Pull the trigger...

It may sound funny, but I sat and stared at the keyboard for about a half hour before I finally hit "publish website". I entered the user name and password and the bars started scrolling. In about 30 seconds I got a pop-up windo saying my website was published successfully! Jimmohr.com was live on the internet. It did not have the content it has today but it had 20 or so pages of fun and interesting stuff. I also popped a couple of the banners and links on some pages and I was back on track to starting (trying at least) to make a little money. My goal was to make just enough money to offset hosting costs, as I thought that would be a good start. I was hosting my site at Web.com and in 2003 it cost around $17 a month and the domain name was (I think) $13.95 a year for a total of around $218. You can do the same thing now for around $50 at Go-Daddy. I submitted the site to Google and other search engines, signed some peoples' guestbooks, I made some posts on some forums and crossed my fingers.

It was a mixed blessing the the free web host I was formerly using started putting the porn on their pages. Yes, it pulled the plug on my ticket to financial independence, but it also forced me to make a change that I would have had to make sooner or later. I guess since it takes forever to get listed on Google, sooner was better, but I was not at all thrilled with having to spend money. After all, I was not getting any younger. As a matter of fact, I had only had a computer for about a year and half. Sometimes I wondered what am I getting myself into? I came from a hobby / money-making venture of fixing and selling bicycles between guitar gigs, and web building was about as far from that as I could get.

Updating jimmohr.com did not really take up much time in my day, but I came to realize that a website is never done. The more I learned about web pages and using FrontPage, I kept making changes and tweaking the site to make it just a tiny bit cooler every couple days. I was also always on the lookout for affiliate programs that I could join to make a bit of extra money. I tried to find items I could promote that were related to my website content. I made a welcome discovery that most affiliate programs will not let you join using a free website, so having a REAL domain name was a blessing. In about 6 months, I had built my web traffic back up to about 200 visits a day and had reached my goal of earning $218. Everything I earn for the rest of the year is PROFIT!