A friend recently gave me a book to review, saying that if I reviewed it I'd get to keep it. The book was all about how to make money from websites, and he figured I'd know what I'd be talking about.

To be honest, the subject has interested me, since to keep your website on top of the search engine listings you have to keep abreast of the latest changes, and usually this means reading various blogs and forums. Quite often you come across people who are making a living purely from having a website. This isn't from selling things through websites, but actually the adverts on the pages themselves. I've always been skeptical, and even after reading this book I still am.

Nevertheless, I should at least try and test out what I've read in the book (actually, this isn't a lot, the book is mostly a rehash of the google adsense help pages - which incidentally is the first lesson. You don't need to write new content, there's a whole load out there free to use). So, here's the grand announcement of my cobbled content, advert overladen website;

Paris - Show City Info! A guide for tourists planning a trip to Paris.

A rather clumsy title I admit. The first difficulty was getting a domain name. Everything is taken already! And not by legitimate sites either. I piled through a whole ton of ideas, using thesauruses (thesauri?) and keyword generators trying to get a decent name. When you check out where the URL leads, it invariably was a domain speculator, which really sucked since without them everyone would have really cool URL's... Actually someone swiped tripseurope.eu before we could get it ourselves (admittedly we were a bit lazy, but they took it within hours of the .eu domains being released to general public). Annoying as that was, it kinda means we're good enough to *be* swiped, so there's a compliment in there somewhere.

Anyway. With luck I'll be raking in 10's of dollars every year with my new site. Maybe this will be the start of a whole new career (how many's that now? At least five...). At the moment the site's still under construction, so I've done absolutely no SEO work on it. Googlebots have still somehow found it, but no visitors. It'll be interesting to see if this blog entry will cause any.