What are the total costs?

This depends on what site you buy, how many you buy and your hosting requirements and any money you choose to spend on marketing, etc. Here's a breakdown of the expenses you are likely to come across. We don't want to come across any surprise costs. We supply the website the business plan is up to you. This is only a guide but a pretty accurate idea of what your costs can be.

Your Site - depends which site you choose.

Domain name - around $10.

Hosting - to start with from £5-10 a month.

These are your starting costs. Whatever you spend next depends on your own business plan.

Updating - from £10, depends what you want

Marketing - this is entirely up to you. Many people do not pay for advertising at all. It can be a minefield. However all you need to understand is this simple fact: however much you spend getting people onto your site, you must earn more in revenue. It's very satisfying getting 100,000 visitors on your site but it better to get 100 vistors and 10 sign-ups than 100,000 and 1 sign-up.

Marketing options are:

Pay-per-click - this is when you have your link on someone else's site and they charge you a fixed fee everytime someone clicks on your link. For example: You get an adword pay-per-click account with google and set the amount at £0.04 per click. Basically you are paying 4p for every visitor you get from that advert. If you earn £20 per sign-up then you must get at least one sign-up for every 500 visitors to break even. This simplified chart below shows the basic principle:

You can see from the table that if your conversion ratio (the number on the left is the number of people who you send to the sites you are affiliated to and the the number on the right is the number of those people who actually sign-up and make you money) is better that 500:1 then you make money but if it is worse than that you are spending more on advertising than you are getting back in sales.

Buying traffic - you can buy visitors from traffic brokers. Basically you pay them per 1000, for example, visitors. As above, you must earn more from these visitors that you pay for them or you will lose money on the deal. Bought traffic converts a lot worse than pay-per-click (or PPC). This is because this kind of traffic usually comes from people being redirected in some way to your site. Unlike the PPC traffic, these visitors were not explictly looking for your site, so consquently they are less likely to spend money.

Paying for links - Some people will charge you for a link on there website. This is similar to pay-per-click but the amount of visitors is estimated and you are not charged per click. These links can be very profitable if you find the right site.

For example: Suppose you find a very large and popular website on casino gambling and you have a site on mini-baccarat. Since baccarat isn't one of the more popular casino games there will be fewer dedicated sites and the chances are this big casino site doesn't have much on the subject. A banner ad on this site might cost you £50 but bring you in a lot of dedicated traffic from interested punters.

Print advertising - this is advertising in the real world, from a card in a shop window to a advert in a newpaper or magazine. Generally newpapers and magazines are way too expensive for your needs. However a small advert in the local press or even a card in the cornershop window may bring in some revenue. Again, make sure whatever you spend in marketing it is less than you earn in revenue.

Suggested marketing strategy.

Marketing can be tricky and expensive if you are not careful. But remember many people do not pay for any kind of advertising - it is up to you and your business plan. The secret is to invest small amounts of money and test the waters. Put aside, say £50, and try one method. If it seems to work, try as little more, if you get nothing, try something else.

Don't forget there are many free ways of getting people onto your site!

Search engine traffic, regular links, dicussion forums and word of mouth are all free.