Business And Entrepreneurship
The internet has opened up countless opportunities for people to make more money. Chances are that’s why and how you’ve ended up on this site.
However, it’s a snakes-and-ladders game. A lot of people will sell you a dream and tell you it’s easy to become a millionaire online, never work again and drive around with unlimited freedom in your unlimited Lamborghini for the low, low price of $297 for a video course that tells you nothing.
Wary of appearing like a hustler, I’d prefer to give you the honest truth and a possible blueprint with a lot of optional side-quests for making the most of the business opportunities available to you online, regardless of your overall career or business goals.
In fact… let’s start with that and address an elephant in the room.
Your Career
I’ve written elsewhere that the notion of a “career” is old-reality thinking. The idea you’ll have one employer, work your way up a pre-defined career ladder and cash out at 65 with a gold watch and a handshake from the director of the company is outdated.
You’re probably going to leapfrog across companies, wear various hats in your career, and have to make good financial decisions to come out victorious at the end.
That’s true whether you decide to be a businessperson running your own company or to work in more traditional employment for other people. Or both.
A lot of people who teach and preach online business will give you ultimatums and tell you to burn your bridges and that there’s a big difference between the entrepreneurial go-getters like you and the sheeply employees who make the world go round.
While that stokes your drive for individuality, it’s not the wisest choice. You have many opportunities available to you and you can always do more than one.
Choose your work like you choose your hobbies. If you gain a skill from employment, then take it. If you gain networking opportunities from a particular work placement, do that. On the other hand, if you figure that your skillset means you can charge for work done outside employment, then do that instead. Or if you can sell something online for spare change, (or more,) then weigh it up and do that.
Optionality is key and there’s never been more space for new forms of income generation, be they through employment or otherwise. Don’t turn your nose up at anything.
Here’s a blueprint that I’ve followed over the years that seems to have worked so far.
Learn A Skill
If you want the quickest “in” to online business with the lowest overhead, then learning a skill is by far your best bet. For me, it was content writing and later direct response copywriting.
Ideally, you want to pick a skill that allows you to learn – whilst getting paid – how online business works. In addition to that, any skill where you have a tangible result on the effectiveness of a business is brilliant as it means your marketing is easier but also your pay ceiling is higher.
To contrast two typical freelance ideas: creating logos and web design.
Web design – say, building plugins or setting up an email list – is better in terms of the above because you ultimately have a direct effect on the businesses you’re hiring. They can see that by using your services they’ll have a cost of X and a return of Y. With logo creation and graphic design, it’s far harder to show that; and don’t get me wrong, branding is important, logos are important and everything adds up. But as a freelancer, you want to be able to say, “Hire me because it’ll be more profitable to you than if you don’t.”
Still, any skill that you can charge for is useful, and the goal isn’t necessarily to make a huge amount of money. (Although, obviously you can.) We’re thinking in terms of our career holistically, and learning something like how to write effective copy can help you land jobs outside of copywriting and outside of online business.
It can also help you build your own businesses.
Build A Business
It’s incredibly difficult to summarise in a paragraph or two why and how you should build an online business.
Realistically, the logistics are pretty simple. You create a product or service, you put it on the relevant websites, and you market those products and people who want the product will buy. You rinse, repeat and grow this until it’s profitable.
This can take the form of pretty much anything under the sun and a bunch of ungodly things that you hope never see the light of day as well. Suffice to say, there are people making more money than you or I will selling the weirdest, most niche of items and services, and for those people and their customers, that’s fantastic.
I recommend everyone build some form of online business for the following reasons:
- It’s extra money from a different source to whatever you have going now
- You can pretty much run an online business from anywhere at any time
- The economy is only moving in one direction and that’s more support for small internet businesses
- It’s additive – you gain a bunch of skills by doing so that add to you as a person and as a holistic career thing, (should you choose to have one)
- You’ll realistically only get mega-rich if you start a business; and it costs virtually nothing to try
- Realistically we tie a lot of our identities into our work. Why not tie your identity into something you want to do?
