How To Get Rich Through The Internet
Let’s put the “How to Get Rich through the Internet” dream in context: What is “rich?” It means different things to different people. Let’s assume that we are talking about you, the young, upcoming, upper middle class (or yearning in that direction) busybody who simply wants everything that you desire. Standing by this context, let’s then define ‘being rich’ as ‘having enough money to have an option on anything.’ It could be that second car or the second home. It could be that private line to the top fashionista in the country or it could be the freedom to take off to the Swiss Alps on a whim – whatever you want, you can go get it.
To feed this beast of a dream, every other week there is a story of someone making it big on the Internet or related to it. One day it is WhatsApp being snapped up by Facebook for 19 billion dollars and another day it is the Alibaba’s IPO yielding 25 billion dollars and a market value of 230 plus billion dollars.
For any of such examples and many, many more that do not come in front of your eyes, ask yourself this: Is there a common thread here? For, let’s be clear – it is not easy… The Internet is an impersonal and harsh marketplace. Too many good-sounding ventures have come up against the vagaries of customer tastes and failed. Resoundingly, with a whiplash that’s tough to recover from.
So once again, what is common to the WhatsApps and Alibabas of the world? WhatsApp was aimed primarily as an alternative to paid text messaging. With mobile Internet rates plummeting and increasing wireless Internet footprints, WhatsApp was well positioned to wreak havoc on paid text messaging services from telecom service providers. Funnily, WhatsApp used the service providers’ services to destroy one of their own services.
Alibaba is a young Chinese e-commerce company, formed in 1999. By dint of being in the greatest consumer market in the world that was exploding exponentially all through the 2000s, Alibaba was the right venture at the right time.
At the basis of any such great Internet success is the great idea. It is an idea economy out there. Good ideas can earn you riches. Bad ones will do the opposite. Half-baked or seemingly good ideas can be found out at warp speed and discarded pitilessly at lightning speed. Your idea needs to be really, really good. Such ideas are by definition, rare. You toss around a hundred ideas maybe you get one that is not so bad. You work on that not-so-bad idea to see if it can be made into a good one, or a great one. So, lesson number one is that you need to have a great idea.
Enter the Internet. The Internet provides you with the means to maximise your idea’s potential. E-commerce, blogging, social media marketing, movie making – the Internet has a place for you if you are looking. And it provides you with all required tools to allow you to be the best you can be. Take the example of a blog. If your blog is good and it starts to attract a faithful readership, you can start advertising on your blog and earn substantial money from that. The same goes for any video media that you might upload on to YouTube. A couple of million hits and they slowly begin to add up to your bank balance.
Of course, e-commerce is the greatest way to riches in this age of the Internet. These days, you get all the required back-end support for an e-commerce site up front from providers available for just this purpose. You simply bring in the idea. The operational aspects of your idea can be made easy by people who are experts in just that sort of thing.
Here’s the thing. The notion of making riches through the Internet is based on the same grounding principles as old economy businesses. The only difference is that the gestation period between a great idea and its execution in the age of the Internet has been greatly reduced. Everyone worth his or her money is looking to invest in the next great idea. They have the money; if you have the idea, why not?
About Author: Anup holds an experience of eleven years in the content development domain. He masters the art of developing, deploying as well as mentoring the content strategies.
