How you started out

Well I began web design way back when the Pentium 3 450 was top of the line and just released. A family friend had just bought a brand spanker for about AUS$4000 and it had frontpage installed with it. This family friend and I have always been interested in cars and we started a site called HSV Centre (www.hsvcentre.cjb.net was our first domain :P) and it just had some pictures of some of the Holden Special Vehicles models and some statistics. This was great fun and we found free hosting to use and ran that for a little bit, we didnt care about traffic or anything (didn’t even know what traffic was) but just enjoyed showing the site to other family members and friends. All images and such were done with Paint and were saved as Bitmaps, boy was that funy with 28k internet.

Years of slowly mucking around with websites I tried to make some money through affiliates but never really had any traffic to monetise anything. My younger brother (David) had been interested in computers and started to program, learning Visual Basic and then years later, learning ASP. He made an online RPG game called Life Of Crime (http://www.life-of-crime.com) and that started to build up monetum with people. He then found problems with the server loads and ASP + Access and learnt then recoded the game into PHP + MySQL. A PayPal button was chucked onto the site and donations were asked to pay for hosting costs (only very cheap still as it was on shared hosting) and he started to make money, after about a year of running that game (I am still mucking around with 3DS Max and playing games at this point) he starts making a healthy amount of money for a 14 year old. I then start to try and make some money so then I start a site called SuperCarNews (http://www.supercarnews.com) and have some fun doing that, it doesnt really do very well money wise but gets some decent traffic.

Skip forward to 2006 and this is where it all starts to happen. I have been running Adsense on a few sites and make between $0-2 a day. It is not much, and I wasnt happy with it being so low. I find DigitalPoint, this is where my luck starts to change. I start reading about how to optimise adsense, increase CTR and viola, I am starting to make $5 a day from no increase in traffic. Figuring it might take a bit more than 1 site to make some money, I follow the MySpace customisation craze and dive into the deep end where there are lots of cannibalistic sharks ready to eat one another. I am a small shark jumping into a big shark ocean. I decide that I dont want to follow 99% of other people and use a pre-made script (nor did i want to pay for one). So i got my brother to code me up a profile generator, friend train and some other gadgets and started ProfileStyling (originally called FlauntMySpace, but didnt want to infringe on any tradmarks). The site started to get some slow traffic, so i did some link exchanges with other myspace sites, thinking it would send more traffic. It did send a little traffic, but that is when Google started sending me more traffic than i could have imagined. This is where i started to learn about Optimising for Search Engines and Link Building. I did a lot of reading and just recently got to the front page of Google for the keyword MySpace Backgrounds. This was sending about 3000 people a day to the site and was one of the reasons i sold it for $XX,XXX.

Now that I dont have much of an income earning site, I have started a new site which will utilise AJAX, and hopefully take down my last sites (sorry mate, its a competitive world out there, just because I sold you the site, doesnt mean i cant re-compete with you). This is just a quick explanation of how i started in website money making, and it really only began this year. Before that, i would never of even dreamed of the success I have had over the past 12 months. The years of mucking around with sites for fun has finally paid off.

How you promoted your sites

Well, i really only promoted sites with search engine optimisation, and word of mouth. I have never really paid for advertising (as I am a bit of a tight ass) but I havent really looked into places where my advertising dollars would be turned around into revenue easily yet. Still another branch I have on my list of things to look at.

How you managed to monetize your network so well

Adsense has really been my monetization tool. I went with the whole images next to ads idea, and it went well for increasing CTR. With the myspace sites, it was all about volume. I was getting about 5-6000 visits a day to the site and getting around 2000 clicks, equalling around 2.7-3 cents a click, it was disappointing to see such a low CPC, but it added up. Had I have spent some time and looked at Google Adsense Section Targetting, it might have made me more money. But I sold the site, and cant look back now. Section targetting has been included on the new site and I will link to it when I have everything in a decent order.

Tips for other webmasters

Dont give up, some of you may think what the hell am I wasting my time doing this for if im not seeing a return on my work. It can be really unmotivating and i went through so many stages of just giving up. DigitalPoint has a wealth of information, read up on it. Learn about SEO and that will drive you traffic to your Adsense sites which have also been optimised for maximum gains.