Feel Reality

Making Money Online Isn’t Easy

Friday, June 13, 2008

First off, let me state that I still catch myself running from one buzz to the next trying to squeeze a profit out of the latest trend.  I don’t consume myself with this and I often give it a half assed effort, but I figure most things are worth a try.  I’m not telling you that you should abandon hope or give up on your quest to internet riches; I’m simply telling you the road will be harder than you initially anticipated.  Everyone wants to sell you on the idea that you can make money fast on the internet and that for a small initial investment you can turn huge profits. I will spare you the research and tell you that most of these clowns haven’t made a dime themselves, and the cash they do mint, comes from suckers looking for a quick fix. It’s like the old school classified ad trick, “Learn how to make money placing classified ads, send $10 to...” There are people out there doing it right and they are converting but it takes time, effort and (yikes) money to make it work. 

I guess you could say I took a fast track approach to making money online myself. I didn’t have a degree in Computer Science or Business before I started churning out websites. I learned HTML early on (circa 1993) and used that knowledge to give myself a voice.  It was a hobby for a long time before it became a profitable hobby.There are a lot of code monkeys writing HTML and spamming the interwebs with content, but 99.9% of all that content is useless. It literally took me a decade to determine that I wanted to pursue a career in this field.

I am not saying it will take you ten years to build your base and get started. In fact, I never really took it seriously, or invested much time until about five years ago… Consider the time line; we experienced a highly publicized boom and bust period where it always seemed too late or too risky to jump in. For a while the future looked dismal and the resiliency of the internet was questionable.

Over the past 5 years I have read countless marketing, online marketing, web development and coding books.  I have two book cases full of them. Sure, I read fiction now and then to calm the buzz, but in the interim I burned through more than the average college student’s tuition in web and business related nonfiction. I took classes to learn as I went along, I got the certifications that I thought were necessary, and I put the blood, sweat and tears into creating a portfolio of sites that were built upon the principles that I was establishing.  You will never have all of the information that you wished you had before you jump in, you have to have a good starting point and then learn as you go.

The bottom line is that it will take hard work to be successful online. In fact, the online world is so highly competitive that it will probably take more effort to churn a profit or make a living in this space then it does IRL (in real life). You have to learn how to differentiate whats real from what’s fake and investigate your sources. For everyone mentor there are a hundred cheap suit wearing, smiley faced ripoffs trying to extract cash from your pocket.  Some of those richie rich types do fake it until they make it, but you’re not going to learn anything from their e-book. 

If you want to make money online you need to build a strategy with a strong foundation, just as you do in any other venture. Again, the strategy doesn’t have to be fool proof, throw it out there and let people shoot holes.  Give it a shot and learn from your mistakes. There are always going to be one hit wonders and having one isn’t a bad place to start. Just don’t spend all your time looking for them.  Invest the time effort and money into building a solid foundation and you should succeed.

And for the record… I did eventually parlay those classes into a degree. I do believe your paper trail establishes credibility, but I haven’t forgotten that the ultimate paper trail in business is green. 

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