Andyrew

How hard can it really be?

A few weeks ago, a friend asked “how hard can making money on the Internet really be?”
“It’s not, really… hard…” I replied, thought for a moment, and smiled. He loved me.
“I want a site, with funny video’s and pictures then, I’ll do one myself”
How hard can it be I thought? “Go for it, I’ll help when you get stuck”

Let’s call him Jason. Jason, like most people in today’s society are computer and internet savvy. They know how to open their emails and buy unneeded possessions from ebay, right? I began telling him that there would be allot to learn, in the small amount of time that he wanted to learn it in.. in a brain so small.

I decided to start by telling Jason to buy a domain name, and look for some web hosting. I felt confident, after all he is a server admin for a Call of Duty 4 server. I told him Namecheap would be a good place to get his domain from, and told him to keep an eye out for a host.

A couple of days go by, and he tells me he found an available domain name (a true premium domain, something resembling ReallyFunnyStuff4u.biz..) and the host he found was BT broadband or something of the equivalent. Maybe this wouldn’t be so easy. A job so simple would take me such little time… and would require so much brainpower. How long does it take, before you can recognise a good domain? Learn that .biz, and .info’s are no good… and that BT really isn’t the type of web hosting provider we are looking for.

Trying to get someone to back down after they are set on a task like this, would be like trying to stop a fat man from getting to the fridge. I began thinking how much of my time, and his time would this cost us? But.. I persevered..

Another few days went by, I had found a decent domain name, and a suitable hosting package. Bare-naked minimum. (Entertainment sites I’m sure can use allot of resources, but with so little knowledge, can it really?)

I think what people don’t realise is that often, they don’t get anything out of something.. if they do not put anything into it; even-more-so if they have little knowledge in the subject area. So, a free script was planned out at first. After all, the domain and hosting must have come to $40 for the year.

Just for the record, there are no decent entertainment scripts for free.. none at all that I found, and none at all that he found (So somebody make one). Looking for “Free video script”, or “entertainment software”.. is easy to search for? Jason was bringing results back for everything after I told him look for a PHP “entertainment script”. Results like, “CGI directory indexing”, and “ASP dating software”.. all of which seemed the right choice for him!

In the end, after purchasing one.. I told him to get some FTP software. Now, it seems that people who haven’t used FTP before can grasp that ‘Your computer is on the left hand side, the server is on the right hand side..’ — Simple concept? no? Leaving him a few days to follow the instructions in the readme files, didn’t help anything.. except wasting a few days.

Now, lets for one second imagine I setup the databases, uploaded the script, installed it, changed the logos for Jason, setup the configs, added a few files to show him! Hurrah. The site is complete.. everything is pretty easy from there.

After a few weeks he wanted to start bringing the bacon home. So applied for Adsense. Adding Adsense to a site is easy, no? Click “Setup Adsense”, grab the code.. and paste it in.. A walkthrough that took me 45 minutes to explain.

This whole process has taken me about 4 weeks, from a-b.. which includes how to get a little bit of traffic to the site. A few people have asked me since to also make them one.. However, telling them that per 1,000 page views, you make about $0.30.. and it makes things a whole lot better.

The things that really made me realise how much I actually knew, when questions like..

• How do I get my site on Google?

• What is the URL?

• Isn’t FTP the same as Cpanel?

• Can i turn my computer off?

• Has anyone seen the numa-numa guy?

Ask yourself now, how hard and how long it would take you to teach someone even the BASICS of html, ftp, hosting, SEO, Adsense, domains.. and how long would they remember it for?

After trying to make my mother computer-compliant for the past few years, my guess would be ‘a very long time’