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I’ve got a survey going for a special project. I have a question for you. How do you expect to make money online when you’re afraid of the internet? I sat down and it took a few days to write up these questions. People were answering, “I don’t shop online.” “I don’t do anything online.”
If you aren’t actively interested in the things that make the internet hum, it’s going to be a challenge for you to make money online. I’ll talk about how I started to make money online. I’ll talk about how I started to make money online from a pure digital citizen standpoint.
I’ve been selling stuff online since 2000. It was physical products for a long time. I did the Amazon thing. I did the eBay thing. I had my own website. I’ve always advertised and marketed online.
I jumped on Facebook when it happened. I remember when you had to get an invitation from Gmail to get a Gmail account. I got my first invitation off the free section of Craigslist. When Craigslist came to Atlanta, I was all over it.
So, where am I going with all this is: if you have no natural interest in how the online world works and you’re just really interested in consuming it, you’re going to struggle so much. It’s going to be a big, big struggle.
I came on YouTube in 2009 and made money in about three months. It wasn’t a lot of money, but I was thrilled. I was thrilled that I put out my book. I put the links under the channel manually. There were not tools like there are now. I went to sleep and I woke up with $90 in my checking account. I was over the moon happy, because I made some money from something I created.
The tools are available for you to be successful. This is the problem. Success does not come fast enough for so many people. The problem with just consuming the internet is that people are led to believe there is this magical methodology that doesn’t require any effort, knowledge or any skin in the game to be successful. They believe they can just come out of nowhere and start making bucket loads of cash online.
Back in the day before they changed all the spam laws, I used to literally throw people on my Constant Content email list. Someone would email me about a product and I would manually put them on the list. I would email market to these people. I added them to the list without their permission. The open rate was 70 to 90% back then. Very few people unsubscribed.
Now compare that to today. I have people who get on the list who know they signed up to subscribe, then they get mad when they get my email. The internet has changed so much. Part of that is because more people are wired.
If you’re an architect of the internet and build sites and apps or sell your products, then you are able to forecast some of these changes. People don’t read emails like they once did. You’ll get a lot of people on your email list that aren’t going to do it.
By putting your message in audio form, more people seem willing to listen. It’s something you can do when you are driving or getting groceries or on your way to work. This is an easier way for people to consume.
I know where we’re heading based on not being afraid of the internet. I’m going to give you a solution on how you can get over your fear. If you sell physical products online, you should buy physical products online. If you sell online coaching online, you should buy online coaching online.
I remember I was in a group and someone put one of those “amazing results for little efforts” post. My client wants to be a heavy hitter, someone that sells $50K courses. I recommended they buy a $50K course and reverse engineer it. If you buy one of those courses, you not only get the information in the course, you also get a lesson on how to sell it.
Buying a $50,000 course may not be feasible, but you should buy a $1000 to $10,000 course so you can see firsthand how to sell that course. This is what I’m talking about when you become an architect of the internet versus a consumer. A lot of the craziness goes away. More importantly, much of this crazy expectation stuff goes away.
I make changes on the YouTube channel and it sometimes takes weeks to see results. I’ll test out something and it won’t work. That’s normal. The sooner you accept the fact that you will work hard and you’ll put up a bunch of turkeys and things won’t work, the better off you’ll be. Then one day you’ll put something together and you’ll wake up to a crazy amount of money in your account. You have to stick with it for as long as it takes, to see the results. It’s not going to happen overnight.
Now we have a bunch of one-year and two-year stars. They come on and they just blow up. Frequently when I get close to these people, I find out they were working 90 hour weeks. That was the only thing they were working on. That’s what they were doing, day in, day out.
They were working crazy hours. That’s why they became so successful so much faster than other people. They were putting in a year’s worth of work in three to six months.
The chance of you losing money on the internet is not a possibility. It’s a guarantee, because you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve got two ways to do this. You can go ahead and figure it out yourself or you can find yourself a mentor.
Figuring it out on your own will cost more money. The lessons you learn will be remembered for a long, long time. We all had a period where we didn’t know this or that. You need to let go of this notion that you’re going to make so much money so fast with little to no effort by just showing up. It’s just not going to happen.
As people go into the video space, they’re going to go in with shitty cameras, shitty production value, shitty expectations, no scripts, and no hooks. They’ll believe that the internet people lied to them again. No. They didn’t lie. They didn’t tell you everything, but they didn’t lie.
You can choose to be successful by becoming an architect of the internet. That path offers more certainty. You will have to take your lumps and hard hits, knowing you can win.
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