Howdy, my name is Chris Beasley. If you’re a member of SitePoint’s Forums you know me as aspen, the team leader of the Manage Your Site section.
I built my first website in 1993 or 1994 and published my first site that was meant to make money in 1999. I’ve been at it ever since. I now own nearly 100 sites on various topics. It’s sometimes hard to explain to people what it is that I do, especially people not in this Industry. Most people assume I build websites for other people, in actuality what I do is closer to owning a magazine or television station. I publish content and collect advertising revenue for the most part. I got my start doing consulting for other people of course, but working for a pain in the butt client for what is in comparison very little money just wasn’t the life for me. I thoroughly enjoy being my own boss, working from home, and cashing large checks. Also, I still make money when I sleep, when I take a vacation, when I go out to eat. Residual income like that is the benefit of having something you own generate revenue for you, rather than having your income directly tied to your labor. That fact is, even if you make $200 an hour you can still earn no more than $1600 a day with a standard work day, or $4800 a day if you could conceivably work for 24 hours. Sure, those are high limits, but they’re still limits. When your business makes money for you, regardless of how much you work, there is no limit. I’ve grossed 5 figures in a single day before, and I probably only worked around 4 hours that day.
So making money is easy right? Nah, not really. Sure, I do very well now, but there was a time when I was on a very strict budget, when my wife paid most of our bills with her receptionist job. It took years of work to get to where I am now. I was at a disadvantage though; I didn’t have someone like myself to get advice from. On the other hand the Internet is more mature now and there is more competition.
You shouldn’t worry too much about the competition. As much as we’d like to think otherwise the Internet is still in it’s infancy and it has a lot of growing to do. The sites you make today (and yes, you should start as soon as possible if you want to do this) will be established in 5 years. If you really made website publishing your job and worked on it on a daily basis I honestly think it’d be nearly impossible for you to not be making a decent income from it in 5 years. You’d have to make some pretty big mistakes to fail in the long run.
That’s enough pep talk for now. The focus of this blog is obviously going to be on website publishing, and otherwise how to create passive revenue streams with the Internet. This encompasses things you may not have thought of. For instance if you’re a programmer and you make a script to sell, you’ve created a passive income stream. There are more ways that just advertising or affiliate programs for making money. I will also include some discussion on ecommerce as it is an important part of my business and an important revenue stream to consider for anyone who owns a website.
I used to design and program my own websites, more recently I find myself outsourcing that work more and more. I never was too great of a designer, and I don’t always have time to program. However, I will occasionally blog about technical issues as they relate to website publishers or revenue generation. Additionally I plan to blog about SEO and other Internet marketing topics, as they are so important to what I do, again though as they relate to making money with a website. None of these ancillary topics will be treated with as much depth as you’ll find in the SitePoint blogs dedicated to them, but I plan for this blog to be more of a practical how-to rather than having a more narrow academic focus. As such you should expect to find me blogging about a wide range of ancillary topics, both because I am such a jack-of-all-trades, and because if you’re publishing websites it helps if you are too.
Well, that’s all for now, I hope to make my first “real” post in a day or so.
Chris Beasley
