Can a free site make you rich?

Posted at APSENSE http://www.apsense.com/invite/ruyuwied

The opportunity still knocks for people who develop profitable webspace content.  The focus is changing on where and how people present information that is relevant to users who are looking to get information on a particular subject.  For as many subjects as there are, someone has posted, uploaded, created, and offered the information online.  What they may not have done is organize it well.

For many individuals, creating content for the internet is a hit or miss operation.  Posting ads, blogging, and forums keep many folks from organizing their content.  Once posted, the information is left for others to utilize, but the poster does not garnish any rewards.  It's all just a waste of time.  Building someone else's webspace for little return.

In 1998 I started experimenting with creating my own websites.  At the time, I had no money to spend on marketing.  It was all new to me, and as for many of us who have now been online for over a decade or two, I wanted to start building something that would help me to begin making money online.  I used a common free site to build my first complete, working website /torqueandchrome.  It was a website designed to offer Houston area classic car show listings for enthusiasts to use as their guide to upcoming events in the Houston area.  I built this site to also promote my own Torque and Chrome Car Shows.  It worked.  In less than a year, I was able to successfully produce a number of events, each making me new contacts, and return visitors to the site.  A free site created a local interest which resulted in increased traffic to the free site.  It worked, it really worked.  Before the first year was out, I began to think of what products I would like to offer on the site so that I could really turn on the cash faucet, making the free site a personal gold mine..

As this story is a true one, I need to add this as a footnote.  I was unable to maintain the business due to an illness, and it did eventually have to be closed.  The website worked, but it took a constant physical presence to maintain.  It was necessary to have more than the site to keep it going.  I learned much, and profited a good lesson in life.

See the archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.torqueandchrome.com