One of the great things about Twitter is that if you follow the right people you can have a laugh pretty regularly through the day. One of the people I follow is Graham Linehan (one of the Father Ted writers and sole writer for the IT Crowd). It’s thanks to him that I came across this wonderful website – Awkward Family Pet Photos (sister site of the equally wonderful Awkwardfamilyphotos). Oh boy, is it fab!

It’s full of brilliantly awful family photos with their pets. This is one of my personal favourites – an Easter card with a very unhappy-looking cat in the middle.

But looking through these fab photos got me thinking about the site itself, who set it up and how easy it must be to run. I’ve seen other sites like this – just a simple idea, maybe based around daft photos or silly sayings or just videos of pets doing crazy things – and many of them after while get huge amounts of traffic.

It just shows that if you can come up with a simple but attractive idea, you can make it work for you for very little money. You can even set it up as a blog to start off with or use one of the many free web-design packages you can get on the net.

You can start off with Google Adwords on your site but once you start getting traffic you could get relevant ads (I notice that Awkwardfamilypetphotos.com has pet food ads on it) and even sell thing off the site. At Awkwardfamilypetphotos you can buy their book (clever eh? Such a popular site they got a book deal out of it) and also mugs with some of the funniest photos on it.

Not only that, but if you’re really clever like this lot you can get your visitors to do your work for you. On this site they have a submit button so that anyone around the world can submit their silly family pet photos. All the owners of the site have to do is pick the best and upload them – job done!

Moving on from there you could set up a regular newsletter (through Aweber, for example, which is the one we use) and then expand your offerings to, say, video as well as photos. Once you have the name and the traffic you can expand into all sorts of things.

To start with, though, it’s the simple, easy, cheap ideas that tend to work. So if you’re looking for a web business that you could run from home in your spare time – perhaps around the kids – think simple, think easy and think about what makes you laugh or cry. If something moves you to laughter or to tears it’s likely to do the same for others and once you’ve done that, you’ve got them hooked!