The World’s Greatest Blog

As I meet more and more people on our travels, and through work, I find that I’m explaining what I’m up to and what I’ve done more and more. Quite a lot of people from across the globe come onto this site each day, including real life people who I’ve met or grew up with, as well as virtual people who exist, for me, only as numbers on Google Analytics and ‘don’t know me from Adam.’ Several of these people ask me who I am and why I’m entitled to comment on X, Y or Z. In fact, I get quite a lot of (usually angry) emails and comments to this effect, so I thought it was time to explain a little, at least about the internet stuff that I’ve done and am in the process of doing.

My first forays into the web were largely focused on trying to make money. I decided that, having already paid for broadband, I might as well use the internet connection, and the copious amounts of free time that being at university afforded me, to try to avoid working behind a bar (which I did prior to university, and in vacations) and get some much needed spare cash.

I turned, therefore, to Ebay. However, not having much actual stock to sell, I did what every man and his dog now tries to do, and sold E-books. I sold E-books on everything, and it is actually quite a good earner, even for 99p each. Here are some little trade secrets I picked up:

Selling E-books on Ebay

1. Write good e-books on subjects that you know people will want to buy. Sounds easy? it really isn’t. You do need to research and compile a lot of info, and present it in such a way that anyone could read and enjoy it.
2. Write a good ebay sales pitch and put it into correct categories. Try not to sound like every other person who is trying to do the same thing: instead offer something unique, and don’t overdo the sales messages. Use your own picture. Be honest.
3. Set up outlook (or whatever email program you use) to automatically email the ebooks out to a buyer as soon as the payment confirmation is received. This is easy to do, and means you are making money while you’re sleeping, or walking the dog, or reading a book. This is called residual income, and it is something which interests me a great deal.

My main focus shifted to horse racing e-books and information, as I had much background knowledge and interest in this very subject. I managed to develop a systematic computer based database with details on every horse and racecourse in Britain and Ireland, and I used this to create (largely accurate) race predictions. Without explaining all the details, I used this information and begun selling subscriptions on Ebay.

After a time, I realised that due to Ebay’s fees and the Paypal cut, I wasn’t maximising the potential of this product to best effect. It was also necessary to have more information online, as well as a place to provide members of this system with selection details and other info. In short, I needed a website.

Not knowing much, if anything, about html, web SEO (search engine optimization), Google rankings, getting links or indeed anything else which was required to do any of this, a rather steep learning curve was about to begin.

I set up Systemlays UK, a horse racing tipping and advisory service primarily for users of internet betting exchanges such as Betfair, using Microsoft Front Page. Inititally, I used this 24hourtrading.co.uk domain for this business while I waited to see whether interest would grow. It did, so I registered Systemlays.co.uk.

This product and business did remarkably well. I worked for seven days a week on this for a couple of years, and graduated through html hand coding practice, to php and other coding languages, and then found Dreamweaver, which made me a bit annoyed that I’d learned so much.

After all this effort, it was a nice finish to uni that I ended up winning a couple of E-commerce and business awards from the Newcastle Enterprise Centre. I particularly like my quote (on the linked to page). I was also nominated for another business planning award, as well as the Young Business Person of the Year North East (sic), though I didn’t go to the latter award ceremony due to travelling to Australia, so I don’t know much about it…

Speaking of travel. After graduating Linda and I wanted to go away and have some ‘life experiences’ and maybe ‘find ourselves’ or something. Basically, it was a pretty cold summer, it rained quite a lot, and we were feeling rather bored of old Britainia. Green and pleasant it may well be, but we fancied a change, if only temporarily.

This posed a problem. I was still running the website every day of the week, and without wishing to leave in the control of another, I decided to shift the information on to someone else who could give it a good home. If you visit the old horse racing site, you’ll see what I did with it. I also did this because horse racing is far too niche for me, I don’t want forever to be ‘gambling related’ and, to be frank, I just wasn’t as interested in running it as I had been at first.

So, I changed this whole site, put some jokey stuff on about playing a banjo and started up the blog to use some of the pagerank I’d accumulated (PageRank for those of you who are ordinary human beings, is how Google ranks the value of a website (ish)) to get some of my many messages across to the world at large, as well as, more straightforwardly, to let my friends and relatives know what I am up to on the other side of the world. I’ve neglected to do both for large periods of time as well. But that’s the point, it’s my sandpit, and I’ll play in it when I want. So there.

But since coming to Australia, and spending a large amount of time travelling and thinking things through, I’ve not managed to remove myself from the internet. I’ve become web 2.0 (horrendous piece of marketing/management phraseology) at the same time as YouTube and Facebook are making their way into the stratosphere (not to mention the middle class news). I’m currently founding, managing or setting up no less than a huge number of websites which are devoted to one or another theme.

Most of them are arts based as I wanted to put all that I’ve learned about web marketing, promotion and SEO into pushing the arts forward on the web. Techie stuff, gadgets and general geekery has it’s home on the web, now its time for something that enriches the soul too.

At the same time, I still have a huge sense of injustice at many of the things I see and do in life. As a natural lawyer, these feelings are somewhat innate, and I’m using the web to try to sort some of these things out too. If any of you read that laughable exchange with the free Google ads person, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about: I don’t like charlatans, I don’t like scammers, and I don’t like people who try to make money dishonestly - I have some ethics, and think that other people should too.

There are also many other ‘ills’ in the world that I’d like to sort out, though whether I would be best served doing this as a (qualified) lawyer or in continuing in a web-based, full time, direction is something I’ve yet to fully sort out. My heart does bleed, but I am not ruled by it. Nor do I feel that one must be altruistic to make a difference in this world. Without delving too far off topic, I’ll state my case: either altruism does not work; or no-one is truly altruistic - if you want to know how I came to this shocking conclusion, you only have to ask.

Having said all that, I’m not here on the web for (traditional) business purposes any more, everything I now set up is and shall continue to be completely free to use, though I do run advertising to help cover costs and hopefully provide me with the time to produce more. Basically, I’ve stopped selling widgets, and am selling my ideas instead which is far easier for me and something to which I have more aptitude.

Here are the current projects which are in the pipeline, or already, er, piped:

• What’s Your Story? - a short story website where we encourage anyone and everyone to submit stories about themselves as well as fiction short stories. This site has launched, though is not fully developed to reach it’s potential. Things need to change, partnerships are being formed, and this should be a good source of online literature and human interest in the next year or so as we get more busy with it.
• Popular Nostalgia - fed up with reminiscing about things in inappropriate fora, we decided to make a new home for everything from popular culture that the whole world remembers. A shared recollection of events. A bit like wikipedia, but with emotions as well as facts - not just what happened, and when, but what it meant to us, and how we look back on it. We were there at the time, let’s remember it. There are memories that we forgot we even remembered…
• A place to vent - this will come within the next year, and will be a place for all of us to talk, in our most erudite way, about everything from life which gets our backs up and annoys us. Am I worried someone will steal this idea? Not really, take it, we’ll do it better anyway, then whinge about how you stole it. In any case, as I write this, it sounds like a shit idea…
• Around 8 or 9 different arts based projects in an interlinking network. I really can’t talk much about this because there is much truly unique stuff that will be in there, though every aspect of visual and performing arts shall be covered, and I am currently seeking out several big players in this field to get on board. This will probably take 18 months to 2 years to even get into Beta phases. I like using the word Beta, though I don’t know it’s derivation.

Watch this space for more.