My first £

Today I made my first pound. The first sum of money I have ever earned entirely off my own back; not a wage, not a gift, not found down the back of the sofa. It's not much, but it's a start.

The short term plan is as follows: be an employee for at least 6 months to build capital, then branch out on my own. I've hit a major load of luck in getting a well paid job at an international organisation, but the downside is that the working day is at least 8am - 6.30pm. This doesn't leave much time to plan/run a coffee business - so where did the pound come from?

My father ran a price comparison website for a year or so in order to teach himself php and to learn more about affiliate marketing. It's a beguiling idea: review a product, post links to that product on the virtual shelf of an etailer, and earn commission whenever a reader decides to buy. Dad operated this system in the traditional way with a modern twist: he built a database system which served up the realtime prices and user ratings of the products he reviewed. With a little work he was earning around £200 monthly - not a living, but not bad either for what was essentially a side project.

Well, yesterday he handed me a book called 'Affiliate Millions' which teaches a more advanced strategy known as 'search marketing'. Essentially the principal is that you pay Google or a like search engine to display a small ad, including affiliate link. You pay per click, and for each click a cookie is placed on the user's system with your tracking code. If they make a purchase during the 'referral period', which for Amazon is 24 hours, you earn a commission - in Amazon's case initially 5%, rising as you make sales.

The name of the game, then, is to pay less for advertising than you make in comission, and this is what happened yesterday. Half of the users who clicked my ad made a purchase yesterday. The clicks cost me £1.50, the commission was £2.50: hello Poundland.

Stay tuned for more tips and tricks of search marketing, as well as some thoughts on the shiny world of work.