I have been trying to make money online for over two years now. I succeeded with FriendBlastr and then proceeded to fail with everything else after that. FriendBlastr, I now see, was an outlier. It worked not because I was good at what I was doing but because the market was so hot. I had a few good ideas that certainly helped, but I do believe my approach was all wrong. Looking back I suspect I could have made more money than I did because of a fundamental flaw in my world view.

In my world view I believed I was an individual agent disconnected from all the people around me. I wouldn't have articulated it that way but my actions revealed that was my mindset. With FriendBlastr I did all the marketing, programming, and maintenance by myself. I did hire somebody for short period of time but I dictated all their actions and found I didn't save all that much time. I just finished reading some ad copy that made me realize that as a sole proprietor it should not be my goal to be my company's sole employee. The man writing the ad copy mentioned in the course of his discourse that his company grew from 12 employees to 48. What was interesting to me was that he seemed to assume that it was normal to have employees. Turns out the world is interconnected. Go figure, huh? :-D

What I mean by that is I can't pretend that I am not reliant on others for my success. While I can realize some level of success on my own (vis a vis FriendBlastr) I must necessarily grow my "company" by growing my network of professional contacts. It is this network of professional contacts which will enable me to collaborate on larger projects than I would be able to handle my own. Furthermore they will allow me to realize things which I have not the skills for. For example, in running FriendBlastr I was able to realize that marketing is not my forte. It is, at the least, something I need to work on. In the meantime it would appear that I am better off involving marketers in my efforts.

I've also realized that the content providers are not necessarily the ones who make the most money. My entire attempt to make money online has been marked by my refusal to be anything less than a content provider. In reality it seems that the ones who sell other people's products are much more likely to be cashing big checks. I do believe that the content providers on the Internet outnumber the salespeople. This could be for a number of reasons, though the most likely seems to be a close connection between the Internet and the content centric technical community, but it seems to be that the ones who make money are the ones who can convince people to buy. This means that most of the moneymaking schemes listed in the books online and pushed in various webinars are simply different permutations of the same concept: be salespeople. This means that the most important, basic knowledge one can obtain is how to be a good salesperson. Unless you know that it won't matter what Google tips you know or what technical knowledge you have because the most basic purpose of sales is to persuade people. Because it just so happens that persuading someone is a lot easier when you present them with the product that they need, that will make their life better, we spend lots of time and energy doing market research and learning how to present people with products. None of that will matter, however, if after reaching our target audience we cannot persuade them to buy. Thus we must learn how to persuade people. Everything else is just environment.

What's really interesting to me is the fact that as a sales person I can choose any company with a product I like and sell it. I can make money without having a product, without having to provide support, without having to maintain a product. It takes a lot of the work load off of me as an entrepreneur and essentially allows me to engage in obtaining multiple streams of income. While I can't deny that it will take a lot of work, it still seems like a highly viable path to success. I admit that I'm tempted toward it and will perhaps pursue it at one point, but in the meantime I still have other projects to finish. At the very least I now know to involve good salespeople in my future pursuits.