Those aware of the financial mayhem taking place are scrounging for ways to protect themselves against inflation (and other turmoil). Gold and silver are the traditional go-tos for preserving wealth during inflationary times, and rightly so. Gold has 6,000 years of history-cred to back it up. But for the most part, metals do just that: preserve wealth, not grow it. Starting a small business involves work, but can provide a source of revenue that grows organically, on top of inflation.

Small Biz: A Better Option For Some

Because “work at home” has such a scammy taint these days, let’s get this out of the way: I’m not selling anything. I’m posting this here because it seems relevant in this environment. There are probably tons of good small biz opps out there, but building websites is the only one I’m experienced in. So I’ll try to share some of what I’ve learned in my 6 years in web-development and internet-marketing. And I promise I won’t try to sell you an e-book or 6-cd program.

The Problem with Metals

Precious metals simply aren’t a good option for everyone: they’re costly and illiquid.  But if you’re motivated and patient, it is possible to earn a living from a small business, using very little capital up front. I started one, working nights/weekends, using less than a $500 initial investment in 2005, and it eventually provided me a good full-time income.

Building a Site

My gig was/is building content-websites and monetizing them with ad-networks like Google Adsense. Building a site is absurdly simple these days. For example, BearishNews.com took me about 3 hours and $35 to build. This site isn’t a goldmine by any means, but traffic is steady and growing. Also, I’m keeping ads to a minimum. That’s important at first. If you don’t have dedicated readers, people won’t put up with ads all over the place. I envision bigger things in the future. It takes patience and dedication to build a successful site.

You don’t need to be a programmer to build a site. Web Hosts make it really easy to build a fully-functional site these days. I highly recommend WordPress for newbies. It runs this site, and is really easy to customize and install. Make sure your web-host offers Fantastico, a program that makes installing blogs like those run by WordPress really easy.

As an alternative, you can use wordpress.com or blogspot.com for a pre-packaged blog platform. However, that limits you to a domain name like bearish.blogspot.com. I wanted the domain www.bearishnews.com for this site, so I bought the name through Godaddy.com and used Hostgator.com for hosting (no affiliation or arrangement with either). Hostgator plans start out at around $5/month, and offer plenty of bandwidth, plus Fantastico. There are also other limitations when using hosted Blogspot (owned by Google) and WordPress.com-hosted sites.

What topic to start a site about?

There are two basic philosophies for choosing a niche to build a site around: One you are passionate about, or one you think will be profitable enough to keep you interested in. You’ll need to generate interesting, original content. So picking a topic you are passionate about is the easier route. But if your hobby is paper airplanes, don’t count on a steady income from it. Not many companies want to advertise on sites like that. Topics like technology, finance, health, are all crowded. But there are multiple niches within each of these topics that have plenty of potential and room left for newcomers.  And they’re all probably better choices than a paper-airplane site.  It’s a balancing act, but try to choose something that it both interesting to you and has a healthy base of advertisers.

Internet Marketing 101

Internet Marketing sounds a lot harder than it is. At its most basic level, it is making comments that contribute to the conversation on other related blogs. Make natural connections with people who have similar interests. Link to other people generously. Write good articles and get them published on other sites. SeekingAlpha.com. is a good example of a site that collects, or “aggregates” articles from other sites in the finance niche.

Email influential people in your niche when you think it’s appropriate. You might write them about a new article you just published, which their readers might be interested in. Many successful blogs publish a “Roundup” type of post, which they just link to other articles from around the web. Don’t be pushy or annoying, but if you have something you think is good, don’t be shy about sharing it.

The cliche phrase in web development is “Content is King”. It’s a good phrase, and it is extremely important to have good content. But you also have to make sure people see it. Sometimes you need to push it a little to make sure it gets seen, cause the web is crowded. You are your best advocate.

Avoid Sketchy Transactions

Try to avoid things like link-exchanges or link-buying. These can provide temporary boosts, but can result in severe punishments from search engines (more below). Some exchanging of links is natural and OK to search engines. But avoid large programs designed to manipulate search-engine rankings. And start out with little or no advertisements. It looks tacky when a brand-new site, with zero traffic is covered in ads.

Working from home is not a scam, it’s just hard

In 2005 my sites had started generating more net profit than my annual salary at my day-job. I eventually left the day-job, and actually lived the “working from home” dream. Sometimes I watched movies and played X-box all day. But it takes hard work. In my case, that work had been done the previous year. So I coasted along for a while and stopped working on my sites for a while. I found some easier ways to build links and traffic to my site, so used them.

Avoid Shortcuts & Cheating

After working for over a year on my sites and getting some initial success, I tried using shortcuts to artificially inflate my search-engine rankings. They worked magnificently, for a while. I was making up to $500/day in Adsense revenue. But Google has become extremely good at detecting cheats like this, and my sites were smacked down hard in 2007. Google doesn’t like it when you fool with their algorithm, and I’ve accepted that they are smarter than me.

My advice is to create a site with useful information, update it as frequently as possible, and to study internet marketing. My sites still generate a good amount of revenue, but not enough to support a family on. So I’m working a day-job for now, and plugging away at night. Success takes time. And don’t try shortcuts, they’re not worth it.