Hello and thanks for visiting SideGains.
My name is Paul Franklin and this is what I’d look like if I lived in Westeros:
I’m not sure how you’ve found SideGains, but hopefully you’ve found it online rather than by having met me. If you’ve met me and I’ve told you about it, I hope I haven’t bored you to death about it in person.
So why do I hope you have found SideGains while browsing or searching online?
Well… the answer is quite simple.
SideGains is pretty much a place to write about my experiences of helping websites to be visible online. Effectively this means helping them to get more traffic.
For most of my working life I have helped businesses to use techniques to increase visitor traffic to their websites.
Sometimes I have done this as an employee. But since 2015 I have done this through my web development & online marketing consultancy business, OK 200.
Why OK 200 and SideGains & What’s the Relevance of OK 200?
For those who don’t know, when you try to visit a web page, your browser requests access to it from a server. As a result, the server issues an HTTP response back to your browser. This response includes a special numeric code.
There are many HTTP response codes, but they generally fall into five categories:
- Informational
- Successful
- Redirection
- Client Error
- Server Error
The 200 OK status code falls in the successful category, meaning that the request to access the page has succeeded.
In layman’s terms, this equates to clicking on a link anywhere online and being delivered a page that loads successfully.
This is what the OK 200 concept is based upon. I ensure that web sites and pages are found successfully by people using the web.
Of course I can’t guarantee that a specific page will load successfully in a browser. You might then say that the concept is a little bit of a stretch. Nonetheless I feel it works as something resembling an analogy.
A further inspiration for the OK 200 name was the 1997 album OK Computer by Radiohead. I played this to death around the time I first started building websites. So OK 200 is a nod of respect to that album and that period of time in my life.
What is the Purpose of SideGains?
There are many reasons why I’ve set up SideGains. Principally these are to:
- Share my knowledge and experience of building websites (20+ years) and promoting them online (15+ years).
- Review successes and failures of side projects and experiments I work upon through my consultancy business, OK 200. I do this to further my own learning and to provide a resource for people who might be interested.
- Share my own personal efforts to make money online through websites I personally own.
Presently the OK 200 consultancy is my primary source of income. However my ultimate aim is to build my own websites (as side projects initially) that support me independently.
I will discuss all of these projects openly here.
… and the First Side Project?
My first side project is this website itself. I want to see how successfully I can grow SideGains with an idea inspired a movie. Actually it’s inspired by an often misquoted line from a movie. That movie is Field of Dreams.
(The actual quote is “If you build it, he will come”… but let’s not worry about that now!)
Something about this misquote has always stayed with me.
Perhaps it’s partly because I was so charmed by the movie when I first saw it. More likely though it has to do with it feeling like a fitting metaphor for the Law of Attraction.
The basic concept of the Law of Attraction is you can make things happen purely by willing them.
You can read more about my thoughts on this subject here: If You Build It, They Will Come.
Do I Believe in the Law of Attraction?
Now I don’t fully subscribe to the idea that you can will something to happen. However, the idea you can increase the chances of a desired outcome through your positivity and energy has to be true.
This is why the misquote means something to me in the context of the SideGains project. If I build it, I increase the likelihood that people will come… however small that likelihood may be.
And that’s better than nothing.
It’s obvious really but I often have to remind myself that to achieve anything, you have to DO something.
Over time and with a real desire to make it useful, I hope people come to SideGains because I’ve built it. But more importantly, I hope people come because it IS useful.
That would mean that you would have to find SideGains successfully (200 OK). That will require some effort from me of course.
Whether or not this works will be proven one way or another over time.
Well… that’s enough about this project for now. If you’re interested you can find out more about me and my journey here: What Happened and How The Heck Did I Get Here?
I hope you find something useful at SideGains… and once again thanks for dropping by.
Bye for now.
Paul