How I Got Started

One piece of advice that's invaluable to any potential internet entrepreneur is to start out in an area you know well. It might be based around the skills you've developed in the workplace or around a hobby or favorite pasttime.

In my case, I've been a software developer for over 20 years. I've worked on a wide variety of projects in that time from Sales Order Entry Systems to Car Automation systems to projects for the European Commission and the European Space Agency. My last full-time employment project was the development of a system for recording the details of young offenders in the UK, and maintaining all details from when they first entered the system at the police station through court appearances and sentencing. A bit different from analysing signals from a communications satellite!

Anyway, one of my long-time hobbies has been astronomy. I set up the Night Sky Observer website back in 1997, a website devoted to astronomy and space. It's still going strong and is one of my income streams through a combination of Google Adsense ads, Chitika e-MiniMalls and Amazon products.

Anyone with a website can easily set up their site to use any of these techniques to pull in a little extra money. I joined Adsense about a year after it launched and, to be honest, didn't make more than a few cents a day from it. Then I came across a guy called Joel Comm who'd put together a ebook about how to make the most of Adsense on your website. So I bought it. It wasn't expecting much but I was pleasantly surprised. Implementing the tecniques outlined in the ebook, my Adsense revenue jumped to a couple of dollars per day. Today, the site pulls in $10+ dollars per day. Now, that might not sound like much, but that's $300+ per month, $3600 per year. That's a little more than pin money. And all this from a site that requires little or no maintenance (it's essentially free money - naturally, I have to pay the site hosting fees from it).

The Night Sky Observer is not the only site I run. Each of my sites adds a little more to the pot each month. If you're interested, here's a list of my websites:

Night Sky Observer
Great Landscape Photography
Cat-oholics
The Emerald Isle
Living With Cancer
Home Based Business Directory

How much you make from Google Adsense depends on a number of factors: how popular the website is, it's subject, how many pages are on the site (the more pages the more chances of visitors clicking on ads), how well the ads integrate into the pages and the price offered by advertisers per click.

Astronomy is a niche market but, even so, the Night Sky Observer gets 15,000+ vistors each month. It's easily the most popular of all my sites but I put that down to its longevity and consequent large number of return visitors.

Google Adsense has now been implemented on all my websites. It's easily the easiest to set up and gives the best return.

In the next blog, I'll continue on how I got started as an Internet Entreprneur...

The Beginning Of My Story

As the title of this blog says, I'm not an internet millionaire. Well, not yet anyway (I can always live in hope!). That doesn't mean I haven't been trying to make money off the internet - I have with some limited success.

My name is Gary Nugent and just over two years ago, I got really cheesed off with the last company I was with and we parted company. My vision of how the company should transact business and treat its employees was at odds with their vision. Just as things were beginning to become acrimonious, I decided not to renew my contract with them.

It's not the first time I've had a run-in with bosses. I have a habit of speaking my mind when things piss me off and managers and surprisingly (!), managers and bosses don't like to be criticized by underlings, especially when they know they're in the wrong. That forthrightness has got me into trouble on more than one occassion.

Anyway, as my contract came to a close, those couple of years ago, a funny feeling began to creep into me: that this would be the last "real job" I'd ever have (or want). I'd put 20 years into computer programming and the IT sector. Policemen retire after 20 years service, so I decided I'd join them.

Waving bye-bye to my last employer (which involved various fingers rather than a whole hand), I flexed those very same fingers and set about the idea of making a living online.

Now I've been playing about with the internet since the late 80s but I'd never really thought about making it my prime source of income. Since bills needed to be paid, I'd have to treat this idea with some seriousness.

I had a good starting position: my mortage was paid up, the car loan was paid up and I didn't own a red cent to anyone. I even had some savings in the bank to fall back on. All I'd have to worry about were general day-to-day living expenses and the monthly and annual bills with, maybe, some play money as well.

This occasional blog will be a recounting of how I've survived on the internet, the programs and systems I've used, abused and buggered up and about the successes I've also had.

So there's more to come...