I’m very proud of the work I did at the day job, but lots of long hours at work left little time to spend tinkering in the Garage.

This years most significant work ended up being a relaunch rather than a launch. The rebuild of Episode List, took something that I originally built in 2001 and let fall into disrepair, with declining visitors, and turned into something that has continued to grow, in both visitors and revenue month over month.

I hope 2011 brings much more garage time.

I plan to refresh and relaunch a number of existing projects, as well add some new projects. I’m focusing on projects (web applications) that help get more done during the day. I’ll be documenting my plans for 2011 in another post.

For now I hope everyone had a great 2010, and wish everyone continued success for 2011.

Forget everything you’ve read about making money online and remember this, there are only 2 ways of making money online: Sell something; or help someone sell something!

There! Obvious isn’t it. But I think people get caught up in page-views, visitors, RSS subscribers, Twitter followers and everything else that they forget the fundamental things. You’re in business to make money, to make money you have sell something to someone.

If you’re not selling something directly you’ll be helping someone else to sell something, either thru some form of advertising or affiliate marketing.

As someone running their business in their spare time, it is even more important to remember the fundamentals. You often don’t have the luxury of figuring out how you’ll make money after you have lots of visitors, because you probably won’t be around if you don’t figure out how to make money NOW.

If you don’t plan on selling something directly on your website, think carefully about the types of visitors you’ll be getting and start making relationships with people that want to reach that type of person.

When you are starting out, the majority visitor will come to your site either via a search engine or a link from another website, and once they know your site will probably use a bookmark in their browser rather than typing in the name in the browsers address bar. So your .com, .org, .net will have little impact on your traffic.

Once your business becomes a huge success you may start advertising more on radio, television and in print. The .com issue may now become relevant, as a matter of branding and the level of type in traffic grows.

When typing in a domain name, some users will assume the site has is a .com, which may result in some lost traffic if your the .com is owned by someone else. Some of those users may still attempt to find your site via a search engine, but any extra steps required by your users is one step too many.

The majority of good .com names have long been registered though and if you try and purchase them could cost a hefty sum. If you don’t find an unregistered .com that works for your business you have to ask yourself is it work the extra cost to buy and .com, you could start with a .net or .og and later rename yourself to a better .com.

There are definitely benefits to having a .com, but I wouldn’t recommend sinking huge amounts of money into getting the perfect one right from the beginning. Even if you have go with a a slightly less desirable name to start and re-brand (and redirect) later your business should not be harmed.