Quote:
Originally Posted by ray3400  about the 900% profit remark...
my point isn't that i made a good profit:investment ratio...
I invested more than 100$, MY TIME AND EFFORT. lots of it. And you would never expect someone to be able to live off of 1k a year right?Your responses are suprisingly more thoughtful than the average forum though.
My main purpose is to tell everyone that there is all this hype for making money on the internet and how easy it is and how fast it is. Through my own experiences I have found out it is not easy or fast. I must have put in a couple hundred hours of learning the backroads to making some money on the internet. It has been a year now since I started and I have 2 websites with small amounts of traffic and 1k. Once again that is no amount of money you could live off of, and especially not get rich from. |
Ray, I agree 100% with what you are saying. One of the key words you have used is "entrepreneurship". You see, online businesses are still subject to the same laws of capitalism as their real world counterparts.
The attraction of setting up online is easy to see and seems especially appealing in these forums and on this site. Now I'm setting myself up for a kicking here but just read through some of the threads we have in this "business and financial" section. Are these really the entries of budding businessmen and woman?
Most of them want a business online. I don't know for sure but I expect the thinking goes something like this: "If I start an online business while I work full/ part time in paid employment, then eventually my web business will grow so big that I can quit my awful job and be free... Then I can go an work and live wherever I want because my laptop (which is all I will need) is portable. More to the point if I follow my passion I can (write/ paint/ take photos/ blog) and earn income from things like advertising which don't require any real skills which is just as well as I don't have any. When I make a few dollars online I can pretend I am growing the seed of something big. Hooray!"
Now I accept I have exaggerated a little but you and I both know that it doesn't work like that and it seems many people (aided by SBI etc) believe they must build traffic and that somehow then they can sell "stuff". How many people do you see on this website trying to set up a retail shop, a cafe, a book store, an insurance company, a taxi firm, a factory? None. No body. Much better to hide behind fuzzy thinking of following a passion and making easy money online and ignore the fact you need to be business minded.
Now don't get me wrong- the fault is not in having an internet business or using it alongside your real world business. No, the problem is in the different mental frequencies that many of the types of people I have stereotyped above are on, compared to successful businesspeople (think Branson autobiography verses average forum comment on SEO and meditating on ones passion).
So what's my point? My point is that for a PD site, to avoid people wasting time they should focus on what's required to be a businessperson above living in a dreamworld. Erin wrote a good article on it- something about having what it takes to run a business.
