baldysblog.co.uk

Whilst I will no doubt feel inclined to comment on the election of a new Speaker which will I am sure, be a total cock-up with the bookies putting Margaret Becket as the current favourite – “You Really Cannot be Serious…” on that one, as politics crawls uneasily towards the Summer Recess, there is not that much to comment upon.

I have been writing this blog since November of 2007 and have published over 300 articles. For various reasons because I am working on a new project running in a development environment, I needed to feed some data in so copied over essays from this blog to there. I was quite amused looking back over some earlier stuff just how there are really very few themes or major topics in ‘play’ in the political arena over that time.

Background

If you have read the “Why This Blog” page, you will be aware of my personal circumstances part of which is planning for the time after my Mother has died and returning to making a living of some kind at the age of 63/64 and in a UK with very high unemployment. Whilst in my time I was a very successful Project Manager, there are people with young families to raise that need the conventional work opportunities more than me, I need to think “out of the box” as they say.

Talking to friends who know me as a “London Boy”, they seemed unthinkingly to assume that I would sell up and return to the City of my birth once free to do so but frankly this is unlikely now because despite the fall in property prices, what I could sell up for down here to what I could buy “there” is too large a gulf, I therefore suspect that I will stay down here on the Somerset Levels.

However, there is a caveat to that because in my life the pattern has always been that just as I think “this is the direction I’m going in…” something happens unexpectedly and off I go on another of life’s merry-go-rounds ! Still I leave nothing to chance and you should always do proper planning for your next moves even if you half expect things to go in a different direction.

As I always tell people, if you don’t have a plan, life makes one for you and you may end up where you don’t want to be. Of course, be flexible for as it is said about “Battle Plans”, they rarely survive first contact with the enemy !

The Basis of the Plan

With a background in IT, Graphics and Photography but no capital to take any risks with but, only needing a modest income because I will have a home free of any mortgage, what kind of business could I construct ?

The obvious answer was that it must be something that was web based and there are essentially three ways you can make money from the web, advertising on your site, affiliate sales for other people or selling your own products, I suppose you could do a mix of all three. However one needs to break those elements open a bit further:

Advertising

Advertising on your site whereby people pay you to display an advertising banner. Obviously this would only be relevant if your site was very popular and you could track your ‘demographic’ profile because web advertising is very definitely tightly zoned to a target audience. Such a site needs to be an “expert or special interest type site” that attracts a specific audience on a regular basis and that audience has a particular consumer spend pattern.

Affiliate Income

There are a number of businesses whereby if your site is relevant to their products and your audience is likely to purchase those through your web presence, they will pay you a commission on all sales generated. There are two British software companies I can think of that would be interested in the sort of web site I am contemplating.

Selling Own Products

This is slightly more difficult because you do actually have to make something that people would be prepared to buy over the web. For me this might be a problem because the one obvious thing I could sell would be framed prints based upon my photographic work.

But the problem would be, if you don’t have a reputation, are an ‘unknown artist’, if people are prepared to take a “punt”, you will need to sell on a low price which is fine except what happens if you become quite popular, you are stuck in a price/market sector that you can never escape. Pitch too high and you may never sell a single one.

So That is Where I am…

So right now I’m doing a lot of work and detailed evaluation on all these topics plus all the associated technical aspects that accompany them so if I blog less for now here, it is not because I have lost interest, just that I’m busy.

There is one thing that is for sure, regardless of which direction I go in with regard to making a living, the real heart of the matter concerns being able to produce and deliver high quality content.