Business End

Quincy and I have been talking about exit strategies. We'd love to quit our jobs and do, well, other stuff. Part of that for me, at least, is getting back into running my own business. Or, just exploring other business ideas. I figured there was no reason to wait.

The first thing I wanted to learn how to do was to start up a web site. I hadn't figured out an excuse for a while. So, I started with someone else's idea.

A few of us were sitting around the cube bay the other day, talking about our corporation's golfer. That's right. In these tough economic times with layoffs and budget cuts, our parent company FTI signed a 8 million dollar deal with a B-rate golfer. He has to wear a hat and shirt with "FTI" on it. You might be thinking: what does your law consulting firm have to do with golf? Nothing.

The joke was, since no one has any idea of what FTI is, when they see this PGA golfer wearing the FTI logo, they'd have to Google it. If our site showed up with all the burried news clips, and folks clicked on it, we could surface ads to them and hope to make, say, $2 on ads. Or a million, should our golfer make it big.

I saw this as a perfect opportunity to learn how to make a website. I ran back to my desk and registered FTIGolf.com. The other guys tried to as well, but I beat them to it. I registered through GoDaddy. I wouldn't do that again (too expensive and they charge for every extra). Once I had the domain name, I needed a hosting site. I thought I might be able to use my Comcast space, but that's not how DNS works. It's just an IP address. So, off to 1and1.com recommended by Megan to buy some hosting.

I was surprised to see that the site hosting and the DNS registration actually took a few days to kick in. While I was waiting for all that internet rerouting to happen, I set up my Amazon.com Associate's account. This is the free account that Amazon.com lets anyone set up to track ads. Long story short, when almost anyone who clicks through ads on my website to Amazon.com, and buys something, I get a 4% kickback.

But that's not really why I did this. It would be nice, actually surprising, to make any money at all on FTIGolf.com. I wanted to learn how to register a domain, set up forwarding and email, set up a hosting site, add ads for Amazon, and be ready for when my next (or someone else's) idea happens. Now that I know how easy it is, I'm psyched.

You'll notice I've added a couple Amazon.com ads to this site. Feel free to click on them and buy a new Kindle or M. Ward CD
. The more you buy, the more I earn. Better yet, set them up for your site! We can trade traffic. Good luck!