I hate to admit it but the sagging economy has been good for business. First let me reiterate that my business is computers. Web gaming, free website hosting promotion, online advertising, freebies and web page design to be exact. Several things have happened that have steered people my way. First, and most importantly, the price of a computer has dropped considerably. Almost anyone can afford a $400 computer. The same computer 5 years ago would have cost around $2000. So computers are in more hands than ever. Especially younger kids that will click on anything without a 2nd thought. Computers are almost a requirement for school children now. The next thing, unfortunately, is unemployment. More people are home from work and spending more time on the computer. The promise of "working from home" and earning a living is closer to reality for a lot of people. Even a majority of job hunting is done on the computer. While not job hunting, I would guess people are coming to my websites and playing games and building websites. And with the invention of Paypal, you can send and receive money very easily.
There is also a recent trend that without getting too technical, for advertisers to want to advertise on regular peoples' websites like your's and mine. The have a lot of money to pay for advertising space and are aggressive in contacting smaller site owning webmasters. It has to partially to do with Google downgrading the value of all the huge sites linking to each other to move up the list on a search engine search. To simplify; the playing field is even for small or huge webmasters to get listed near the top on a search engine.
To prove this, do a Google search for the term "build a free website". My site http://buildfree.org/ has been near the top for nearly a year. On the site you will see occasionally text ads from Google. These are "Google Adsense ads". You build a website, apply to Google to join the adsense program, then put the ads on your website. Whenever someone clicks on a Google ad, you make a few pennies. The trick is to get a lot of web traffic, in my case, it comes from the Google search from above. So Google sends me a ton of visitors, and then pays me to send them to their advertisers. God Bless Google. Add this to a few other campaigns, and you would be on your way to riches..
What makes this sad is, everyone I have ever tried to coach (in person) to try to make money online, has treated me like I am pushing some type of pyramid scheme. I will admit I am not the best teacher, but I always thought that if someone saw proof in black and white of what the potential is, they would persue it. I wish I would have met someone like me about 5 years ago to show me the ropes, it would have save me many headaches and tons of time and money.
Sites to use for reference: http://buildfree.org/, http://netearnings.org/, http://free-sites.org/, http://websitefreebies.net/, http://buildfree.net/, and http://free-templates.org/.
