the richest man in atherstone

I've been running my own website design business in Nuneaton, Warwickshire for two months now and I'm enjoying every moment of it. It feels great to be free from the shackles of the normal 9 to 5 routine giving me a lot more flexibility around my family. Some of the advantages include:

• I get to spend more time with the kids in the daytime
• I can take the kids over the park (and give my wife a well-earned rest)
• I can go to the bank when it's actually open!

Of course, it does have it's disadvantages including:

• Insecurity (no guaranteed wage slip at the end of every month)
• Lack of work - Some weeks, I've had to turn work away because there's simply too much and others (like this week) it's very quiet so there's no money coming in
• Work environment - In the first few weeks I had a lot of distractions from family members - I resolved this by turning my loft into an office and hiding up there

I still have a couple of months-worth of redundancy pay, which gives me a cushion as I work to build my business up. Hopefully, by the time it expires, I'll be a little more well-known in the area and have lots more work in my portfolio to back up my claims.

As well as my website design business, I have a few websites that are generating a little income each month. Both businesses have potential and I'm still working out how much of my time should be spent on each.

Well, that's it for now. I'll try and keep this blog updated a little more frequently in future as I discuss my experiences and lessons learned.

I created my own online contact management system a year or two ago that was designed specifically for my own needs. Recently I've been working on sprucing it up so that it can be used by others and it is now at an advanced stage.

The next stage is to thoroughly test it and so I need a number of volunteers to use the system and report any bugs or problems they can find. Therefore, you are cordially invited to set up a FREE lifetime account and try out the system.

By registering and using the system (named FABDEX), you discover just how easy contact management can be and will gain access to many fantastic functions that are useful to internet marketers and anyone looking to create and maintain a mailing list. This includes:

- Powerful contact search functions
- Saved searches
- Easy creation of user signup/subscription forms for your website
- Quick and simple contact management
- Categorisation of contacts using tags
- Import & export utilities
- Access to your contacts from any Internet-connected computer

As a BETA tester, you will get priority response to any technical issues you have as well as having the opportunity to shape how FABDEX evolves in the future.

I have limited the number of BETA Testers to 10 to ensure that there are no capacity issues, so if you're interested be sure to get in quick.

Create your FREE account by clicking on the link below:

FABDEX

and I look forward to working with you on this exciting project.

I was recently made aware of a couple of website advertising networks that offer fixed payments for displaying banners on your website. They are Matched and Money4Banners.

Matched
With Matched, you submit up to five pages per website and they try to 'match' an advertiser to your website's content. For each page displaying an advert they pay you £3 per month.

Money4Banners
With Money4Banners, you select three pages from your website to display the banners. If accepted, they pay you £5 per month to display banners on the three pages plus a one-off £10 sign-up bonus.

My Experience
I have a few domain names that I secured for projects that I haven't got around to finishing and thought that I'd try the aforementioned advertising networks with one of them. The website I chose has a fair bit of niche content but not a whole lot of visitors at the moment due to lack of marketing. It already earned about a dollar (50p) per month from Google Adsense, so publishing adverts from both Matched and Money4Banners would provide a significant boost in revenue.

In early March, I subscribed to both Money4Banners and Matched and submitted my webpages to them.

Within a day or two, I had been accepted by Money4Banners and so I copied and pasted the 'ad code' into my website. A few days later I received my £10 sign-up bonus via PayPal and have subsequently received my first £5 monthly installment.

Matched are still trying to 'match' my webpages to an Advertiser, so no earnings from them.

Summary
I think that Matched and Money4Banners provide a great revenue-earning option for smaller websites or websites that serve a small niche market. As I mentioned previously, I was only earning about 50p a month from my 'test' website and Money4Banners has increased the revenue tenfold (plus an extra tenner for signing up).

I now plan on integrating this method of advertising with all my half-finished websites to bump up my monthly income from them.

I'm also considering buying a few domain names and knocking up a few quick websites specifically for serving banners. It should take about an hour to create a website with content and after a couple of months, the domain name would have been paid for leaving 10 months of pure profit

The guy who made me aware of this, Phil (a subscriber to my newsletter) earns himself around £100 each month by doing this. Great job, Phil, and thank you for sharing

This series of articles was inspired by a wealth-building strategy created by Stuart Goldsmith. It is called 'Double Your way to a Million Plan' and you can sign up for your free copy on this webpage. For a brief outline of the strategy, take a look at this post.

Since becoming self-employed a few weeks ago, I've been thinking an awful lot about whether I should keep my business income and Doubling income separate. This is the way I've done it over the past year, the main reason being that the rules for Doubling state that Doubling money should be kept separate from personal cash.

This poses a number of problems. Firstly, I will have two sets of accounts to keep and working out the split for National Insurance and taxes will be quite difficult. Secondly, each time I come up with a new money-making idea, I will have to decide whether it contributes to my personal or Doubling income. I would have to design some sort of criteria to help me make the decision - and what sort of criteria would I use?

Over the weeks, I've come up with a number of strategies for keeping the funds separate, however none of them 'felt right' and they were all unnecessarily over-complicated. I feel I could continue to ponder upon this until the cows come home but, even then I don't think I would come up with a satisfactory solution.

So, I made a decision.

I will combine my Doubling quest with my other business ventures and split all the income between myself and the Doubling Pot. Although this is technically breaking one of the rules of Doubling, I believe it is the only satisfactory solution to the dilemma. My business will become my 'Doubling Account' and one of the expenses from said account will be my salary. I think at some point everyone that attempts to 'Double to a Million' will have to pay wages or labour costs, and that is the way I think about drawing a salary from it.

As well as gaining personally from my Doubling exploits, my Doubling Project will gain from my personal business income (including income from this website). A joining of forces, as it were.

The way I intend to split the profits is by totting up the income earned every quarter and splitting it three ways. The first third will be held back to pay the end of year tax bill. The second third will be retained as the Doubling Fund and the third third(?) will be transferred to my personal bank account.

My salary will be further divided as highlighted in my personal financial plan for 2008.

This also has the advantage of amalgamating the Doubling updates I make here into a single quarterly post.

So, with this plan in hand and a little math, I find that I need to earn a little over £15000 during 2008 to achieve two of the goals I set myself at the beginning of the year (goals 4 and 5).

I'd better get cracking...