Position yourself before getting into any kind of online business plan.
Today, you hear someone’s saying that “hey, my friend is sooo cool! He just sits at home and all he does is just withdraw money online!”. Yes, that can be true, I assure you. But let me tell you the story, before that Mr. Who can sit comfortably at home and wait for his money goes to him.
As a starter, you started ambitiously, saying to yourself “I want to make money online!!”. But how? put on a website and receive payments from others around the world? A big NO to you. First of all things, you must ask yourself, “What can I do?”. Most people stop at here, they do not know what can they do online.
Let me try to categorize all the online “money-makers” I’ve known so far.(within individual ability)
1)Technical and Creative Solution Providers
These people have certain level of skills in programming, web server setup/maintenance, website development/maintenance, website design, graphic design, product design, photo shooting and many more. They charge for their services, or sell their own designed products. (E.g, Webhosting, Programs, Images, Website Templates)
2)Content Providers
These people have decent language skills, they can write articles, reviews, stories, and e-books to post on their own websites, or sell to others.(E.g, Journalists, Columnists, Photographers, Authors)
3)Online Auctioners
These people have very sensitive touch of trends. They can always get valuable, lower than market price and easy to deliver items to be auctioned on major sites like ebay and amazon.
4)Online Marketers
These people do not own any product, they sell other online merchants’ products and earn commissions from the transactions. Normally they advertise various products on their websites, and persuade their visitors to buy, with any mean.
5)Smart Surfers
These people participate in various advertising programs. Mostly pay-to-surf programs, they login to the websites of online advertising firm, and then run the special written web program to display advertisements. The amount of income is depending on the time they run the web program, or the volume of advertisement they’ve viewed.
Categories above are what I’ve experienced so far with the activities on Internet. My intention here is to provide you a starting point if you are really interested in making money online. Please bear in mind that online business has no difference with any other business you see in real life, hard work and smart brain ensures the success.
I’m quite concerned about the growing trend of online business training programs found within the country. Yes, indeed all the speakers in the seminars can speak well about the online business they are doing, they can travel whole world to share their success stories.But whenever I read or listen to some classic marketing jargons like “It’s as easy as abc, 123″, “5 easy steps to your online gold mine” and bla bla, I’ve started to doubt that am I a targeted customer to them.
These online business training programs or seminars, always come with products of their own, sometimes CDs, books, audio tapes and many others. So before you can actually EARN money, you already SPENT on those products, and sometimes those can be costly. I’m not saying that those are scams, instead many information from them are very accurate and useful. The only thing is, if you are going to start earning money online, it is the Internet you are going to deal with. There’s no spoon-feeding of any kind, you have to search for what you need.
So, as I said, position yourself on what you can do best, start collecting relevant information, be ready for the learning curve you are going to face. And most of all, stop hoping that someday, someone will bring you a big fortune. Everyone is on their own.
