Years later, with the advent of the World Wide Web, my wife and I would correspond via email during the time when my career called for it. Like many people, we would trade electronic greeting cards between us to mark significant dates missed while apart. This email traffic developed into an idea of a card and calendar service, where reminders would be sent to people with suggested cards or gifts to be delivered. Again, capitalization played a part in dismissing this idea. Several months I noted some of the websites began to offer this service and today, www.americangreetings.com is doing quite well. It was then that I realized timing is also important.

Last year I made a half-hearted stab at on-line retailing, drawing up some graphics and opening a "store" on CafePress.com to sell T-shirts and mugs. I thought the idea was cute: "Feng Shui 2001 - A Space Oddity". It leveraged the growing interest in feng shui as a home decorating method AND was a pun on Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" which was supposed to have taken place at the new millenium. Of course, I didn't make any money; I didn't promote the site, so I don't know if anyone else thought it was a good product. There are so many websites out there, you have to actively promote your site in order to sell products.

This New Year's resolution is to try again. However, money is still a factor. Cosmik Enterprises is a two-year experiment in low-budget money making from the web. The goal is to provide web content in the form of articles on our various interests. These interests range wide: home improvement, landscaping, small business, philosophy, computers, Volkswagons, hunting & fishing, and Ferguson tractors, to name several. The articles will serve as a vehicle to promote various products offered by us at sites like www.cafepress.com or other storefronts. Or through the use of affiliate programs, we may earn money through products and services bought from other vendors. Part personal homepage, part small business site. You may think it amateurish and depart, never to return, but I hope you appreciate the honesty in this attempt. In the least, we hope the reader will at least find something of use in the articles.

Since this is an experiment, we will provide findings on success or failure. On the Summary Report page, we will track time and money invested against earnings. Readers will be able to discover whether we make a decent hourly wage and return on investment (ROI). I doubt that I will give up my day job, but some part time income would be nice. It may help you decide to take a similar step into an attempt to make money off the Web.

While I'm starting small with only a few articles, the site will evolve over the course of the experiment. Both in content and in layout, as we add more articles and I learn better HTML coding skills. If you don't find something you need now, check back later in a few weeks. If you have a topic in which you're interested, feel free to send us an email. It might already be on our tentative schedule for inclusion.

Thanks for visiting.