So I started my first website which was called AZGold.co.uk. The basic idea was to replicate the Yellow Pages model online and make money by selling advertising. Well, to cut a long story short, after two years of trying I decided to let the project fold. I had managed to make a small loss and I had almost got into legal trouble with the real Yellow Pages - people who, quite rightly, were keen on protecting their trademark.

The following Christmas, three years ago, I decided to start White Dove Books just as an outlet for my own writing. I run Personal and Professional Development courses in the UK and I thought I could provide my delegates with an additional useful resource. I didn't have any thoughts of making-money in my mind at that point - I just tried to build an interesting site. Then I did what almost everyone does when they get started, I found related affiliate programs, joined them and put their links on my site. It took a whole year before anyone bought anything through one of those links, but I was delighted when that person did - it demonstrated to me that affiliate programs could work, if only I could get enough traffic.

During the second year I cracked the traffic problem. It wasn't that difficult really: I bought a piece of software called IBP which allowed me to analyze successful websites in detail and then figure out where the differences were between their pages and mine. It still requires work on your part, but it takes a lot of the guessing away when you are optimizing for the search engines. The very first search-term I decided to optimize for was Personal Development. At the time, there were over 600 Million sites returned by Google for that search term so it was quite a challenge. However, we have been on the first page of Google for that search term for over a year now.

One tip I could give for newbies on optimizing is this: think about how you get other sites to link to yours without paying for that link by linking back - there you have one of my own tactics! Now to do this takes some work on your part: you could give away something of value - that contains your link - and allow others to put it on their sites. Most people so this by publishing articles but you can be creative here: think about what you could provide that necessitates the co-operating site to publish your link and you are onto a winner. All those one-way links will get you to the top of the search engines. It takes time and effort but in the end it's worth it!

The next big thing that happened to White Dove Books was getting into the Adsense program. If you have never heard of Adsense, then listen-up: this program can instantly make your website a success - provided, of course, you have invested some time in creating a content-based site i.e. one with plenty of original articles. Essentially, it works like this: Google provide you with a small snippet of Java code which you put into your web pages and that allows Google to place context-sensitive advertising on your site; and guess what? You get paid when someone clicks! Wow - what a difference - people don't have to buy anything - they just click and you get paid. This program has been instrumental in making our site so successful.

Meanwhile, with the steady flow of new visitors we were getting, we decided we had better start collecting email addresses. If seemed that every internet guru was saying this is what you needed to do. Their idea was basically to market to your list. Now we do collect email addresses, but we don't really market to our list. We simply use it as another way to provide useful information; and that keeps people coming back to our site; and a percentage of our visitors click on Adsense ads; and that's how the site is monetized - it turned out to be simple.

What we have been working on more recently is getting to Level 2. I always try to treat the whole internet thing as a bit of a game - I would say we are on Level 1; we are now good at Level 1 but we are now ready to get to Level 2. We figured out the things you needed to master at Level 1 - things like traffic, rankings and monetizing the site. But now we need to figure out the Level 2 stuff like really mastering viral marketing - that's really what separates the most successful internet marketers from the rest of the field.

We have made a good start. We have a number of great affiliate programs in the area of Personal Development/Self-Improvement and we also offer a great deal in commission. You can see all our affiliate offerings here ... Affiliate Program

But we know this is only a start. In January of this year, we sent out a small poem to around one hundred people. It was just a short poem about my hopes and aspirations for the coming year. We attached a music file to it and put in a nice picture - but that was it. It only took about 15 minutes to do because we already had the music. The result was that people loved the poem and passed it to their friends and then the whole thing snowballed - and that email was what got us into the top 100,000 in the Alexa rankings. That is the power of viral marketing!