Tag Archives: my story

My First Attempted Money Making Web Site

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Screen capture of The Electronic Fortune CookieThe first web site that I ever built in an attempt to make money is The Electronic Fortune Cookie. I’d developed other sites before, but not monetized sites.

I naively thought that I could make a site that is incredibly entertaining, put up some AdSense ads and affiliate banners and that would be that.

I developed the site in xhtml/css and php (I am a programmer after all 8=) with an excellent template as the base for the site. It randomly spits out quotations, jokes, etc. from a database that at this point has about 10,000 entries (there are about 100,000 more on my computer waiting to be converted to go in — they’ve been waiting a long time 8=(

What I expected was that this would be so entertaining that it would go viral. People would come, have fun and tell their friends. Plus they would come back day after day.

Didn’t happen.

I invited my friends expecting they would share it. Some of them came and told me they liked it. But that’s where it stopped.

I was very puzzled and started my adventure trying to figure this thing out. EFC is a labour of love on my part. I like the concept and the way the site is laid out. But I didn’t know enough about how to get the traffic (not to mention how hard it is to get relevant AdSense ads to show up on random content 8=).

I hope to come back to EFC at some point and add some of the sharing features and integration into Facebook that I’m learning about. It would be great to turn it into a Facebook app.

But other projects have taken the front burner — those that I feel have a better chance of turning a return on investment. And I still have so much to learn.

So EFC languishes … for now.

Who the Heck is LoneWolf Anyway?

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Bill (LoneWolf) MuskokaSince this site is called “LoneWolf’s List Marketing Adventure” you may be asking yourself “Who is this LoneWolf guy? And why should I pay any attention to him?”

Well, I’m that LoneWolf guy.  My name is Bill Nickerson (that’s me on the right) and I’ve been working at trying to understand how this online stuff works for a couple of years now.  This adventure is a way to share what I have learned along the way.

The Backstory

I come from a background in contract programming and corporate training.  I’ve gathered some arcane skills along the way, including html and javascript (at least enough to make me dangerous 8=).  Learning css, php and other web based technologies was very simple for me.  I even picked up a decent SQL grounding along the way — in fact, that is one of the technologies I trained people in.

So I decided I wanted to build a business that was home based and allowed me to exercise one of my passions — writing.  Blogging and building web sites was a natural fit.

Build It And They Will Come — Not!

I created a couple web sites and blogs, signed up for AdSense and sat back to watch my empire roll in the cash.  Guess what, it didn’t.  I’d written some pretty nice posts on a couple blogs.  I’d written a fun web site that provides random fortune cookie quotations (based on the idea of UNIX fortune program).

But they didn’t get any traffic.  And I didn’t know why.

So I set out on an adventure — an adventure to find out what I was missing.  Boy, was there ever a lot!

The Adventure Begins

I’ve learned a tremendous amount over the past couple years.  I still struggle with getting enough traffic.  I still struggle with getting sales for those sites that are oriented that way.  But I’m getting past the discouragement, learning to focus on things better and breaking out of my shell when it comes to sales.

So, if you’re finding yourself on the same journey, come and join me on my adventure.  You’ll find tips and advice on how to build your online business.  You’ll see the lessons that I learn.  You’ll share in my disappointments, successes and the occasional rant. I’ll also share more of my story along the way.

Grab your backpack and your walking stick — it’s going to be a long, fun adventure!