About Me

Hi my name is Zee and for those of you who don’t know me, well ? I’m a pretty normal guy except for the fact that I’ve managed to build a full time income and a complete portfolio of revenue generating websites in just a handful of years.

For me that’s a pretty big achievement and this blog offers an insight into my personal activities and the steps I have taken and will continue to take to further develop and grow my business. The focus and content on this site is written from my personal experiences which will hopefully showcase not only the achievement and success side of things but also the many failures and bad decisions I have made along the way.

If you’re interested in learning more about this type of business, as well as reading in depth case studies, reports and general articles covering webmastering then this blog should be a welcome change from the many useless “Make Money Online” websites that exist today.

Making Money Online ?

Now despite this site covering the highly popular subject of making money online my intentions are not to talk purely about the money aspect. Why ? Well my personal view is that talking exclusively about how much money I’m making online or how much money you can potentially make online has limited benefits. In most cases the motivation the reader receives is short lived, and in the long run he or she receives no real substance or guidance on how they can develop their own web presence online. 

This blog therefore aims to offer a broader look at webmastering as well as the making money online aspect offering the reader a collection of viewpoints and experiences that I hope real webmasters will appreciate and find beneficial.

More About Me

Although I’m not a big fan of writing about myself im sure a little introduction into what I’ve been doing and how I’ve got to where I am today might be interesting for some, so here it goes.

After graduating from university with a bachelors in computer science like most people I went out looking for a job. My working life thus started back in August 2001 when I joined the gradute program of a highly respected investment bank. It’s here that I learnt a lot about technology and spent almost 5 years working in a mixture of software development roles.  

Now don’t get me wrong, working for others is great, and for many it’s their preferred way of earning their bread and butter, but for me personally 5 years of being employed was enough and after this point all I wanted to do was try something on my own. (I’m sure many of you will feel and know what I’m talking about).

By January 2006 I had thrown in my resignation and stepped into what must honestly be said is the over rated world of self employment. For the next two years I was engrossed with an eBay business which involved the buying and selling of radio controlled toys, tech gadgets and related merchandise.

I had jumped into the deep end but this was what I wanted all along, and in many ways despite the hard work it was also one of the best times of my life. For starters I was working from home (no more long commutes into London) and more importantly I was my own boss! I could get up when I wanted, take a break when I wanted, and being a gamer what really made me smile was that I could switch on my Xbox 360 and play games during hours which for most were normally reserved for working (i.e.  the 9-6 daily drudge). 

Unfortunately like all good things about 2 years into my success on eBay things went a little pear shaped. So what happened ? Well in simple terms eBay got greedy and down right dirty! The extremely fun and open marketplace which eBay once was, became a tightly policed, dictatorship which in my opinion offered little to no support to the thousands of small to medium sized businesses like me. I had over 25,000+ feedback if you’re interested in knowing what I regard as a small to medium sized business and how large I actually got.

If you add to this continuous policy changes, fee hikes and stupid rules like sellers can’t leave negative feedback, well all of these factors and many more (I could go on forever about how eBay has changed for the worse) finally led me to closing down my eBay operations during the summer of 2008.

At the point of shutting down not only did I have little to no income but I had very little cash money to start something new with. What saved me ultimately were a few websites I had purchased on an extremely uncalculated basis back in 2006/2007. When I say uncalculated what I really mean is that I had so much money coming from eBay that I was just randomly investing into a variety of other online ventures so that all my eggs weren’t sitting in the proverbial ”One Basket”. 

One such early website which I had purchased during the eBay heydays was signaturebar.com (full story here). This and a few other sites were ultimately what saved my ass from going back into full time employment and sent me flying into the wonderful world of full time webmastering.

My Present & Future

So where am I now! Well I run a steadily growing portfolio of websites (100+ as of August 2009) of which some of have been developed from scratch whilst others purchased and re-developed from others. The process of taking a site and improving it by utilising a number of different professional skill sets (e.g. web design, programming, seo, marketing and even people management) is where the income and reward lies in this business. It’s fun, exciting and something that I love doing day in day out.  

Now despite me making the work out to be fun and recreational I don’t want to hide the reality and hard work behind it either. Getting started isn’t easy and there are definitely certain technical and professional disciplines that if you have mastered in advance would put you in good stead when entering this field. 

However even if you don’t have many or even any of the skills mentioned above, don’t worry because a) you can learn them as you go along but b) the real success in this business hinges on one simple objective and that is to create and deliver quality websites that will increase in traffic and popularity over the months and years of their existance.

The more traffic you gain, the more you will potentially earn, and if you have this one concept firmly rooted in your psyche you’ll do well because whether you do the work yourself or manage a team of professionals the goals of successful webmastering are the same and open to people of all backgrounds.

For me, my technical background meant I started off doing a lot of the work myself but as I grew I slowly outsourced various parts of my business both to contract hires as well as full time employees. If you stick to your guns growth is inevitable in this line of work but keeping yourself focussed with a core objective is the real challenge and that’s what I continue to work at.

This blog will reinforce and elaborate on the tasks and steps I took and continue to take on a daily basis so that those who are unfamiliar with this line of business can become familiar with it, whilst those that are already in this business can gain tips, ideas and motivation for their continuing involvment in this line of work.

Other Stuff

Well that’s about it but on a parting note I thought I’d just mention some of the other projects and areas I’m involved in, as from time to time I do mention these in some of my blog posts.

Firstly apart from managing my own web portfolio I also work with external clients via my web design agency at creative9.com. When I get bored of working on my own stuff working for others is always a welcome relief, and a change of pace.

Oh and life isn’t always money, money, money. As well as paid work I try to spend some time releasing free wordpress themes. Wordpress in my opinion is one of the greatest CMS’s ever to hit the net, so releasing free themes is my way of giving something back.

Well that’s about it but if you have any questions for me simply drop me a message via the sites contact page and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can. Enjoy the site!