financial independence

Back from fishing and having some days away heres an interview with Lord Matt who derives 99% of his income on the World Wide Web, due to the size of this interview I've split it in Two, part One today and part Two tomorrow. Lord Matt's response's are in Italic. Don't want to miss part 2? Subscribe to financial independence or Subscribe to financial independence by Email

I am a regular reader of lordmatt.co.uk as you know that means I know quite a lot about you already, I know you wanted to suggest the questions but you can't. I have to ask the questions its my interview but what I think would be really fantastic is if you linked back to my interview saying how it could be improved what do you reckon?

I know you run a lot of sites you have 6 listed on mybloglog they are:

The fantastic world of lord Matt - which is great

Worldwide opinions - I thought you hate blogspot?

Laity online

For Jono - This is a sad story and I worry about a similar situation with my 3 year old.

Globally Local

Moreturf

What others are there?

The fantastic site was the first (although before tha I spent some amount
of time playing with blogspot which nicely leads on to World Wide Opinions.
WWO was started by Kate Blogs who is taking a leave of absence from
blogging for personal reasons but before she left she had invited many
bloggers to join the blog so that the opinions would be "world wide".

Laity Online is an experiment that sits on he back burner along with
buzz42.com which holds five minor blogs where anyone can submit content (subject to editor aproval). There is also blogclue.com which is a wiki
and technorati style listing in one. I'm still working on it (I want to
add OpenID and a few other quality features to get the most out of what
goes on there).

Forjono resides on it's own account to keep it isolated from my business
activities as it means a lot to me. The events that followed the reason
for that site inspired fixthelaw.co.uk which is currently offline (I have
to find the time to reinstate the site which is going to cost me a day and
a bit). Both run Mediawiki in one form or another.

Globallylocal.com is currently a shadow of what I hope to achieve. It is
the site to watch. Currently I simply (re)sell domain names and hosting
and offer resller packages to anyone that is interested.
However, I started Adullam Limited to write and profit from a project I
started three years ago. It is very much a web 2.0/3.0 knowledge "mush
up" aggrigating our knowledge of what is where.

It all started because the
local business directories were frankly such a pile of poop that they were
hardly worth using. I plan to change this. I started writting in ASP
(before ASP.NET came out) but soon realised that Access 2000 and ASP did
not have the power I needed. MS-SQL-Sever did but the price tag was too
much. MySQL was a far more prommising price (free) but the best examples
were in php. I learned php to port the project and that is where
code.orbit42.com came from.

More turf.com exists only becuase I love a good personal challenge.
Turning 1p into a million pounds is my idea of a good challenge. Yes, I
am mad.

There is also cultofthe.com (cult of the dot com) which is a domain name
spinner with a twist (ie it works for me better than any other I have
tried).
Also there is MaxWebEdit.com and Tip42.com just getting ready to be
something. There are also sites I am doing for my dad (who is a very
impressive artist) and other family members. After that there are others. But they are something I am keping
underwraps for now.

What was the first site you ever started about and what was it's domain name?

The very first site I ever made was called mad-den.net and it was written
very badly in ASP and was a cross between an affiliate banner farm and a
niche index (like a tiny yahoo). I'm getting ready to do something similar with that in php with the same domain name but more niche content and less affiliate links.

Do you derive all of your income online?
yes and no. My business is 99.9% on line but the 0.1% produces huge
bursts of cash where as the 99.9% is steady if a bit weak at times.

From what sources and which sites?

I use a sub-domain on gloabllylocal.com to run an advert server. My three
main source of income are PPC (like bidvertiser and google), affiliate
programs and the domain name / hosting deal at isp.globallylocal.com
although I have flirted with sponsored posts which have the dual problems
of getting paid and (especially with PPP) not paying enough to start with.

I don't think you'll tell me how much you make so I won't ask, what was it that got you into the World Wide Web?

You are right on the making money front although a brief trip to the companies house website should allow you to purchase a copy of the company accounts so it's not that much of a secret. But it is not something I like to talk about too much.

A big Thanks to Lord Matt of The Fantastic site and imaginary hyperspace of Lord Matt amongst others. Part Two tomorrow don't miss it.