How The Internet is Evolving your Career Options
The internet is a revolutionary invention, enabling us to work in virtual offices from home. So why are most people still working the old fashioned way?
June 9th, 2010 by Pete Casale
Time for Change? |
For millennia, humans have followed the same daily work routine.
We leave
home in the morning in search of a means of getting food and shelter - and maybe bartering power. We've practiced what we do best so we can trade our product or service with other humans who live nearby.
Can you think of a time in human history when this routine wasn't the way of life? Even early humans followed this same pattern. It's so ingrained in our DNA and in our society, that we never question it - even when new technology presents us with a clear alternative.
Trading with Other Humans
Obviously we still have to trade something with other humans - because humans are the ones with the money. But with the exponential growth of technology, there are now compelling new career options staring us straight in the face.
Assuming you live in a city, you probably have enough potential customers within range of your home to start up a business. If you can appeal to just 1,000 customers (out of the million-or-so people in the city), you can probably make a living from that. But why limit yourself?
If 1,000 out of 1,000,000 people buy your product, that's just 0.1% of the local population. (If you're at all familiar with conversion rates, you'll know that is a very modest - and very achievable - sales rate.) But if you were to take advantage of the simple technology on your computer and translate your product into an online business, you can target all of the 1.8 billion internet users who may as well live next door.
Now you have 1.8 million potential customers. That's 1,800x the potential income than you have working in the offline world.
How Many Ways to Make Money Online Are There?
Imagine you're locked in a house with just the internet for company for 10 years. What would you do? Surely most of us would watch a hell of a lot of YouTube. But the question is - could you still make an income?
Of course you could.
There are myriad ways to make money on the internet. In the physical world, most of the traditional ways to make money have already been discovered. But in the virtual world of the internet, everything is new and 99% of people have not yet started to take advantage of this.
If you were chained to your
computer, would you still be
able to generate income? |
Logically, there must be thousands of ways to make money on the internet that nobody has even thought of yet.
Remember when Yahoo was the biggest search engine? People thought "That's it, Yahoo is King. There is no room for anyone else." Then Google came and blew Yahoo out the water.
Once, MySpace was unstoppable. Nobody could compete with that. Then along came Facebook. Then Twitter. They offered very subtle twists of the same basic model and overtook a tired predecessor. If you're reading this article several years from now, you might be thinking "Facebook? That is so old school. Now everyone uses X because it does X way better."
This trend will go on and on. I have no idea when we will reach a peak but it would be naive to say we're anywhere near it at the moment. Back in the 19th century, most scientists agreed that everything that could possibly be invented - had been invented. There was nothing new to learn. Foolish, right? And yet here we are in our early development of the internet and social media and complex virtual worlds. We have only just scratched the surface. So it would be ridiculous to say that there are no new ways to make money from the internet. We just have to identify them...
Dropping The 9-5 Mentality
Before you can even consider making serious money from the internet, you must adjust your core beliefs about income generation.
Working 9-5 in an office is the way of the past. Becky and I generally start work whenever we happen to wake up. We work until we feel like a break, then we take the dogs for a walk and return to work in the afternoon. Sometimes we'll take the afternoon off, and do some work in the evening instead. As long as we achieve our goals, what's the problem? We do not "clock in" like Big Brother is watching. We do not even have to work every day to get paid. Earning a living is no longer about doing the 9-5. For us, it's about creating things we enjoy - and that's all.
What if you're still trading your time for money? How does the internet help then? I am in this boat as well. One of my businesses is a web design company, in which I trade my time and creative efforts for fixed fees. This is not a form of passive income - but it is an enjoyable self-employed role. A lot of my clients are overseas, in America or the UK. It doesn't matter to them one bit what hours I choose to work. Most of my clients have no idea what I look like, and some have never even heard my voice. I don't have to go to a corporate office or even visit them in person to win a contract. They are very happy (I say with much modesty) with the quality of my work, which is delivered on time. And that is all that matters to them.
If you still think your only job option is to work your way up the corporate career ladder... you are most definitely living in the past.
How We Make Money Online
Becky and I have spent the past three years using the internet to make money online and generate 100% of our income. In fact, there is no facet of our income that does not rely on the internet.
Before we "retired" from the 9-5 office job, I was a graphic / web designer and Becky was an investment analyst and writer. When the internet evolved to become mainstream, our career options evolved with it.
Who is to say your current job hasn't evolved as well? It may be entirely possible that there are ways to make money online by doing exactly what you do now. It may be through freelancing, online consulting, or contracting over the internet. You could even quit your job and become an online psychic (unless you have a moral problem with deluding people).
One of our most passive income sources is simply writing about things we find interesting. We run a number of websites that offer considerable of free content and make money online through affiliate product sales. For instance, I write about Neuro-Linguistic Programming; Becky writes about Lucid Dreaming and Shelties. Career Evolution is another example of this.
Becky also used to wear glasses for nearsightedness, and just by doing some daily eye exercises she dramatically improved her eyesight naturally. So that year, she made a website that teaches people all about Eye Exercises so they can ditch their glasses too.
You don't have to be the world's leading expert on a subject to write well about it. As long as a subject interests you and you can share your own personal experiences, people are keen to hear about it.
That's why we will keep pursuing the niche website model. Anyone can turn something they're passionate about into a passive income source on the internet. If you have no idea to build a website, that's fine. Becky started out using Site Build It to create her websites and that took all of the technical aspects out of the picture. It is a very useful tool for people who don't have the inclination to master HTML and website design to succeed.
Between the two of us, we have replicated the passive income model taught by Site Build It over and over. It is a very smart way to make money online and will pay you many times over for your efforts.
More Ways to Make Money Online
I've already mentioned that there are countless ways to make money online. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain them all here. So Becky and I will be writing about the best ones in separate articles over the coming weeks and months as this website develops. We'll tell you about all the reliable income-generation techniques we've discovered to date (forget the scams, thank you) and how to implement them yourself.
If you want to be updated the moment a new article is released, you can subscribe via RSS or join our Facebook page. Either way I assure you that you'll be the first to know about our latest tips for making money from the rapidly advancing technology of the internet.
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