Part I - overview of the money out here

Increased sales for offline business

Whatever you sell, there are far more people accessible to you online than in your immediate locality or via your "realworld" advertising media. Imagine your ideal UK customer, now imagine 10s of 1000s of versions of that customer, now imagine 100s of 1000s, in fact handfuls of millions of them. The internet puts that kind of reach in your hands at reasonable rates and using manageable and low-cost business structures and processes.

In fact the cost of it is so low that the few people who understand how and where to buy the best website users online can currently make more than stock brokers, property brokers, commodities brokers and other immensely rich people even when the industries of those mentioned were at their peak. Ask yourself this: how come Google has 100s of billions of dollars? The main thing they do is let you click on their pages. It's just a page you click on. The answer to the question is that globally there are 100s of millions of clicks every second (in a market spanning across almost every language and nation) and the clicks are all worth some small amount of money. That's a lot of money per second.

And don't be so naive as to think Google's clicks represent "the majority" of web use! For starters, every Google use engenders the use of some other site also - which puts Google vs "off-google" (i.e. people going to sites other than Google itself) usage at 50/50 just at the start, let alone how much far ahead off-google usage gets when you consider all the other multitudes of entry points to the web and the abundance of links on all sites leading to so many other sites.

The reality is that the worldwide web is teeming with money and profit and capital and power and anything else you want to call it - it is a veritable planet of opportunity. So get a feel for the different kinds of site that exist, the sorts of usage and traffic that they get, and learn to buy the right eyeballs. Alternatively seek out the most powerful mainstream brands (eg Google) and pay them for the said eyeballs and learn how to not waste them.

Web-based information sites with ad revenue

Web-based information sites with subscription revenue

Peripheral web-based services, business to business

In many areas technicians have been underpaid for years but as the retail and business to business world gets more dependent on internet traffic for its sales, something fostered a great deal by the stock market crash and the demise of many traditional pre-internet businesses, the earnings per hour for skilled online developers will rise sharply. Programming skills are often well-paid as it is, but even those skills will see much higher salaries in future. 70k coding jobs will leap to 100k, as 20k design jobs leap to 40k - so the rise is still higher for those who have been trampled underfoot by liquidity-driven low-talent giants who are now falling every which way.

Part II - selling ad space

Affiliate networks, "etc"

There are still 100s of affiliate networks which ARE real, although globally, in the English-speaking commercial world, there are only up to a dozen or so which are the major networks and cover the vast majority of tech-literate giant retailers. I will provide a full named list when I have completed research I am doing on this matter, but the major networks I know who provide a lot of UK money include Commission Junction, Affiliate Window, Tradedoubler.

Affiliate networks pay very good money to you for each sale that you make for a company. Companies pay the networks £1000s per month to be allowed the privelege of talking to you, and then on top of that they pay out commissions to you which make the usual forms of "monetizing your site" seem very weak indeed - frequently people sell "clicks" - they go to pay per click networks and get paid for each click that sends someone away from their site.

Affiliate networks don't do that - they pay per performance - if you sell £1000 of goods, you could see a nice £100 commission from many sites. Ironically an estate agent will still try and pay you £2 for a lead that could earn them a £15000 commission from a property owner! That will change, of course, if they want to sell houses on our turf. Otherwise we'll just make our own estate agents online! The affiliate sector has been growing at a rate much faster, overall, when you factor in the recent global market crashes, than Google and the big mainstream competitors of Google whose names are known to all. The affiliate sector is, collectively, much bigger than those known names. We are just about the most profitable subsector of any capitalist endeavour on this planet currently, above all if you factor in longterm security. I can't say more than that, really, can I?

The "etc" part of the title refers to the fact that as well as affiliate networks, there are, as I said, pay per click networks - these DO PAY YOU, and are SOMETIMES legitimate. Google Adsense is a good mainstream all-purpose pay per click network and I wouldn't knock it, even if I personally feel I can make more money from Google's Affiliate Network.

The crap stuff - what to avoid

What you will find when you hunt for payers is that there are countless other networks and where Google Adsense pays what to me is already 20 to 80% max of what my clicks get if they are monetized by a performance algorithm instead of an arbitrary bid, those crap networks pay about 1% and can drop even lower than that. I won't name any of them. In time I'll just make a full list of everything that I know is good, and you can choose from that, and if you find others which are not on my lists but which are good, I can add those, once you let me know. A working version of the list is here.

Part III - buying ad space

Trash, Junk, Spam

Putting out lots of junk on the web, whatever form it takes, if you know that it is in fact merely junk and that there is no soul to it, if YOU know that in your heart, then it definitely is, so don't do it. If you do it, that will add years and years to the delay before you get rich. So if you don't listen to me, listen to the sound of your own poverty! That'll wise you up, eh?

Mainstream sources - Google

Mainstream sources - everyone else

The other huge provider of traffic, in fact the best in the business, is of course the Affiliate Networks I mentioned and described as "the real affiliate networks". Sadly they will charge you £3000 per month in fees, plus you'll pay out 5 to 10% of your revenue generated, so that those generating it are paid. You'll be able to buy hundreds of millions of sales per month, easily and without the kind of serious effort required to buy that much off Google, who is the only other trader able to supply that much monthly traffic really.

Part IV - resources

Back end design and coding

Personally I build all my back ends using CGI (common gateway interface) scripts written in Perl (practical extraction and reporting language). I imagine a lot of back ends are written with PhP (Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, and then later the "recursive acronym" Hypertext Preprocessor). or in Asp/aspx (Active Server Pages - from Microsoft). Other languages you can build back ends with include C++, Java (NOT Javascript - which is a cosmetic language for front ends, and part of design, not coding).

Back ends should be designed to give you full "content management" and enable the development of as much facility and utility for your users as possible, making your site into a "place" where people come and use stuff they want, which makes it a permanent location on the world wide web and it starts to gain rank for ALL the reasons that guerrilla marketers don't know anything about - the natural reasons sites are "promoted" naturally by the overall "ethos of the web" - if it's good, it will rise. If it is a bunch of evil, of lies, of exploitation... you can push it, but you'll always be against the grain, no matter how big you get.

Front end design and coding

There are organisations, unsurprisingly easy to find, who have all the official information on all surface level web languages and systems, and anything you do is likely to be well-documented so if you want you can do it absolutely professionally, at no cost whatsoever.

Online communities

Marketing, public relations, sales

Making sales happen through your site, whether you are advertising other people's products, selling your own or charging for subscription is all down to one factor alone - high quality informational content. If the quality of what you do (other than making money) is good, then your return rate will be good. The internet is a very meritocratic place in a lot of ways, when it comes to the money.

Part V - things to stay away from

Advertising by email bursts

Undervaluing developer norms

We are developing search technology (and have been since before the time of Google even) which centres on a primary aim of effectively delivering powerful information with virtually no difficult processing. Although we are able to mimic common models of delivery (such as those apparently employed by Google) we have devised our own specialised system which pioneers a whole new approach to pattern matching information delivery.