About
This isn't going to be a long winded page about my childhood but more just some background info to explain what I do and why.
I've just turned 30, running my own business creating and maintaining websites. I've been developing sites since 1995 when I went to University and discovered the Internet. On leaving I managed to work for a while in London but left a year later after not being happy. During that time I started doing some extra development work on the side for a couple of charities and companies. After contracting for a short while, and spending most winters skiing (for 4-5 months per seaon), I started to build up a small client base. After my last full season skiing I moved to Cardiff for 18 months (before moving to Cheshire) where I took up a contract job to help pay the rent as my business was only halfway there. However in 2006 it literally exploded. During this time I had convinced my partner, David to give up his day job and help me with front end development. Now I spend most of my days writing PHP code for websites.
So that's where I am now. Running my business and then trying to relax in the evenings and catch up with my personal stuff if I've not fried my brain too much during the day! My business consists of working on various projects along with a 25 hour a week contract job with the company I worked for in Cardiff. The contract work, whilst PHP, is pretty interesting as it's completely different from the norm using COMs (components) to access an internal database which isn't very accessible! Gives my thought process a good work out at times.
Since discovering the Amazon affiliate scheme back in 1999, along with a scheme from Easily, I've been trying to make money from the web ever since. At first it was just a few small amounts here and there, then back in 2003 Gary Burton started talking about AIS (Automated Incream Streams) and sparked my re-interest in online money making ventures. Having a few domains gathering dust which were bought back in the late 90's for ventures and then forgotten about, along with the knowledge of building sites and a small knowledge of SEO and marketing I figured that perhaps I could start to knock up those sites and see if my ideas would actually work.
(Below was written in 2006)
So that brings me to now. My target for 2006 was to make enough money to cover the cost of 50% of a car as I wanted to get a new one. I priced these up as between £3,500 to £5,000, so to make £2,500 between June and December I'd need to be earning £12 a day. Of course to get the average to level to this I need to be aiming for £20 a day so that the later months balance out the earlier lower earning months. I've taken a spare savings account and we're now putting all online earnings into it. Admittedly this has only been since July and of course it's only what's been paid out and not the money sitting in various accounts all over the internet!
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Now (2007), I've bought a car and partially given up using AIS to pay for it. We've been saving AIS earnings in a spare bank account since last July/August and we're going to use this money for a 2-3 week trip around Italy in Autumn. We'll probably start to just use AIS earnings for our holidays as it's great to know you don't have to cover the cost to have a nice time away.
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2008 has come and the above never happened. We had to move instead and all of our holiday money went on that. Still, it's good to have the money there to fund it rather than putting ourselves in debt.
Most people say they're trying to crack the AIS game to be able to give up their day job and work from home, or if they already work from home, to be able to dump their clients and just work for themselves. I don't do AIS for either of these reasons. I love my contract job and could quite happily just do 4 or 5 hours a day for them (so 20-25 hours a week) and then just work on my own stuff. I could do that right now as I have very low living expenses, however I'm just not a person who can turn away clients, plus I feel that I have a duty to my clients to be there for them when they need me and need new work doing etc. Ideally I guess I would like to have a couple of people who can essentially manage my clients and business and leave me to just do my contract job and personal work, so essentially I need to build up enough money from client work to cover at least 2-3 wage packets then I can leave it to be managed by someone else and just be in the background when I need to step in.
I also do AIS sites for the challenge. I love setting up new sites and getting visitors to them. When a site works and becomes successful then I feel it's worth the effort. Plus the more I tinker and play with these sites, study the stats and visitor patterns etc. the more I learn, which I can then use on other sites and for client sites at times as well. I guess sometimes my AIS sites are more like experiments for me to test various SEO theories on.
So that's me. I use this blog for updating the regular readers on my progress, asking questions or making statements, and hopefully trying to offer some useful information to others. I do have a few other blogs on different subjects which are all compiled into one site at http://www.stuffbysarah.net, and for anyone wanting to learn PHP then I've done a few posts on that in my Learn PHP category.
