I met Ercole Marsili of Italiamia.com through the social networking site Stumbleupon.  I think his site encompasses a lot of useful information about all things Italian such as travel, books, movies, music and current news.

1  What is the aim of your business?

To provide information on culture and products from Italy to people living outside Italy, for instance, USA, Canada, Australia and South America and to earn commissions from sales generated from the website.

2  What prompted you to start your own business?

When I started the website there were no websites about Italy and its culture here in U.S. and so I decided to start collecting links that might be helpful to the visitors wanting to know more about Italy. Later, the website has become one of the main sources of income since I lost my regular job.

3 What has been the hardest aspect of having your own business?

As we many home businesses, the hardest part is taking care of all the aspects, not only maintenance of the pages but also dealing with various legal issues of running your own business, answering emails, finding good reliable sources of products and services. It takes many hours a week to keep up with the latest news and stories, far more than 40 in a regular job.

4  What is the funniest thing that has happened to you running your own business?

More than funny, it is the satisfaction of seeing your website getting higher in search engine results and being mentioned in other important websites.

5  Is there anything you would do differently with the benefit of hindsight?

Oh Yes! First of all, having a collection of links is not at all important anymore, with the proliferation of portals and search engines doing that, but having instead many pages with original content is definitely the way to go. Also, regarding the links, I never created a database for it, it’s always been a manual job which, in the end is not very efficient at sorting out all the info about the links, but I am planning to do that along with switching the entire design to new web standards, such as CSS, and all the new Web 2 technologies. But, being a 1-man project, I foresee that it might take a while to do it all.

I created other commercial websites that are doing well. If you do a search on Google for Italian books, Italianbookstore.com is N. 1. Other pages that rank well on Google are: italianposters.net, italiabest.com, italymagazines.com. The above websites are just a spin-off of Italia Mia and they do not take to much of my time except for Italianbookstore.com.

My comments – I think it’s really important working in a business, especially one which is of great personal interest to you, to focus on the fact that you need to make money from it, as Ercole highlighted in question 1 about the aims of this business. I’m sure all self employed home workers average a lot more the standard 40 hour working week and I’m not sure we can ever be jacks of all trades.