Conceptualising The Net and Making Money

Jul 182011

Conceptualising The Internet

I have to say that it took me some time to realise that you could actually, and I hate this word, monetise the internet. For years I understood that you had to physically sell something on the internet to actually earn money. The reason was simple. I had an estate agency and the internet generated leads in the form of clients who came over and bought a house for sale in Spain. Simple really. However that is slightly removed from actually earning money on the internet. That is a real world business supported by a shop window of the internet presence.

It took my soccer injury in November of 2008 and a period of reflection and studying hard that made me make the intellectual leap to the idea that it was actually possible to make money on the internet through direct selling of information, getting traffic onto a website and various other methods of, again that word, monetising the internet.

My first real information product had been made before that and a half hearted attempt at selling it on eBay while using it as a lead generator had sort of fallen flat. It did a job but was never a great seller. Last year I produced a set of audio interviews that sold Ok but not as well as I had anticipated but the information in them was gold for anyone coming to Spain (I have started to give it away for free on my other blog). This product was as a result of the six to eight months of study. The moral is that nothing is easy of course but every step you take moves you closer to the goal and both of the products allowed me to actually see the light of how to do it.

My current situation is this. I make products which are sold on the net by myself and affiliates. They bring in an income. I have Google Adsense on various websites which make a few dollars a day per site. It isn’t a lot but it makes a nice little amount every month. I sell the products of others that suit the markets I am involved in on various websites and again it brings an income stream in. I buy domains and sell websites I put on them and get offers for advertising on those websites if they have PR and traffic. So all in all every little bit helps.

My main business, the estate agency, is supported by a lot of traffic because of the methods I use in social media and SEO promotion. I get a high percentage of all sales in the Valencia region to non resident visitors. (I only found that out yesterday and it made me laugh). This eventually leads to business of course because without traffic an estate agency cannot work of course, who do you sell to?

Now my point is as follows. Until I got my head around the web and its possibilities, I didn’t see these opportunities to make money. In the good old days of real estate in Spain, the boom times, my main site was getting over 1000 visitors per day. Let me just repeat that for a niche market in Valencia, over 1000 visits per day. We didn’t make any money out of those visits directly. No adsense, no mailing list, no nothing. We might have made sales but the tracking wasn’t in place to really test the ROI of dealing with a client.

Now here is the pitch. I have been collaborating with Nick on the Bootstrapping Book and it really helps you to get your head around the conceptualisation of the internet, in other words it tells you the many ways you can earn money on the net bit by bit and by building up your knowledge and then even selling that knowledge to businesses that don’t have time to do it themselves.

For more information get yourself over to our Facebook page for the Bootstrapping Book and sign up to our mailing list to get one of our chapters free, the one about Domaining.

1) Progress on the Bootstrapping Book

2) Remote Working and Collaboration

3) Creating Content Easily