Hey Joe | Page 6 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

For those who wondered, here’s a report for the last week showing US Amazon orders. As I said, it’s completely anonymous, but it does tell me that someone clicked on an ad for Imagine and bought it (that’s the 100% conversion into a sale). 100 other people clicked on ads but didn’t buy that product, but collectively they bought nine other items.

As you’ll see, there have been some cat-related purchases, but I have no idea if this is all @parlance or several people. To repeat, this is all anonymous unless you tell me you’ve ordered something. And I tend not to check it often anyway – like with stats tracking, I don’t tend to pay much attention beyond noting whether I had a good week/month or not.

Thanks to all who do use the links when buying things from Amazon. It adds nothing to your costs but does help this site (OK, me) out a little each month. Who knows, one day I might even be able to do a grand US tour with the proceeds, but for now it mainly goes towards server costs.

Thanks for @mentioning me, @Starr Shine?. I missed all of the messages about the history of the site, but others seem to have it covered well (Ron N’s assessment was spot on).

To recap, yes the site started early 2008, the forum a few weeks later. Yes I was miserable and wanted to escape my job, and spent a couple of weeks thinking of ideas for raising millions (lol). It was really nice to just sit down with pencil and paper and spend time thinking of creative ideas about what I wanted to do with my life – it’s not something I do very often but it’s good for the soul. I’ve worked on web projects since the dawn of the millennium and have a background in journalism, so it made sense to do something similar, but it took a while longer to realise that I had bucketloads of Beatles information to share. Sometimes the obvious solution is staring you in the face.

Someone I once worked with used to run loads of little niche sites on vintage guitars, caravans, ringtones etc. He used to just look for ideas and bash out quick sites. I don’t really like those, because they clutter up the web and offer little substance, but it made him a decent amount of cash (he quit his job to do affiliate marketing full time). He told me forums were a great way to make your site grow without much direct input. So that was part of the plan, although writing good articles was always primary.

The idea was to set something up then eventually retire on passive income. It didn’t really work like that, partly because I’m crap at self-promotion, but also because advertisers don’t really bid high for website space on music-related keywords. I’d have made far more if I’d written about mortgages or cancer fundraising, but you live and learn. I’d always rather write about something I was passionate about that something deathly dull, even if it made more money.

I’d also have done better if I’d set up a range of smaller sites, but this grew far larger than I’d anticipated. Originally it was just going to be Beatles Diary/Day-By-Day (all the best .com domain names were taken), but then I realised if I was writing about sessions I should also write about the songs they recorded. And then every mention of a person should be linked somewhere. So it mushroomed very quickly. Even now there are some holding pages where I haven’t got round to writing the articles (eg some All Things Must Pass song pages).

I didn’t give up the day job, but I am happier now. I worked really hard on the site for about 3.5 years, easing up when my son was born (2011), and easing off a lot more when my daughter came along (2013). I’m also working on a book which I’m hoping to be for sale before I’m 40 (April 2016); more details to follow at some point.

Prior to this, I’d run a few sites but not since 2002-ish. I’d mostly hand-coded them back then and assumed I’d do the same for the BB, but a kindly developer at work said “Why don’t you just use WordPress?” That night I set it up on localhost, started writing, and didn’t look back. I never tried out other CMSs because WP has a good developer base.

I looked at a few different forum providers, and I think I originally tried setting up something using vBulletin or phpBB, but in the end I chose Simple:Press because it integrates right into the site rather than being in a sub-domain or on someone else’s server. I sort of have a love/hate relationship with SP, but it’s probably too late to switch now and not lose functionality or sanity.

Let’s deal with the domain name while we’re here. As I mentioned, there’s a real lack of good Beatles domain names left nowadays. Many are registered by Apple Corps or the guy who runs their web ops. I spent a week or two mulling over a longlist before settling on the Beatles Bible – partly for alliterative reasons, but also because of the “not quite as popular as Jesus” tagline. But mainly because it was available and memorable. I’m not remotely religious.