Just like clockwork.. not

Buildfree.org actually went together quicker and easier than expected. It seems I spent so much time building free websites myself, that I had a wealth of information tucked away. It was kind of like writing this blog, once I got going, the site kind of built itself. Buildfree.org also turned out to be a website in the right place at the right time. It seems that others were going through the same frustration I was. They were looking for a no frills website that helped them build a free website, period. Within 6 months, buildfree.org was getting 600 visitors a day. The site was living proof that a regular guy with no computer skills or website training can develop a succesful website. I started putting a few of my money-making affiliate programs on the pages, and now buildfree.org was on the gravy train!

I am going to jump ahead as the next year or so was for the most part uninteresting. I am not going to say it was uneventful though, as being new at web building, things happened I was not expecting. I can only say that ther are a lot of small things that caused day-to-day stress. I had an issue with web.com, where they claimed I was using 30 gig of bandwith a month all of a sudden. That would be like getting 100,000 hits a day for as small as my site was. I was on the phone about every day for a week and had to pay approximately $50 in penalties just to keep my sites live. The all of a sudden it just quit, no explanation, no refunds, strike one. Then I started having a problem publishing my sites; everything would go ok until the very end of the publishing process, the it would just keep saying "publishing website" and the scrool bars would take 2-3 minutes to publish. Web.com said it was because of my FrontPage - the same program I had been using for a year. Strike two. Then several times, both sites went down for hours at a time. They blamed it on migrating servers, and they would be more reliable and I would be happier blah, blah, blah. Strike 3.

So whether I wanted to or not, I was going to learn how to move my websites to a different web host. In theory it is very simple. Purchase hosting at your desired location, furnish your domain name you want to use and they give you the "DNS settings." You then log into your domain name administration and change the DNS setting to point to the new host. I decided to leave my domain names at web.com and just move the hosting. I also chose to move jimmohr.com first to the new web host. They do warn you that it may take 24 to 72 hours to propagate across the internet. I found out that that means your site will be down for 1-3 days! It is weird too, sometimes it will be up, then down, up, down. It is a helpless feeling, I was sure I had done something wrong. You really have to monitor it close too, as soon as you see a default page on your website, you have to publish your website ASAP. In 2 days plus, jimmohr.com was back up. I calmed down for a couple days, then repeated the steps with buildfree.org. I took almost 2 days to complete the process.

I can see why people give up on making their internet fortune. I had basically been working on this (whatever you want to call it) for almost 2 years, had my share of headaches, and my monthly earnings were about $100 a month. It worked out out to about $1 an hour. What I did see is constant growth. And at this point, I really just can't quit, everything is paying for itself. I guess I need a couple more websites...

In the trenches...

There is no turning back now. I am not one to give up easily, so now I am determined to see what I can make of this endeavor. It's all profit for at least the rest of the year so at least I am out nothing, but I can see the potential. Early retirement is flashing before my eyes. It seemed to boil down to visitor traffic. It appears that anyone could make money from a website almost effortlessly if they had traffic. I am not talking a ton of hits, just around 300 hits a day seemed like the break even point. Now I am talking natural traffic, people that WANT to be on your site, not the forced traffic that some programs promise.

I decided to put jimmohr.com on the back burner for a bit, it was holding it's own. I hade tweaked the website to the best of my knowledge by optimizing it with Meta Tags. And since it takes months for a website to reach it's potential, I was getting restless. I decided to put everything I had learned to this point to good use and buy (rent) another domain name. Everything I had learned revolved around building free websites, so I did some research and found that buildfree.org was available. Feeling like an old pro now, I did not hesitate much and bought the domain. My problem with all the websites that promoted free web hosting kind of led you in circles, the offered you a free trial, not a website that was truly free. I felt I could develop a list of free websites and offer some helpful hints to get beginners on the right track. After all, I had spent a year jumping through hoops refining my free website building skills. I had made mental notes of the locations that I found helpful and I felt I had found a niche by organizing it in a manner that did not belittle a beginner.

The hardest part with starting a website is just that; starting. I always recommend putting your ideas down on paper before you actually start building web pages. As a matter of fact, creating an outline (just like you learned in school) works great. Your main page links to inner pages which link to even more pages, so seeing it in outline form helps you with the structure. Carry a notebook (paper) with you and jot down ideas as you think of them. No one I know can just knock out an entire website in one sitting, so be patient with yourself. The best website a beginner could build is an informational website. Choose a topic or hobby that you know the most about. Starting out thinking you can build a 100 page site selling widgets is not going to happen.

I am going to go off on a tangent for a bit and throw out a bit of personal philosophy. Most of the people on the internet and TV that say they make a living on the internet are lying. Yes, there is money to be made, but it happens in nickels and dimes. Almost every turnkey website that is pre-built and stocked with figurines will fail. You cannot buy your way in, you have to pay your dues and learn to do it yourself. You have to be able to update your website(s) as needed, not wait for days and pay someone. It will also not happen overnight and that is why most people give up. As in my prior posts, it may take a year to make your first dollar. But on the brighter side, once the ball starts rolling, it is almost impossible to turn it off. The term "It is always 5 o'clock somewhere" has never been more true than on the internet. Be patient, and people in Europe want to make you money even before you get out of bed!

