John Myers Hargrave of Zug.com overcomes his initial response to young comedians of 'I don't need any more competition, go do something else', to share some of the things he has learned in seven years of doing comedy on the web.

Develop a gimmick
Some of the funniest comedy sites are essentially simple, one-joke ideas, such as I'm not insane, The Official Ninja Homepage and Furniture Pornography. Focus your idea.

Get a funny domain name
Doodie.com www.doodie.com features a daily cartoon animation about, well, doodie. When you want a quick laugh, it's an easy name to remember, especially if, like me, you have the maturity of a third-grader. If you can't think up a funny domain name that hasn't been taken, go with something funny-sounding, like swoozyswizzle.com or fartymcstinko.com, both of which are still available as of this writing. (A .com domain name costs £49.00 per year.)

Update regularly
Very often I see funny people start up a website, update it for two weeks in a frenzy of creativity, then lose interest once the romance wears off (and it does). Jerry Seinfeld once said that the only secret to becoming a successful comedian is 'tenacity', and nowhere is this more true than the web. Repeat after me: 'The only way to build an audience on the web is through persistence'. Give people a reason to come back every day, and they will, guaranteed.

Develop a thick skin
On the web, feedback is anonymous. That means that people will be brutally honest about whether your material is funny or not. The thing to remember is that a negative reaction is much better than no reaction at all. The reaction one should fear most is not criticism, but apathy. Humour is terribly subjective, and what makes one person yuk makes another upchuck. And humour is also very difficult – as Chris Rock pointed out, even the great comedians are only funny about half the time. Take criticism in your stride.

Be funny
While I believe that some of us are funnier than others, I also believe that developing comedy is more of a learned skill than a natural gift. You get funnier by doing it, not because you were anointed by Herbie, the ancient Roman god of comedy (who often disguised himself as a rubber chicken in order to impregnate chaste young maidens). By practising the craft of comedy, you learn little tricks, like the fact that jokes about rubber chickens are rarely funny, unless they involve impregnation.

Be passionate
Do it for love, not money, and you will eventually be repaid. For example, some of our more dedicated fans spontaneously decided to pay for all the hosting and bandwidth charges for our website this year. At a time when the common belief is that people are not willing to pay for content on the web, the readers of Zug.com proved that completely wrong. The only way I can explain this is that we have passionately slaved over the website for years without earning a dime – paying for it out of our own pockets, in fact – and our readers want that to continue.

In the early days, we did comedy on the web because we loved it. When the Internet boom came along, the field became crowded with people doing it because they wanted to get rich. Now that they're gone, we're seeing a welcome return to people doing it because they love it. Personally, I think the web is still full of comedy potential. The laughs have only just begun.