Earning Money

Bizarre title, I know. But guess what? It’s damn true. I decided to take a break from college and go visit my Father who lives about forty five minutes away. And, he decided he wanted to go to a cigar shop with some of his biker friends. So, we all went. I don’t smoke, but I had about a cigar’s worth of second hand smoke. Whatever. What I realized as I sat there watching them and listening to them is that they are all incredibly smart. And, it’s not book smarts. It’s wiseness. And I realized…The older you get, so long as you’re not brain dead, the smart you’ll be.

And then I realized something else. The same thing goes for on the internet. The more time you spend working on the web, the more you naturally find out. You could be a millionaire on the web in six months, but I still would bet that someone who has been earning on the web (although not millions) for six years is smarter than you, knows more about the web, and is just wiser. Why? Experience. Success doesn’t always mean you’re the better one. The millionaire may have had the right contacts or just the better idea. But, that doesn’t make them wiser.

Whether you’re talking about your niche to an older individual or just life in general, they have been around longer. They can provide you with things that helped them with their life that you can use yourself. The guy who made shoes as a kid who became a shoe company owner could really inspire you to make your sites amazing. Use the knowledge of older individuals. Take from them what you can and I can guarantee that you will find success. Living now is much easier than living then was. Their ability to survive is evident of their understanding of the way things work. I think that if you listen to what older individuals say, you will find a greater understanding of how to succeed. Listen…You will learn.

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I think that one of the biggest mistakes that I made when I first started earning was that I was going to be a millionaire by working on the web and that was going to be that. I soon realized that this was, unfortunately, not the case. It wasn’t that I could not be a millionaire, it was because I was trying to reach an unrealistic goal for my initial goal. Sure, being a millionaire one day would be nice, but I began to realize that if I was going to get there, I was going to first need to learn how to crawl and then learn to walk. Only then could I learn to run and finally run a marathon. So, to get away from the exercise terminology, I would need to start small and then grow.

So, I sat down and began to ask myself: what do I want? Do I want a $5.00 day on adsense? Do I want to try and get 50 RSS subscribers by X day? What is my goal? What do I want to do? How do I want to succeed? So, I began to stroke my chin and see what I was looking to do. And I realized that I needed to be realistic with what I was doing. I needed to take things step by step so that I could grow over time. Just because you see people like Darren Rowse or John Chow making so much does not under any circumstances mean that they did that over night. Hell no! John Chow has been around for a few years and so has Darren. Actually, John has been around long enough to have felt the dot com burst. So, he has a lot of time to build his name and reputation.

When you’re trying to find out what you want to achieve, sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and just write down EVERYTHING you want to achieve. It can be as unrealistic and as crazy as you want. Write for an entire minute. Then, step back and read over the list. Now, cross out the things that are a bit unrealistic, such as, “owning a yacht in two months of creating the website.” Eh, not going to happen. But, if you see something that says, “earning five dollars a day on my site in one month,” now that is a possibility. So, go through and cross out what just seems impossible and then rewrite the list of realistic goals.

The final step is to reward yourself when you reach those goals! If you want to try and get 50 RSS subscribers and you reach it, throw yourself a little party. Just reward yourself for doing what you wanted to do. Treat yourself to something that is good and makes you happy because it’ll make achieving that all the more enjoyable. And once you have done that, restart. Write down what you want to achieve for the next block of time and try and get to that. If you keep doing that, you’re going to find yourself getting to the top and that is what you want, no?

John Chow and Darren Rowse did not start as experts. They did not start from the top. They made goals and they achieved it. And each and every time they achieved that goal, they made a bigger goal. And that is what I do. I make a goal and then go for the next push. And then the next push. And that is all you can do. Set realistic goals and then achieve them. Treat yourself to a little reward every time you succeed and voila, you are going to find that earning on the web has just become a bit easier and there is more to be made.

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