Guy Kawaski of Best buy has an interesting post over on his blog about the 10 lies entrepreneurs tell when speaking with Venture capitalists. The list is fairly inclusive and interesting from the respect that I hear a lot of people doing business on the web making the same outlandish claims. Now I’m not saying that all people who post their earnings online just to try and get you to buy something are not telling the truth, but why would they need to do that?
I’ve seen bloggers like Darren Rowse make statements about earnings but in a different context than a sales pitch. I’m not one of these big name Gurus and really I would not want to be. I make money from the web and have for several years, can I live off that money, well the answer is no. It has not really been my choice to even try to live off the money I make on the web up to this point. That has now changed and I’ll talk more about that at a later date. I’ve always just wanted to create some content put out on the web and have some people read it. Those activities have earned me money, but that was not really my goal. I started out with Adsense in 2003 and my only goal was to pay for my hosting expenses. It did that and then some. I could be one of those people making tens of thousands of dollars from Ad revenue if I would have really buckled down a few years ago and continued to push out content. At the time I choose not to spend my time doing that. Now I’m at a different point in my life and I’m building every type of site possible to generate revenue. The funny thing is I’m still not doing this for the money, I’m doing it to earn my freedom. Freedom from the 9-5 grind, freedom to spend my time as I want.
There are some statistics, which I don’t know are true or not, that state that 95% of all new marketers fail and give up. This may be true. Maybe its because some people think they can put up a website with some scrapped content and make thousands every month form doing nothing. Then when they find out it’s not true then they quit. Or it may be that there are so many information products out there that show these screen shots of huge earnings that any one can do in a matter of days. When it turns out that you can’t do that and you have already spent your $97, $47, $197 or whatever you paid then you quit.
Stop paying for those items now. You only need a couple of things to succeed online. The main part of that is content. You need unique content and lots of it. Once you have that the rest of it will fall in place. Other than content you need time and energy to put that unique content out on the web and monetize it. Don’t do this for the money, do it for what you want and make decisions based on how to achieve those things that mean a lot to you and your family. Work from the motivation of achieving those goals and the money will take care itself.
