Mike Meuser
RecyclingSecrets.com
Given the present economy more and more people are turning to home-based businesses hoping to earn a fulltime income. The internet is full of marketing scams, schemes and ripoffs and folks often jump from one dissapointing opportunity to the next hoping it will be the one. In my home-based businesses I've found that rather than focus on opportunities where the primary focus is on making money, it works best to develop a strategy based on my skills, education, interests and, most important, my passion.
The internet is just full of online business scams, schemes and rip-offs. Just signup on one of the many home based business forums and you'll see what I mean when you get friends, emails, and replies to your posts. Many are there to take advantage of your desperation. The majority seem to be a bunch of amateurs who pose as professionals and try to sell you products and services guaranteeing that you will get rich like them yet they have never sold anything online except more online marketing schemes. Where does it end? Similar to the dotcom bomb and housing bomb, no real value is created. Very few will profit at the expense of the great majority. If you are lucky enough to actually make a living with one of these schemes, is this the way you want to do it? - At the expense of others? That's not the way I do business and I doubt if it is the way you really want to do it either.
How many people who have NO claim to internet fame except to sell internet marketing schemes to others will there be before the bubble bursts? I could see the dotcom bomb coming. I read reports saying that most of the top companies were only shuffling money amongst themselves - no real money was coming in. It was doomed to fail yet I would hear people say, "all I have to do is work at suchandsuch.com for a few years, take my stock options, cash in and retire." NOT! Some I know even cashed in their kids' college savings to buy dotcom stock! If it were only so easy! It wasn't, of course, and most lost a great deal while a few prospered.
Then along comes the real estate boom. Just like dotcom, everyone wanted a piece of the action before it was too late. As the percentage of people who could actually afford to buy a home dropped from 50%+ to less than 10% in some places, few connected the dots. I saw it coming but very few realized that when only a few can buy the inflated value homes, the bubble just has to burst - there's no one left to buy them. And, of course, as we all know, the bubble did burst. While a few got rich, the great majority suffered and will continue to suffer for a long time.
But, don't get me wrong, not all internet marketers are bad. If you step away from the bunch who sell internet marketing strategies to newbies who then in turn sell more internet marketing strategies to newbies and on and on, you find that there are some folks out there who sell amazing products and services. Before I elaborate on this let's talk about creating real value instead of furthering the get rich online marketing schemes that very few will actually benefit from. Here are two examples.
My website MapCruzin.com is devoted to helping people learn GIS mapping. I provide free software, map shapefiles, maps and resources. I also sell a few GIS map shapefiles that I have created. MapCruzin.com was online from 1996 through 2008 before I even thought about making money with the website. My passion drove me to create unique helpful content. In 2008 I began implementing adsense. Since then MapCruzin's revenue has risen from a few hundred dollars per month to several thousand. The ads are extremely well targeted to my audience. I have both a high click through rate on the ads and a high number of pageviews per visitor. This tells me that both my content and the ads are of real value.
I'm now writing an ebook about MapCruzin.com and how I earn a living from it NOT by selling "how to make big money selling online" products, but by providing unique content and real value to people making a living in the real world. It's easy to get drawn into the online-marketing-bubble, but if you do, in time your bubble will burst.
My other website, RecyclingSecrets.com is devoted to helping people bootstrap (as in little or no startup cash) their way into the home based salvage and recycling business. I began in this business in the early 1980s doing deconstruction, metal recycling, electronic and telecommunication salvage and reuse. I've done quite well at this business and I now sell an ebook that chronicles my experience, the Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual. The manual is full of real stories about how I bootstrapped my way into the business, provided real value to my community, while earning a very good living. This business is not for everyone - it is not passive income or some scheme that "guarantees" that all you have to do is work a couple of hours a day and sit back and watch the money come in - it takes hard work at times - but it can provide a good and growing income. You can check it out at RecyclingSecrets.com,
It was only after years in the real business of home-based salvage and recycling that I became qualified to write and sell an online product that adds real value to the lives of the purchasers. Similarly, when I do write the ebook about my success monetizing MapCruzin.com, I am qualified to do it because I've spent years writing content, placing ads, blogging, tweeting and doing related things to increase the traffic to and revenue from the website while increasing its value to visitors. Both ebooks provide the purchaser with real value because they are both based on the real world experience of making a living with home-based businesses.
Earlier I mentioned that there are some really good and helpful folks online who can help you to create really excellent information products and market them earning a good living. One I have found that is particularly good is Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian. His excellent ebook, Think, Write and Retire is full of helpful information about developing your niche, writing and marketing your online informational product. More great folk who have inspired and helped me are listed here.
You too have experiences, knowledge, interests and passions that provide you with unique insights. We all tend to think, "well everybody knows that" when we think about what we know, but the truth is that most of the time, most other folks DON'T know what we know or how to do what we can do easily. Your unique insight is valuable and can be of great interest and help to others.
Avoid jumping from opportunity to opportunity. You will be better off if you stay away from things that only attract you because of the claims about money and focus on the real tools and information out there that will help you to capitalize on your unique skills, experience, education, passions and interests to develop a winning strategy.
The bottom line is to not spin your wheels and waste precious days, weeks, months and years of your life doing things that someone tells you will "make you rich." Spend your valuable time creating real value for others, creating real things that people in this world really need. If you do this, you will succeed in business.
You are free to share this article in any manner that you like with the following exceptions. You can email it, use it in presentations, print it, place it on blogs and websites, and otherwise use it only IF (1) you do not alter it in any manner and (2) you give credit to the author by linking back to MapCruzin.com and RecyclingSecrets.com. Thank you.
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