They make it sound so easy..

If you start looking around on the Internet you can find a lot of people touting all sorts of schemes promising to get rich quick. Virtually everyone of them is selling you some sort of software program, ebook, membership site or what they otherwise term as a turnkey program designed to make you a ton of money with little or no effort from the Internet.

They make it sound so easy… In reality, it isn’t so easy. If it really was that easy do you think I would be selling you a program telling you how easy it was? If I had such a program and I really was making the kind of money they promise, well, I’d be so busy making money I wouldn’t have much time or inclination to sell you my program.

Mostly, these programs are just a bunch of hype. These people take what might be a good idea, wrap it into an informational product and the real money is made by selling it to you as an opportunity to make a bunch of money on the internet.

First off, lets look at the real facts. The only way someone is going to make a killing on the Internet selling anything is to get lots of traffic to their site -first. So no matter what program you buy into the real key to being successful is to first get loads of traffic to your site. That’s where the real work comes in  as well as the investment of time and money.

Secondly, you can get tons of people to your site and even though you may have relevent information that brought them there in the first place, the next trick is getting them to convert into a sale. And that is an art unto itself, usually doesn’t just “happen” and takes lots of work to get there including web analytics and comprehensive site analysis and site design “tweaking” until you hit on the right formula of design and technology to compel your visitors to convert to a sale.

And I don’t just say this. I am a certified specialist in ecommerce and a CIW Professional which is one of the top industry standards for a qualified webmaster to have. This doesn’t come easy it took alot of experience and training to earn this status. And I have learned from many years of doing this that there is a right way and a wrong way to succeed on the Internet. Both take hard work, dedication, money and time but only one of them results in success.

From a $300 investment a company is born.

Adtastic was formed a little over 9 years ago from a $300 investment. Actually I had been doing what we do now even before that but that was when it became serious. Mostly, before that it was just a little here and there for friends and family that asked for help about internet stuff. The Internet was still an everyday business for me but the bulk of my income was from running affiliate programs with the likes of yahoo and other companies offering internet related services.

What caused the official formation of the company was so many people kept asking for help and one day one of them said I should do this for a living. I thought about it and went out that day and purchased me another computer in a pawn shop for $300. That was my first official “company asset”. My office was a small desk in a corner of the living room back then and I subsisted mostly on designing small websites.

Today there are 7 computers and various office machinery and my office is in one-third of the 2400 sq ft house I live in alongside a lake. Its a separate section of the house that used to be two large bedrooms and a private bathroom. And now we do everything from website design to ecommerce to our specialty which is search engine marketing  (SEM) and web page optimization (SEO).

Over the years I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to build a business from nothing, survive and grow it. With any luck maybe I can pass on some of that here on this blog, we’ll see.

Adtastic joins the world of blogging!

Adtastic Hosting and Internet Services is a small Internet services company that was built from scratch, one customer at a time. Started back in 1999 the company has grown from a few local customers to hundreds of customers from all over the world.

Since the company is owner operated and successful we’ve often been asked if we had a blog to share our secrets of success from. The short answer is no. The long answer is we’ve decided to make this one and use it to talk about the ups and downs of running your own business. Maybe we’ll learn something from the process and if someone else is able to pcik up a tidbit or two that might be nice too.