Odds are that most of you reading this blog, including myself, starting our very first website without the intention of making money. I made awful looking fansites on Geocities and Angelfire back in the mid 90s. I did it for fun, for the challenge, and the love of the content. I had no idea people were making money online and never would have thought that some day I’d be one of those people. However, things change. We move on from making sites just for fun and move to making sites that can grow a business and bring in cash flow.

So that’s the question I’m asking you today… Is it all about the money?

As I look through my network of sites (in the side column on my blog), I do not see any sites on there that I’ve built just for fun. There aren’t any sites on that list that I don’t plan to monetize. There aren’t any sites on that list that aren’t for sale. The only exception I can think of is my blog, but really… I have monetized it by selling sponsored links and honestly, if someone offered me a boat load of money for it, I would sell. I hate to say it, but by the looks of it… it is all about the money.

Sure I’m not the only one? How about you… how many of the websites you own don’t produce a dime of revenue? How many of the websites that you own do you do it purely for the love of it? How many websites on your list are not for sale?

Things change. 10 years ago, people made websites for fun. They reviewed products because they liked to, not because they were making money for it. They made fan sites because they like the person, not so they can get 10 cent clicks on it.

I’m not saying all this is a bad thing, I just think it’s important not to forget why we are in this business and what brought us here. Feel free to comment if you have a website that you maintain solely for fun. I’ll gladly check it out. If you’re all about the money, that’s cool too.

I’ve been making money online since October 2005, and never have I made money from an affiliate sale. I’ve always made money by getting clicks, whether its on Adsense, YPN, or Adbrite. Well, just two weeks after I launched my Fishing Lures website, I am proud to announce that according to Amazon, I have 9 items ordered under my referral code.

Sure I only get 6% and the average price for each item ordered was probably $3, but it just feels really good to finally make money by ’selling’ products. I won’t know my exact commission until the products are shipped, which will probably be this afternoon or tomorrow.

Something I don’t like is how Amazon only keeps your referral tracking cookie on someone for 24 hours. That means if someone clicks your product link, but then decides not to purchase the product for 2 more days because they’re waiting to get paid, you won’t earn commission because it’s been over 24 hours. Unless the click through to Amazon again from your link.

However, something nice about Amazon is that they are MASSIVE. Probably the largest online store in the world. Someone can click one of my $2 product links and end up in Amazon, but decide to purchase other products and I will get paid for all of them. The best thing about Amazon is they are trusted and offer thousands upon thousands of products. I could get commission for someone buying a fishing lure, and ipod, and a shirt all in the same order. That would be a nice $15 payout for me. Sure $15 isn’t a lot, but it’s not bad considering they only went in to Amazon originally for the fishing lure.

Over the next week I’m going to spend time researching how I can better optimize my site for affiliate sales, including adding a “Hot Deals” feature. I also want to look through my CJ account and find any good offers in there that might pay more money.

I found this cool generator while browsing Sitepoint. It automatically generates a Web 2.0 Company name for you. There are 100s in the database, if not 1000s of company names. There is also a button that checks to see if the domain is available to register. I tested it out on a few of them and surprisingly, they were all free.

Click here to check it out.

I was just searching around Godaddy for some domain names and stumbled across BassPictures.net. Pretty good I thought. The domain leaves no room for interpretation. It is what it is. So to go along with my Fishing Lures site, I picked up basspictures.net to compliment it.

I plan on putting up a simple photo gallery on the site. I’m thinking about using Plogger. I’ve never used it, or even heard of it before yesterday, but I like the way the demo looks.  I want to create a simple site where users can submit pictures of themselves holding a large mouth bass. I know there are a lot of fishing pictures sites already out there, but I’m hoping my domain will be solid enough to keep visitors coming back.

I’m not quite sure where I’ll get my initial batch of pictures because odds are most will be copyrighted. I’m thinking about hitting up Flikr and asking members (the ones with bass pictures) if I can borrow them for my site. If they say yes, then I’ll not only get their picture, but also a visitor to my site because they’ll want to see it up.

If Plogger doesn’t work out for me there are several other photo gallery scripts I can run on the site, including Gallery 2.2.2 and  Coppermine. The site probably won’t be up until early next week because I have a lot of things to do. I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s live!

Ever searching for news ways to find topics to write about? I know I am. I run several blogs that require new up to date content on them. It’s hard sitting here coming up with new ideas to write about on my sites/forums. When you’re having writers block, I suggest to head over to our friend Google.

Enter in your topic’s keyword, in this example we’ll use ‘Ryan Howard’. Click search. Then on the next page click ‘News’ at the top. This will bring you results of all the latest news on Ryan Howard. All the professional articles will appear in the main index, and if you want blogs click the blog link on the left.

Now that you have a list of current Ryan Howard news, you can surely find something to write about. Just on the front page alone I can see 3-4 good topics to write about. ‘Howard to defend Home Run Derby title’, ‘Vote for Howard in the ESPYs’, and ‘Howard fastest to 100 homeruns’.  So after reading those articles, I would then start writing my 3 posts. Queue them up with a timestamp and be done for the week.

You can use this quick tip for almost any website topic. On GFX Rebels, I would do a Google news search for ‘graphic design’ and find out the latest news in the industy. This would give me tons of ideas for thread titles to make. The same goes with Gator Envy. I use it all day to think up post ideas.

So next time your stuck, don’t just say ‘ahh I’ll wait till tomorrow’. Head over to Google news, search some keywords and you will find things to write about. If you find more than 1 or 2, then queue them up with timestamp (if you’re using Wordpress).