Is this easy?
Getting started in website publishing isn’t hard. In fact, its the one business I know of where there are people who, with tiny nvestments, have been able to make $1 million+ a year almost entirely on their own.
Its cheaper now than ever to get into web publishing. Domains are virtually free at under $10 for a .com. Hosting is too at a few dollars a month. Or you could just sign up for a free-hosted blog. Right now my business expenses come into just under $200 a month and I am bringing in well over that.
Software isn’t that big of a deal either, for starting. There are countless free open-source apps and cheap templates that you can buy to build your website.
The barrier to entry in this business is less than most people’s monthly cable bill.
That leaves one more barrier — you. Do you have what it takes?
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. Is this an easy job? It feels like it to me, right now.
I have been publishing profitable websites for a little over a year now. One year to a very healthy business that keep growing month after month with or without daily attention — sounds too good to be true. A tiny investment, slap some Adsense ads on the site and the money starts rolling in, right?
So, is this really easy? Web publishing requires multiple disciplines which most people make careers out of. To be successful at this I’ve had to be good at writing, designing, coding, marketing, convincing people to do things, the list goes on and on.
The reality is, the first website I designed was probably in 1996. For me then it was just out of curiosity, just a game. I was a kid and the idea never even crossed my mind that I could make money off of it. In the past 10 years I’ve done tons of design work, paintings, drawings, written articles and stories, participated in and helped build evolving online communities, and played a hell of a lot of computer games. Its only now that I’ve been able to look back and realise just how critical all of this has turned out to be.
If you are no good at design, coding, or writing, the good news is that if you have a little extra money you can pay other people to do this stuff for virtually nothing. Good outsourcing is dirt cheap. The bad news is that you still need to know what you are doing in order to properly co-ordinate the work.
That leads me to believe that the truly critical skill here is understanding just how the online publishing world works. Where does traffic come from, how do you get it, and how do you maximize your profit when you do get it? There are plenty of internet geniuses out there who have made more this year than I will make in my lifetime — even if I make $1 million a year until I die.
Enough about me, what do you think, is this an easy “job”?
I think it seems a lot easier to get started if you’ve spent the last five to ten years immersing yourself in all the different aspects of the web as you mention. Spending time online, surfing different sites, getting a user’s perspective of what works and what doesn’t, working as a developer (as I’ve been doing as well for five years) and then reading forums such as Chris Beasley’s Website Publisher, Web Master World, Sitepoint and Digital Point and now blogs such as this all help add in small pieces of the jigsaw that eventually seem to click.
I’ve only launched a few sites of my own publishing wise over the last month as I’d always done sites for other people before but I think that time learning the trade has made this step of actually publishing my own sites so much easier. I’m using open source blog and CMS software, my reseller hosting package is less than £20 per month and domain names are buttons so the barriers to entry as you say are not going to be financial ones.
The one main area that sets successful, money making publishers apart from the rest is that they know how to get traffic and monetize it and if they don’t know something, they know who to ask or where to look for help. The other thing is they actually get off their backsides (figuratively speaking of course!) and put their sites out there. I used to do some work with a marketing consultant who told everyone he met how he was the real inventor of Ebay and that he had dreamed it up years before the real one started. The difference between him and them was that they did something about their idea and he sat on his hands.
Maybe the hardest part, in the begining at least, is motivating yourself to actually start publishing and stop just thinking and talking about it.
Comment by Alan Hylands — November 17, 2005 @ 3:46 am
I’ve been doing publishing for quite a few years. Every year I learn more and more. This year, all the pieces finally came together and I could see how to start making money in a passive manner from internet information. The next step is picking the topic and producing the sites/products. This is the hard part. It’s not the time so much as the doubt. “What if I do all this and get it wrong?” The other problem is picking the product. I think it was Mark Twain who said “write what you know.” However, if what you know isn’t a marketable commodity, then you’ve got a lot of learning to do.
Comment by chris — November 17, 2005 @ 9:28 am