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About me
> insert clever subtitle here <
6/5/2007 I've always thought "me" pages were a little presumptuous. I recognize their importance though. Every website should have at least some information regarding itself made publicly available (some more than others), if for no other reason than to prove it has nothing to hide. The internet's not getting any friendlier as it grows. In fact it's getting pretty nasty. Lines are being drawn even as we speak. Next generation browser security will include new and improved ways of identifying white -vs- black websites and steering users away from any who don't pass their sniff tests. I think it's more important than ever for web designers and webmasters in general to honestly show at least a minimum degree of transparency in what they do online. The web has long been a haven for anonymity. It's one of it's better selling points. Anonymity in the future is not going to be viewed as such a good thing though - it'll be an indication you might have something to hide.
I have a small network of websites that I sell products from. I sell my own products and I sell for several other companies on a commission basis. That's known as affiliate marketing and I've been doing it, as well as a couple of other things, for the last seven years. For five of those years I've actually made money at it. Before that I hung sheetrock in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, La Quinta, California and Huntsville, Alabama. I imagine I'd probably still be hanging drywall if I hadn't messed up my leg in a careless accident in Huntsville, Alabama nine years ago. It was while I was recovering from that accident that I was introduced to computers, and more importantly, to the internet. I guess I got caught up in the lure of internet riches. No, I know I did. The internet lottery... new winners daily... Every week you'd hear about the latest dot com millionaire, some geeky, tenth grade dropout who'd just happened to stumble upon the right idea at the right time and had had the ability to capitalize on it. The ability to capitalize on it didn't require having a good idea. A good idea helped but the idea didn't have to be good. It just had to be an idea, any idea so long as somebody else wasn't already doing it. What the ability to capitalize on it required was being able to deliver that idea to the widest possible audience, and to do it consistently day after day after day. The bigger the audience - the greater the potential to monetize the bandwidth that audience is using up. Simple physics. If you can get the traffic, anything you put in front of it will eventually sell. If you're not selling products, you can turn website traffic into cash in other ways such as affiliate marketing or PPC publishing. The moral of the story is that traffic is king. Get enough of it on your pages and monetize it correctly and it'll pay your bills and then some. I really didn't know what I was doing at first. I stumbled around for two years trying different things out, mostly with regard to search engines, none of which worked as well as I wanted it to. This was back when stacking keywords in your meta tags and other shady tricks still worked with a lot of search engines and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was basically in it's infancy. I learned a lot in that two |
