I do think that newer webmasters coming in to the industry from 'today' onwards are going to find things extremely difficult however, thats not to say it is a good or a bad thing.

Necessity, for the most part would dictate that thos who are doing this as a 'hobby' whilst in between jobs really will fail and not make any money which is good for everyone, whilst those who run this as an actual business and research what is needed from them to be a success in the industry will ensure that although slowly they will succeed.

I think Patti made a very good point to, many new webmasters either dont find the boards when they need them or, they find the WRONG type of board, lets not forget that in the last 2-3 years we have seen an explosion of message boards that cater to the hobbyist webmaster and, whilst many of those boards are busy, they lack the business understanding by many (including the board owners) to offer anything of worth to the new webmaster.

I was actually talking to Patti about this very topic last night i beleive, out of all the boards that are currently in the industry, the trend seems to be attracting a 'post count' rather than a 'business thread count' as was often the case going back to '00 it seems these days, the more posts you have on a board, the more money companies are willing to spend on advertising therefore, the more non-business orientated boards open up, not only throwing the newer webmaster in to a continuing cycle of not being able to find the help they need but, when someone does offer them help. its either for the wrong reasons or, the information itself is so out-dated its unreal.

Of course the one thing that we all need to remember is that the more new webmasters start hopping in to the industry, the harder its going to be for everyone to make money as the pie keeps gettting cut in to smaller and smaller slices.

Over the past 6 months im sure you could see people on a range of boards including GWW who either no longer post or have left the industry completely and, im sure this trend will continue over the coming months as government regulations and the slow down in surfer activity starts to take hold on the industry as a whole.

Just going back to a point i mentioned above about the type of help they [newbies] get offered being for the wrong reasons or out-dated, it should be said that some of the time, the reason for this is because the wrong questions are being asked, for example, rather than asking where do you find your traffic, the better question would be how do you get your traffic and, more importantly, how do you market to that traffic once you have it.

A single question with no qualifying sub question really is worthless in todays marketplace, only by asking the right sort of questions will you (and they) actually be given the right answers, it would be so easy for me to just reel off a list of TGPs, link lists or search engines for where i get my traffic but, unless you know the mechanisms behind HOW i get the traffic, that list is in effect useless.

Just my $0.02

Regards,

Lee