Andrew Haddleton - The Internet: A Scary Place Or A Way To Make More Out Of Life?

We see our children and grandchildren playing, working, communicating and even making money using the Internet. And for a while we could ignore it as a new-fangled thing that doesn’t affect me.

Well, those days are well and truly gone.

Many of us don’t think twice about email and yet that’s a use of the Internet.

But many of us now know that there are more opportunities for us besides good “old” email.

What are those opportunities for us?

When you go right down into the detail, the list is almost endless.  There are so many things to do on the Internet but let’s keep it to four main categories of activity and a few examples of what you can do:

• Keeping in touch - email, social networking - Facebook

• Finding information - search engines, wikipedia, companies

• Entertainment - online games, sports, hobbies

• Buying - books, holidays, music

Added to that list and, coming out of each one of those, is an opportunity to make money.

And that is what many of us are looking for.

• As an addition to our retirement income

• As a second income

• To escape from a job

• Because you’ve lost your job.

Many of us know it’s possible to make money on the Internet but the big question is HOW?

It’s too complicated people say!

Plenty of people look at the Net and start to look at how to get a website.  Then they want to know how to make one.  What happens to it then? Where does it go?

Then once they’ve cracked that bag of mystery, they finally realize that no-one is going to the site so how do they get visitors or traffic?

Then they search in Google for their site but… it’s not there.  It’s not even on page 4!

By this stage most people are frustrated and confused.

They come across a continual stream of initials and wonder what it all means.

ISP, FTP, SEO, PPC, CTR, CPC, RSS

And then a string of words which might as well be in Swahili for all the sense they make.

Hosting, blogging, posting, copy, ranking, pinging, book-marking, networking and on it goes.

Argghh!  Can someone please talk in English?

The Cavalry is here

Clip clop.  Yes, the 7th Cavalry has arrived.

Hi, my name is Andrew Haddleton and in this series of articles I will walk you through some of the basic involved with the Internet but with a main focus on showing you some obvious and some not-so-obvious ways to make money from the Internet.

I’ll tell you what you don’t need to worry about.  How to find people to help. Which bits to ignore. And what you really need to do to make some cash.

And we’ll have some fun along the way too.

Don’t worry that I’m some 22-year old geek who will be speaking in alphabet-soup.  I’m right in the target market of GrownUps being on the right side of 50 .

I have a planned schedule of articles but please feel free to ask any questions as we go along.

Until next time.

Yours (not yet) in the Cyber-retirement village
Andrew Haddleton

Click here to read more articles by Andrew.

Published 20th Feb 2009

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