Section 0: Basics
Basics of Becoming an Online Millionaire
Internet Marketing is a mixture derived from many different offline strategies and techniques. And the best of these are the ones which have survived and will actually earn you money.
Mailing lists, for example, come from bulk-mailers, who have used these successfully for years. The CAN-SPAM act has put in the rules on this area, enabling honest mailers to make a good living provided they stick by the rules.
But just because it’s being done on the Internet, it doesn’t mean that it’s illegal or “cowboy” or anything else. The basics of business offline are also the basics of business online.
So we are covering, briefly, what you have to know in this area to succeed.
One of the key points is that you treat what you are doing on the Internet as a business. Means you have a schedule, means you have a budget, means you keep track of expenses, means you do all the usual things a business does. And in that way, you actually succeed at this.
The government even gives you tax breaks for this. But the key reason they take away business tax breaks is that the person is using it as a hobby, not a business. The businessperson is constantly looking for ways to improve increase his income. The hobbyist is generally looking for a distraction from life, an entertainment venue.
The rest of us are treating this time off from our day job as a way to make a better income than our day job could ever produce.
A way to become rich through using the Internet
00. Get a presence on the Internet
0. Drive people to your site
1. Capture every identity you can
2. Find out what these people really want
3. Sell them a solution to that problem
4. Continue selling them similar solutions
What are you doing here?
You may have wondered occasionally about the reason humankind was put here – or how we managed to find ourselves in this current scene. Whether we were put here by Divine inspiration or evolved by remarkable circumstance and good luck – that is beyond argument here.
The key point is that we are here and there are reasons as individual as each of us which drive us.
It is up to you to know and follow your own dreams. Second to that is to not place yourself across someone else's dreams.
There is no real reason each of us cannot dream large and have that dream occur around us – excepting only those limits we have placed on ourselves. And where we recognize that we placed those limits, we can move them or eradicate them.
You can be, do, or have anything and everything you want.
Now, this isn't just someone shouting down a rain barrel (or into an empty cave). All of this has been subjected to very historical and scientific research by the most ancient of philosophers and religious prophets, right up to the most modern professors and researchers in quantum physics.
If you get a stack of religious books, add in a stack of self-improvement bestsellers, throw in the classic philosophers – you will find common themes and statements to all of these. You will find simple laws and basic operating systems which form and guide our actions. These laws and systems have been in place as long as humankind has walked and breathed on this earth.
And you can find them.
I did. And I'll tell you about some of them here – as we go along through this book.
This bug to find out the basics of this universe bit me at an early age. I followed it through my rural upbringing over into the West Coast, where I worked in many professions while I studied counseling and consulting in all my spare time. I practiced at this and became very good at helping people solve their problems.
In middle age, however, I became dissatisfied with the corporate structures I had been part of and relocated back to my rural beginnings to help my aging parents.
It was here that I began to make sense out of that voice, that urge which had been pressing me on through all my years. In the relative quietude of rolling fields and creeks, I began to understand how to listen to that voice.
It showed up when I was walking one day, accompanied only by the farm dogs and my walking stick. Stopping by a huge, hundreds-year-old tree, I suddenly found peace. It was like having the wind just drop right out of your sails and suddenly be left coasting along, alone out on the calm, balmy ocean.
And as I started reflecting on this, it left – crowded out by my very thoughts. But this incident made me think. And think – and think some more.
I had been looking for this internal peace my entire life and had chased it across both coasts – but hadn't even known what I was chasing. I still didn't understand it. I knew I needed to know more.
Since I had never started college, and “the best” local jobs seemed to require a college degree, I went back to school at a local community college.
Here I found that Academia had built not just one Ivory Tower to defend its hold on knowledge, but a tower for each of the major bodies of thought as they had described them. And these towers were silos in themselves, not talking with the other towers or sharing their information.
But I did. Forced to study in each tower (as part of being “well-rounded”), I found in them keys which unlocked hidden rooms in the other towers. Algebra and Geology unlocked Economics. History unlocked Science. Each, in turn unlocked the others and helped them make sense as a whole system, not individually as single parts.
I began a study (several really) to unravel the 40-some year journey I had traveled thus far. There were many things which I had studied, yet no cohesive whole statement or theory which said, “This is what it is all about.”
I knew that one could obtain peace of mind wherever one was – city or country. But I had no way of telling people how to get this for themselves. I knew some people had gotten rich and famous, but many hadn't. I knew that for the most part, people lived lives of Thoreau's “quiet desperation” and didn't really have answers to questions I had been asking all these 40-odd years.
So I said to myself, well maybe some of these books unlock others – and no one person has all the answers. I then began to read and download others until the walls of my room were over-filled with books that dripped into piles on the floor and my hard drives had to be emptied onto CD-ROMs which built into their own unsteady stacks to make room for more data.
Eventually, I narrowed down all these authors into a handful of dead ones who had been outrageously successful in their own life, while telling people how to be successful in theirs. I wrote a book as part of that study and then left it sit – so I could see if the seed I planted would sprout.
I then continued my studied to get my sheepskins, since I found that making good grades was fairly simple and I was getting some government support to remain a poor student. As well, being able to work only part time was far less stressful than trying to make sense of corporate policy and foibles at the various jobs who wanted to hire me full time.
Another study gave me an interesting theory of how people actually think and how they make sense of the world around them.
A tertiary study involved enabling rural communities to become prosperous through improving broadband capability (see, the academia nomenclature still resides somewhere in my veins).
As I started getting to the end of these studies, I realized that I was never really going to fit into corporate or factory or warehouse or laborer positions. But I had to make a living somehow.
So I poured my studies into some Masters and PhD molds, paid these off with a credit card I couldn't pay and finished up my work.
Then I started writing. And writing, and writing. I found a great place called Lulu.com where I could publish for free. So I published and edited and published and published some more. But for all their online excellence, I soon realized that I needed to market my way out of where I was. I was making all of $30 a month in book sales. That wouldn't pay for the credit I'd stacked up, nor rescue me from my day-job drudgeries.
This book, then, starts up where my others left.
It is my studies of marketing and my own real-world application which make me rich, famous, and a success. I took my own best advice, and that of those same do-it-yourself writers I had studied – and now I’m making the world of my dreams become reality.
And you can follow my steps as I do.
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