New Beginnings

Due to an overpowering combination of circumstances, both personal and professional, this blog has been neglected for nearly six momentous months.

I won't bore you with all the details that have diverted my time away from my blogly responsibilities , suffice to say that this blog is returning to active duty (followed shortly by its two Blogger relatives All I Ate Today and About Manchester United) and fully intending to live up to the lofty ambitions up there in the description!

Expect to read dazzling deeds of ethical adventures in eCommerce as I take my first teetering steps into the brave new world of making a living on the world wide web.

If you want to share the complete beginner's experience, I strongly recommend you visit my wife Ursula's blog, A Woman's Work.

Ursula has no prior knowledge of what she's getting into and no previous experience of running a business so is very much going to have to rely on her own hard work and determination as she walks into the undiscovered country of the internet.

I already have a little bit of a head start over the complete novice, having read up on the subject quite a bit over the last six months and also having an existing website or two, which I had to build myself.

The most established is Antequera Villa Rental, which has been contributing steadily if modestly to the Rose family fortunes for just over a year now. There's no great secret to a site like that. I designed it over a period of about two weeks using a software programme called Web Studio and we put up a couple of ads on the internet, on Owners Direct and Perfect Places.

I actually built the first version of the site using the free download of the software so it didn't even cost me anything. I then went on to buy the full programme, which I used early this year to build the current version 2 and put up our new little business on the web, Lighthouse Point Holidays in Torrox Costa.

Once you get used to it, building websites doesn't seem quite as unimaginably scary as it first appears, although I imagine that it could be even easier.

To be honest, I now know there are easier ways to build a website with a lot more control over both the layout of pages and important things like keywords to help Google and the other search engines understand what a site is all about. Neither of our two sites is keyword or search engine optimised (SEO is a massive field of mystery we will come back to in the future) at the time of writing and have Google pageranks of 4 and 3 respectively.

DISCLAIMER: Some of what I cover in future will be on the very subject of making money online as I buy or try a whole bunch of software and new ideas to help me exercise my right to earn a living. Some future posts will include affiliate or associate links to products that I feel worth recommending.

Rest assured however that any such links will always be clearly indicated as such and if you don't want to support my efforts by buying them through me, there will also be a link direct to the homepage of any site or product I endorse.

It is my intention to be nothing but honest in these matters and will be reporting my experiences, warts and all, without fear or favour to the companies whose products I use. Some of the material will possibly be used for future publication elsewhere.

I am particularly keen on the idea of reviewing a whole series of different software products and eBooks both here in Alienboy's World and for the time-sucking magnificence that is Blogcritics, the wildest bunch of bloggers on the web. Imagine the literary equivalent of the famous bar scene in Star Wars!

However, I digress.

The Rose family of blogs are probably going to abandon blogger.com in favour of a more versatile platform in the very near future. I'm sure Google haven't actually forgotten about Blogger as they grow, but the technical limitations of this platform (no categories!) and the frankly rubbish technical support they give leave very little option to anybody wanting anything more than the most basic of blogs.

I will, of course, keep this blog and, more importantly, YOU, fully informed.