Do you recognise the following sequence of events ? It happens thousands of times, every day, throughout the world.
In the beginning ‘they' enter a search term, more often than not, on Google and ‘surf' the web. Next ‘they' establish an email account, usually a free one, because, well it's free. Now a desire to join in the cyberspace community becomes overwhelming and ‘they' join You Tube, Facebook and all the other social websites their friends have told them about.
‘They' are, of course, you, me, everyone.
A percentage of this vast internet army want more. They know eBay is the largest online auction house, listing at least 60,000,000 items at any one time and guess what ? Those halogen light bulbs that cost $7 each at the mall can be bought for $2 on eBay. Hmm, how about selling stuff on eBay.
This is real interaction, the casual surfer has morphed into a trader, a dealer, an entrepreneur !
Then a vision, blurred at first, becomes clearer and more defined in the mind of the would be web wizard. That vision, that dream, is creating a website of their own.
When I last checked it was estimated that there are about 176,000,000 sites out there and growing by the hour. A cyber sea of information and misinformation representing every emotion, hope, dream and failing known to mankind.
Despite the fact that huge numbers of sites must be sad, neglected bundles of unwanted, unloved data, floating around, forgotten in cyberspace, it seems that to create a website is still regarded as a ‘must have'.
Our budding entrepreneur wants their own website and nothing will stop them ! Well actually it soon becomes clear that there are two basic options. Firstly there is the ‘techie' route. Buy a course or attend an how-to evening class and study html and every other mind bending aspect of site creation. This method can be costly in terms of both time and money and can lead to introversion and a desire to live on Chinese take outs and never leave the house.
Some will survive and prosper, many will be put off the whole idea - permanently !
How about getting someone to do it for you ? Unless you know someone who has survived the learning curve described above and, as a result of having lost all of their friends, will create a website for you in return for your companionship, you have a problem. In order to solve the problem you can go to a site like elance or guru.com to find a webmaster who will, for a fee, do it all for you.
If money simply isn't an issue, this is the way to go. Be clear about exactly what your site should do and what it should look like and you will be lord of your net empire in a matter of days. Even so you still need to slot into place the most important part of the whole jigsaw, namely, how to drive traffic to your site and make money.
I've travelled down this turbulent route and half succeeded at most aspects and never mastered all of it.
I'm a huge fan of eBay - the free university of the internet - so I felt that the best way to create a website of my own was to become an eBay affiliate. It must be pointed out that I am a useless ‘techie' so the old problem arose like the creature from the black lagoon. What I needed, to overcome my ‘creating a website phobia' was a program that showed me in a step by step format how to put up a niche site, link it to eBay and monetise it.
I found it in BANS, Build A Niche Site.
By clicking through to their site and without buying anything you will find a huge amount of information explaining how it all works and the unrivalled support. I just don't have the space here to do it justice but bear this in mind, with thousands upon thousands of possible ‘niche' subjects for your sites you are never going to run out of ideas for your next one.
If your online history has been anything like mine then you need to, at least, check out the BANS option. Creating a website, making money and staying sane is possible
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