Commercial web development is a thriving business sector, but DIY web authoring is exponentially greater. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people set up their first blog or web-based profile page; be it with Blogger or WordPress, or MySpace or Facebook, or LinkedIn or Elance, or Geocities or Google Sites. There's hundreds of popular, free web authoring services. Web entrepreneurship has never been easier, and it's only going to get easier in the very near future.
There are free stats tools to monitor page loads and referred traffic; like StatCounter and Google Analytics for example, which can be "invisibly" embedded into a webpage.
People are quickly learning that all it takes to set-up-home online and bring in some easy, untaxed revenue, is a few minutes of setting up a free blog and then a few further minutes each week to write about something — anything — that people want to read about (after which they may click the adverts on your blog, which sends money straight to you).
This DIY web authoring trend is widely becoming a serious career consideration; for families in third-world slums, for students in built-up cities, and for pensioners in their rural cottages. Whether you pursue the technical route of web programming until you can slap-up a new, credible, corporate website for free, from scratch, in an hour; or whether you want to stick to content and let the giants like Google worry about the code. What you can't ignore, as a serious aspiring web entrepreneur, is Content is King. Even as an entrepreneurial web author specialising in programming or graphics design; it's still nearly all about quantity and quality of unique content.
In summary...
Forget about the trashy content-generation tricks. If you're a serious, aspiring web entrepreneur, go home each night and think. Think about what you are an expert in. What do you know, that other people don't? What can you write about in a way that others can't?
Then write. When you have an idea of something to write about, based on your unique expertise in whatever you know or do best, write it down. Spit out articles on your favourite subjects just like you spit out words on the phone or in a chatroom.
Keep it simple, although quantity is important, because the long term aim is to satisfy the readers. When the readers are satisfied, they will link to your site. It takes years, and starts very slow, but even just the first one or two inward-bound links should be encouraging enough in demonstration of potential. Inlinks means good SEO, and search engines then start to rank your site highly. Googluck!
