Monday, October 8, 2007

Can I earn a full-time income on the internet?

This must be the most asked question of our times... and the answer is..... I don't know. I haven't achieved that level of success on the internet yet, so I couldn't answer that honestly. What I can tell you is that there are people earning full time incomes with web based businesses right now. In fact, there are web based businesses that pay hundreds and thousands of peoples full time salaries.

Just take a look at Richard Rosenblatt, it's reported that he sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch for upwards of $500 million. Then you got Ashley Qualls and her $70K a month WhateverLife.com, which is a free MySpace layouts website . Just take a look around the web and I'm sure you'll find many other profitable websites as well. There's Facebook, eBay, Squidoo, and a slew of others.

OK, I still want to know: Can I Make Money on the Web?

It depends on a number of different factors, but the key ingredients lie within your plan. You will need to have a plan that outlines exactly how you will go about earning money. Your plan should be highly detailed and should include topics like: How much time you will invest working on your business, how you will spend your time (down to the minute), how you will handle creative differences amongst your team, and how you will go about growing the business financially.

A lot of people want to make money on the web but have no idea where to start. First things first, you have to make a plan. If you start without a plan it's very likely that you wont get far with your internet business. Don't buy into the misconception that you can become a millionaire overnight with no work or effort on your end, as this is simply not true. You should be prepared to write niche-specific articles, and should also take the time to learn about SEO, social networking, and using video-sharing sites to promote your business. That's just to get started, there are so many other things to learn about when it comes to online marketing, but I think what I mentioned above is enough to get you off to a nice start.

What is Your Plan to Earn Money?

You must have some sort of strategic plan for earning money online. Whether it's building heavily visited sites so that you can earn money from advertising, building members only websites with super valuable - high demand information, adult websites, or selling your own product. Whether your products are digital or physical is totally up to you. Online business, just like brick and mortar businesses, require hard work and dedication for them to become successful. So be prepared to work for your money, even if it only is during the start-up phase.

Once you've figured out how you are planning to make money online, you need to plot out the exact techniques that you will use to actually make money. What I mean is... if you are planning on building high traffic sites to earn advertising dollars off of, what will you do to get that traffic over to your sites? Will you upload videos to YouTube every day/week/month? Will you keep a daily blog? In other words you need to set tasks and set a schedule for accomplishing those tasks.

Creative Differences

Something else that I think is super important is to have a formula for dealing with any disagreements or creative differences within your team. You will not be able to predict every single scenario, but preparing for the most likely to arise is a smart move. I believe it's a smart move to have a plan in place at the beginning because it will save you time later on down the line.

For example, you might run into a situation where you and your business partners all have different visions for the new color scheme of your site re-design. If you have, lets say, a voting system in place for situations like this you will be able to resolve the problem rather quickly. As opposed to taking two or three more meetings to finally decide on the new color scheme. Be creative, perhaps you and your team want to sit down and think of all the possible scenarios that might arise and create a resolution plan for them.

Financial Growth

The last thing I want to cover in this post is financial growth. How will you go about growing your company / business financially? You must have a savings plan in effect if you plan on growing your business. I know a couple of people who are in business for themselves, but that do not have savings accounts. They earn money and spend it all, without even putting 5% towards savings. These same people are the ones I hear complaining all the time about bills, late charges, and over-drafts. Just because you can afford to drive an Aston Martin right now, doesn't necessarily mean that you should go out and buy one.

If your company earns $5000 a month, you should not be spending $5000 a month. Out of every job that you finish, you should make it a point to save some money. Imagine if you only saved $2000 a month for the next two years. At the end of those two years your company would be worth just about $50,000. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why religiously saving a portion of your income is a brilliant idea. To make a long story short... invest some time into creating a savings plan, you'll thank yourself later and kick yourself if you don't.


Take Care,

Antonio


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