Web Business Freedom

There are lot of genuine, highly credible experts on the web, willing to give you a lot of the “secrets” you need to start a good, profitable business online (or supplement an existing business), and in the process vastly improve the quality of your life.

Before I talk about some of the people who’ve influenced me the most so far, first let me share a recent conversation I had with a friend. It is typical of the lack of knowledge people have about how to be entrepreneurial and make money online.

First, I’ll explain that my friend (let’s call him Ray) is one of the most talented web developers I’ve ever met. He puts together incredible websites and web applications daily, as part of his job.

Ray is also an artist at heart. And his wife is, too. (Let’s call her Sally.) For many years, she has been a stay-at-home mom, helping support the family with part-time graphic design work. A couple years ago, she decided to go back to school part-time to get a masters degree.

Finally, after several years of late nights and weekends spent studying, Sally earned her degree and started calling around town on arts groups that would be most likely to hire her. This has gone on now for months, with a few nibbles but nothing substantial. It’s frustrating.

I mentioned to Ray that perhaps his wife could share her knowledge and expertise via a website. Not only does she have her design background, she now has advanced expertise in things like grant writing, that people would be willing to pay money for. Not everyone can afford the time or expense to go get an master’s in arts administration.

Sally could set up a blog and start sharing her know-how, in order to establish herself as an expert in her field, I explained. Blogging is a great tool for this, I said. First come the posts, then perhaps she can put out an e-book (or a series) for free, all while building up a list of subscribers (fans). As she develops a following and reputation, she can start advertising individual or group coaching. Maybe this starts locally and expands to webinars (which could be as simple as a group conference call with PDF handouts emailed to participants). She might then sell more advanced materials, or access to a members-only group. Once the site builds up some traffic, she could sell some sponsorships, and start looking for ways to earn commissions selling affiliated products.

Those were just a few thoughts I gave, in about a minute.

“Wow, I hadn’t thought about that,” Ray said. “I’ll have to mention that to her. Thanks!”

And remember, Ray is a web developer 45-50 hours a week!

A couple hours after that conversation, I met an old friend, Phil, for lunch. (Another name changed to protect the innocent.) He had recently joined LinkedIn, and I could tell by the tone of his emails that something was up.

After settling in at a restaurant, my friend told me that after 13 years working for one of the big banks in town, the ax fell. He wasn’t expecting it. For the past two months, he’d been out of work yet had somehow managed to find another job within the same company. “It’s like I never really left,” he explained. And he got a 5% bump in his base salary, though his annual bonus—that he and his wife count on—would likely take a hit.

He then went on a rambling, 10-minute monologue about how unstable banking was, and how unsatisfied he was in his career, and at age 45 anxious to do something else, he just didn’t quite know what. He shared a passion for the web, and had years before helped start a successful grassroots website in town. “The bulletin board I managed on international trade was the most popular section of the whole site,” he boasted. I could tell he had a bunch of very specialized knowledge, combined with a passion for the web—both of which he had never fully capitalized on.

Phil then talked about his wife, “Mary Beth,” who runs a solo interior design business. “It’s tough, and mostly word-of-mouth,” he said. “She just got a job for a very high-powered woman at one of the banks, but she’s being transferred to California.”

I asked about Mary Beth’s website.

“Well, she does have a basic one,” Phil said. “But we are paying $20 a month—which is a lot for us—and not getting good service from our web firm. The guy who runs it just actually suggested we might be better off switching over to GoDaddy.com, which we’re in the process of doing.”

“Does the site make her any money?” I asked.

“Not really,” he admitted. “But it has a neat Flash intro, and then when you enter the site it is all Flash.”

Hmmm, I thought. A 100% Flash-based site. Forget being optimized for search engines, easy to bookmark or print.

After some more prodding, I confirmed that Mary Beth has to contact the developer to update the site. Not good, especially for someone who could be refreshing her site frequently with photos, how-to articles, blog posts and more.

I stopped Phil and ticked off half a dozen suggestions for improvement, much like I’d done earlier for Ray. All were based on taking advantage of Mary Beth’s wealth of expertise and simple, proven techniques for online marketing.

“Interesting stuff,” he admitted. “I guess we’ll get the site switched to the new host and then maybe think about making some changes sometime.”

The Elephant on the Keyboard

Why is it that so many smart people, who are savvy enough to use a computer every day and chock full of expertise, are blind to opportunities to attract more business through the web?

It’s like there is a big elephant sitting on their keyboard, blocking the screen. Occasionally they get glimpses of the web, long enough to check email, their Facebook page or a YouTube video, before they turn back to their “day job” or the pressures of running their own business.

Just like how you go to school for years, only to find out that they never teach you what you really need to know, in the real world—most people get no instruction on how not to waste time online and make the web actually work for them.

Once in awhile, out of frustration, someone like my friends might do some Google searches that mostly produce a lot of get-rich-quick schemes and dead ends.

I know this first-hand, because I myself did that a long time. It’s highly tempting to surf around mindlessly, wondering why some people make money on the web, but not you.

These people must be freaks of nature, you tell yourself. They are trust-fund, silver spoon-fed scheisters who get to play on Daddy’s computer all day, or after they coast through college and have nothing better to do because they are too lazy to get a real job. Yes, and they are probably single without any real responsibilities and pressures. Or they are some kind of super-geek genius weirdo with no friends.

Wrong.

There are people making lots of money online, all right, but they are people you’d recognize: people just like you and me. Unfortunately, it can be hard to sift through all the junk to find them.

Once I started getting serious about understanding how to really make money online, and not just where to find some crazy software that would somehow solve the world’s problems and miraculously dump cash into up my bank account, I started finding real, credible people who were more than happy to share what they’ve learned.

For me, the true miracle was that they were there all the time, and I just hadn’t bothered to find them. And once I did, there has been a snowball effect, where one great person leads to the next, that leads to another, that leads to another. All the top web gurus oddly don’t compete, but actually help each other. They give away an incredible amount of advice and information, before they try to convince you to buy anything from them. And the reason they sell a lot of stuff, ultimately, is because they know what they’re doing and have the results to prove it.

All you have to do is know where to look, and look carefully.

I consider it a quest to connect the dots with this genuine experts, real people like me with families, responsibilities and bills to pay. Not some fantasy “Rich Jerk” sitting on a yacht, wearing a gold chain and smoking a stogey.

I’m going to be talking about (and to) some of these people a lot. They include Jay and Sterling at Internet Business Mastery. Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs Journey. Rich Shefren. Caroline Middlebrook. Tim Ferriss. David Meerman Scott. Alexis Dawes. And so many more. I’m still peeling away the layers of the onion.

What exactly makes these people believable, vs. the other gazillion so-called gurus out there? Because they all started real businesses, on- and off-line, struggled to make ends meet, made mistakes (some really stupid and costly), worked very hard and eventually through a lot of trial and error discovered proven ways to streamline their lives and improve their profits via the web. They then decided it was part of their mission in life to help others succeed where they once failed, or still see others failing.

I now humbly see myself as joining their ranks. I’m applying a lot of the techniques they teach, along with my own knowledge and expertise, to prove to myself that I can do it, and so can you.

I think elephants belong in the wild or the zoo, not on your keyboard.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankenstoen