When It Comes To Working Online And Making Money On The Internet
When it comes to working online and making money on the internet, most discussions tend to look at specific tactics. How do you set up a mailing list? How can you get a merchant account? And so on. The answers to these questions may be useful, but you can learn about them elsewhere, and I thought it would be helpful to take a step back and look at something higher-level.Fundamentally, how do you make money on the internet?
I’ve been making my living online for more than a decade now. The specific projects I work on have changed over the years (and may change again), but I can’t imagine not doing something that pays the bills through online work. There are essentially two broad approaches to working online: you can either profit from an inefficiency in the marketplace, providing a solution to a problem someone else should have fixed, or you can make something valuable and share it with the world.
For the first 5+ years of earning all of my income through online projects, I focused on profiting from inefficiencies in the marketplace. In my case, this meant things like selling on eBay during its early days, when it was a seller’s market and high profit margins were normal. (Things changed later on.) Then it was playing an arbitrage game with Google Adwords and Adsense, profiting a small amount, many times over, from the split between the two. (Again, things changed later on.) There was nothing wrong with these projects, but they also weren’t very exciting. I didn’t go to sleep at night thinking about how my business would help people the next day. For a while, that was OK, because I was involved in plenty of other things that were at least somewhat helpful. But as time went by, I felt challenged to contribute in a greater way, so I began to shift to the second approach: making something valuable and sharing it with the world
