click and then select view source) you will see that there is the title of the web site in h1 tabs but yet you can't see it on the site. The reason for this is that in the css code there is a positioning distance of -500px effectively taking the title off the screen. One of the ways that google indexes your site is by looking for the title of the page. By doing this we give the pages a title that google robots can find but the viewer can't see it.

One of the other ways that google indexes your web site is by looking for links to it on other sites so you will see that I have a page linking to other sites that I have made. By doing this I am hopefully helping my other sites to be found by google.

What's next?

I plan to add a forum to this site so that other unfortunate's in my situation can get together and chat about it. This is a bit more complicated than normal web pages so check back in the future to see how I get on. I will also add in more web sites that I have created.

Stop Press!

If during the course of writing these articles I actually make some money, I will let you know here. So remember to check back regularly - last updated 24th August 2011.

Latest update - as at 1st December 2011. Had a small amount of success promoting Speed-e-loans.com. They are available as an affiliate via Affiliate Window So if you would like to try them - have a go (UK only).

I will be continually adding to this site as I discover new avenues.