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!

Moving on...

It took a while, but I finally decided to desert my free website and look towards paid hosting. This was somewhere around 2003 and web hosting was a bit more expensive than it is today. I found out that you have to buy a "domain name" as well as web hosting. So step one was to think of a name that would actually be worth getting. Most of the good .com and .net sites are already taken since they have been available for many years. I did a search for my name and sure enough jimmohr.com was available, so I purchased it. Let me clarify, you never really "own" a domain name, you merely rent it. You pay a registrar a yearly fee, and you control it for as long as you keep your payments current. You can get a domain name at thousands of registrars, and you can switch it to a different registrar if you need to with not too much trouble. Having a domain name does not mean you have a website. You also need to purchase web hosting. Thousands of companies will gladly sell you web hosting and usually a beginner should probably get their domain name and web hosting at the same place. Also, get the cheapest hosting account to start. There is ample space and bandwith for a beginner site, and you can always upgrade at a later date. If you get your domain name from a different location than your hosting, you have have to log into your domain name administration and change your name servers to "point" the domain name to the web host. I would also recommend choosing a location that has 24 / 7 telephone technical support. (check their website and call the number to see how long you would have to wait.)

The next problem I ran into is how to build my site. Most free websites have a browser-based web builder. That means that you build and maintain your website on the internet and there are no files stored on your computer. A lot of paid web hosts now have a site builder that is free to use to build your site, but I have found they are fairly limited and complicated to edit. I was really not sure what I wanted to put on my website anyway so I started looking for a program that I could install on my computer that I could work on my website at my leisure whether I was hooked up to the internet or not. This is very handy if you carry a laptop and can only work on your website a bit at a time. You can wait to publish your website until your site is done.

The two most popular website building programs at that time was Webweaver and Microsoft FrontPage. I tried both and I have found FrontPage is more similar to a lot of the free websites' interface I had learned on. It is a matter of choice, but I found a college student that could get me Microsoft FrontPage for $10, so that was all it took. I still use FrontPage to publish all my websites, but I understand it has been replaced by "web publisher" or something like that in the Microsoft Office Suite. You can still find FrontPage on Ebay though.

Like all my endeavors, I vow not to pay anybody to do something I can do myself. It is the same for website building, so I spent the next couple months learning FrontPage. I could turn out a plain page rather quickly, but I found it fun testing out all the cool things FrontPage could do. I was also unsure of what I wanted my final website to look like, so it was a slow process. The great thing about FrontPage, you do not really need to know any computer coding or HTML skills. You can use what is called a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) site builder. It is like using Microsoft Word or Outlook. Then you can see what makes things happen by looking behind the scenes by "viewing the code". It is kind of backwards learning that comes in handy as your web pages get more complicated.

Ok, so now I have a domain name and paid hosting, but still no website on the internet. It is nearing the end of 2003. To get your website live on the internet, you have to "publish" it using your site building program. And I found out that if you use FrontPage to publish your website, you have to have "FrontPage Extensions" turned on on the server on your hosting account. I made good use of the 24 / 7 telephone tech support, and now I was finally ready. I was nervous as the first day of school...

Important lesson #1

All was well for the next few months, my 7 dollar monthy earnings blossomed to a whopping 24 dollars, then averaging around 80 dollars a month at the end of the first year. This was all on a free website in my spare time while working a day job. The free website was getting around 400 visits a day, and I was getting nice emails from people thanking me for offering free clipart collections and good feedback on my other funny site content. I even got a nice email from a teacher saying she was using the website for her students to get clipart and photos for their projects. Little did I know the web world as I knew it was about to come crashing down.

I had mentioned before I especially liked the free host I was using because it was easy to edit and had a nice interface. Well another benefit was there was no forced advertisements, no pop-ups or banners of any kind. Well I woke up one day and got an email from my formerly happy teacher asking how could I put porno pictures on my website. Sure enough, I opened my website and across the top, almost as big as half of the page was a couple of pornographic pictures, and links to other questionable sites. This material appears on every one of their free sites on all the pages. That is why I have not told you the address to my first website or the location of the free host. I will only say they were not based out of the United States. They are still out there and they have porno on the pages. It made me very angry and I am still very disappointed. All of the people that trusted me to provide a cool website were sure I was responsible for the photos and there was nothing I could do.

Now I was the learn the pitfalls of a free website. The web address (domain name) they give you is what is known as a sub-domain. It is a name you choose that goes in front (or behind) of the name of the site. Just like what Blogger.com does with blogspot. This is all fine and dandy until the host decides to discontinue service or makes unacceptable changes. You have no control over the name and cannot take it with you. The 400 hits a day I had built up over the year were lost. My reputation tarnished and all the time it took for people to be able to find my website by searching on search engines like Google and Yahoo was out the window. My 80 dollars a month was lost...