1. Starting from Your First (or None) Income

Where do you come from?

When you start in online business, most probably you come from three kinds of environments:

You are working on an offline business of your own
You are working as an employee for anyone else or
You are unemployed.

At some point in your life, you search or find or are faced to – for relative or friend- information about Internet marketing, online business, affiliate marketing, email marketing, etc. Such information makes you think about some opportunities to earn money as second income.

Why do you want to change?

Why is the reason that leads you to look towards another direction from the road, which you know previously?

There could be the following grounds:

You are unemployed – for any reason – so you are not earning money at all
You are employed, but you are not making enough money to satisfy your needs and desires
Independently of the amount of income you are earning right now, you want to have more free time to spend with you or with your family and friends
You want to get rid of your boss and develop your projects

Certainly, there could be much more reasons. However, those cited above are the most common ones.

Where do you want to go?

It’s important to note that the primary reason for looking for a second income is to optimize your work either by using less time for the same amount of money or increasing the sum of money you earn during a particular period.

Keeping the focus on this primary reason make us not to lose direction because when searching for improving our lives through more money, suddenly could appear on the horizon several false shiny things.

Yes, you can play the lottery, or bet on any game out there but you probably are going to lose that money. You can suddenly become a salesperson, but the options are that you are going to spend a lot of time before you can master such job. In contrast, you can invest your time in some very profitable activities such as being a doctor, lawyer, business person but guess what? First, you have to use a lot of time to get there, and probably you’ll need a good amount of financial resources in such training. The chances are that you are already there! Earning splendid money but instead, you don’t have enough time.

Whatever it is your actual situation, the idea is that you need:

A serious, legal and consistent source of income for long term
Easy training
Minimum starting investment or not at all
Flexible enough for being adapted to your time needs

Why Online Business (Internet Marketing)?

What is Online Business (Internet Marketing)? This is a personal explanation and not intended to give technical terminology. Personally, I understand the concept of Online Business as an activity to promote products or services using online resources.

In this respect, Online Business is not different from another real business; that means someone offers a product or service, and someone buys it. It’s as simple as that. The interesting thing about Online Business or Internet Marketing, are the methods used both to sell and to buy, the methods employed to advertise and become visible to a potential buyer but above all that those potential customers are almost everybody in the whole world!

Today the world is digital. If you have some doubt about it, look around at your family, coworkers, neighbors, and the people you share with the spaces on the street, coffee shops, transportation, etc. What are they doing right now? The chances are that looking at the screen of a mobile, tablet or laptop! Am I right? What are you doing right now? More or less the same!!!

As beautiful or disgusting as it could be for any of us, it is a reality. We can complain from it, or we can adapt to it, that’s a personal decision but as long as people depends on more and more on digital technology, the attention, needs, desires, thoughts, decisions but mainly money flows gradually through such technology.

Now if someone wants to read a book, buy food, hear music, transfer money, play games, travel, learn, ask for a taxi, know the weather, read about the favorite sports team, etc., chances are is going to use an app on the mobile or the laptop.

Almost every word on the planet in any language you can think of is ranked within some search engine like Google and linked to a bunch of related websites. What does it mean? Likely that what you do as your primary activity to earn money or if you are not earning money right now any ability, skill, or project you have and can imagine as a way of living, is making money right now from some online source.

Three Big Ghosts: Sales, scams, and technical expertise

Three ghosts are still floating over the world of Online Business.

The first ghost is “Sales”

If you are like me, the first impression I get when I hear the word sales is someone talking fast, loud and trying to sell you anything regardless if you want it or not. I hate the idea of being a marketer as long as it relates to people selling any stuff on the street or in a store. My rejection is not because being a marketer is a bad thing but instead, because I’m not inclined due my personality to do an activity like that, however, what if I tell you that anyone of us is somehow a marketer or a seller.

If you are a doctor you “sell” your knowledge of medicine, and your ability to heal to your patients. They are “buying” such knowledge besides your education, reputation, and results along the time. In such sense, you are competing with other colleagues in the same “market”.

If you are a scientist, and you work in the field of physics, neuroscience, molecular biology, etc., you “sell” your knowledge as well as the discoveries you do through specialized journals, patents, conferences, scientific meetings, etc. In this way, the people who read your papers, or attend your talks become your “clients” and consume what you has to offer as long as they are highly interested in the same information.

If you are a homemaker, for sure you know more than enough of a wide variety of things from cooking, cleaning, administering, organizing, caring, repairing, etc. So “your clients” are those people very close to you who benefits from your skills, knowledge, and love, however, have you tried to share such knowledge with other people? Do you think they could be interested in what you have to say as long as such information would improve their homes in some way? I bet they would do.

If you are a parent, any worker or employee, a student, an artist, whoever you are, you have a particular knowledge about something on which you are an expert and can solve a problem for someone else. It doesn’t have to be a product to sell but any information you can share. The root tricks of a specific software, hidden and nice places to know about, a useful method and how to apply it step by step, a complicated and well-explained technique complemented with recommendations of the best tools and how to use them, tips on how to improve anything, etc.

As you can see Online Business is not just about “selling products” but instead it is about sharing information and earn profits (a few or a lot, it will depend on many factors) on it.

The second ghost is “Scam”

The whole concept of “Make Money Online” was something similar to what happened with the California Gold Rush back in 1848-1849. Just as the news of the gold gathered “forty-niners” from many parts of the USA and the world, the news about the easiness of free advertisement, traffic and sales online drew the attention of many people who saw the opportunity to sell “virtual gold” to others.

Twenty years ago now, individuals who started in Online Business focused not in offer products or services to others but in providing the “opportunity” to get rich through buying “miraculous” programs to find the very secrets of earning money overnight. Probably some of these schemes were well intentioned and maybe some of them worked for many people, however as well as lottery, more were the non-fulfilled promises than successful stories.

However, in the meantime people promoting such miracles used all the tools available at the time, legal or not, to increase the visibility of their offers.

Those times are gone!

Search engines, specifically Google was aware of many of the scams, abuses, and nonethical tactics to advertise, and sell online. They changed their search algorithms, then increased the stringency of the criteria used to rank some site privileging above all the content, which had been a secondary feature to take into account.

Now, the scams are still there, and people who are trying to catch the attention of others with “shiny objects” still use nonethical means to do so. However the present amount and quality of information have improved to levels incredible professional in a broad spectrum of areas giving anyone the opportunity to build a serious business online not limited just to “make money online” field but to any human field of knowledge than any individual can honestly develop to profit from it.

The secret here is to find carefully, compare, test and decide which of the various proven, successful and ethical systems out there is better to you.

The third ghost is “Technical expertise”

To many people the only idea of “building a website” is terrifying. Thinking of learning about blogs, social media, links, HTML, uploading images, etc., could be a very challenging task, especially if the people in question are not accustomed to using some computers or mobile devices.

If that is your case you must understand that obviously there is a learning curve when starting in Online Business, however, is not about technical issues at all because they are entirely straightforward as long as you can read simple instructions and click some virtual buttons.

Even if you got to do some activities involving the use of codes in HTML, the procedure guided step by step could take no more than a simple “copy-paste” action from one virtual box to other.

The best advice I can give you if you are afraid of the ghost of “Technical Expertise” is that just let it go. Ask for anyone around you and can assure you there will be a plenty of people using laptops, tablets or mobile devices willing to help you and to teach you if you require.

Continue to 2. Thinking in something realistic or go to our Wealthy Affiliate Review to learn everything about Online Business.