- You can put any extra non-necessary income into various investments (even if it’s money in the bank)
- If all your money is necessary, then the more the better
These are all in addition to the fact you might get rich doing whatever it is you love, drinking champagne and eating steak nightly on a tropical beach with a harem of attractive people surrounding you.
I’m trying to make this as down-to-earth and realistic for the majority as possible, and life isn’t really a dichotomy of “Get rich or die trying.”
Let’s move on.
Leveraging The Internet For A Traditional Career
You can make opportunities without building an online business or freelancing at all. The internet gives you unparalleled access to basically everyone on the planet. You can learn whatever you want, get better prices on all sorts of things, get an education at a cut-rate and generally make yourself more valuable by leveraging the fact that everything is a click away.
Whilst networking online is running a gauntlet of hustlers and desperate recruitment agents on the one hand, on the other you can seek and find world-leading experts and people with a lifetime of experience in whatever it is you want to learn, and most of those people are just hanging around online the same as you are right now.
Added to that, you can take on projects and – providing you have done the above and learned some skills and maybe built a business; you can absolutely leverage that into displaying competence and aptitude in a range of different areas.
This is incredibly valuable and will put you at a huge advantage, realistically, against anyone who just watches Netflix and plays video games all evening.
I’m not a big fan of the idea of “personal branding” but everyone can build a credible digital footprint and it’ll mostly benefit everyone to have some sort of online presence. After all, you can look at the world and see it’s only going one way.
Learn Auxiliary Skills
The aim of this section is not to give anyone the idea that you have to be a programmer, internet hustler or anything of the sort to succeed in business. In fact, telling everyone to “learn to code” is somewhat asinine and not even true.
Not everyone will be a coder and it doesn’t even matter. Assuming that tech does become a backdrop to everyday life more so than it is now, then that means tech as an infrastructure divide will boom.
But like financial services before it, that doesn’t mean the only way to get rich or lead a fulfilling career is by being a finance guy.
Instead, the infrastructure developments will mean massive growth in pretty much every industry.
That’s why collecting auxiliary skills – whatever they might be – is important.
Learning how to write a little code that makes your job easier benefits you, and you don’t have to be a programmer or know a lot about programming. For a lot of things, there’s probably already a hobbyist who has done what you need to, and they’ve probably done the coding for you.
Writing an email for your customers or network is a useful skill regardless of whether you’re a tech guru or a basket-weaver. Remember; the tech is the infrastructure and you can use it to network, sell and build whatever you want.
Speaking of building…
Build A Digital Asset Portfolio
I’ve avoided “passive income” talk until now. However, the internet is brilliant for building assets that produce a residual income. The term “passive income” is pretty loaded, so we won’t dwell on it. But you can basically do the following:
Build a webpage, email list, or write a book.
You can then sell that product with no, or little, further work on your part. The internet infrastructure does the work.
Ergo, you can do the work once, and continue getting paid for that forever.
These are what I call digital assets, and providing you’ve done all of the above sections, you can create an incredible number of these and cross-sell them to any audience you build. They are the equivalent of buying stocks in a company, but you’ve built the company and nobody else owns it. The end goal is residual income which you can then invest elsewhere or otherwise spend on stupid stuff on Ebay.
The forms that digital assets might take are limitless, and so I won’t cover them in this article. However, I’ll cover it in the various sections on the site, and finish this section by saying that everyone can create some form of digital asset that works in this way.
Final Thoughts
Most of this site is geared up to help people succeed financially using internet business. In addition, I write the Direct Response Newsletter for those who want to keep up with my processes at doing all of the above things.
I’ve tried to keep this “Start Here” article concise while also getting across the idea that the internet provides with a ton of options that you can pick and choose as you see fit, and that you can mould those opportunities to suit your life and career situation and goals.
Over time, I’ll go through all of my other material, clean it up and create comprehensive guides for more specific matters related to online business. These will be available in the Member Vault.