Leigh Burke's Blog – make money online

The internet is a crowded place, but there will always be opportunity for those willing to genuinely tap their true talents and model themselves on those that have gone before them.

This post will look at effective ways to make money online the Facebook way by finding your unique voice. You’ll also learn how to avoid the fads, latest trends and low hanging fruit that tends to attract the biggest crowds online.

Make Money Online The Facebook Way

The online world is no different to the offline world. Each person, business or website you encounter brings their own special flavour, skills, talents and ideas that all go towards shaping your internet experience as a whole. Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) is an extremely talented programmer. That’s what he does, that’s his thing. He focused intently and wholeheartedly on his one talent to exploit his own skills and develop his creation Facebook.com which has changed the very fabric of social interactions on and offline. It was only a few years ago that you had to email photos to share them, send group emails to organise events, and actually catch up with your friends physically to catch up But we live in a fast paced world, and Facebook suits society’s needs here and now in 2011. This all thanks to a Mark Zuckerberg, a talented programmer who stayed true to his core talents and beliefs.

You’ll recall that prior to Facebook, Myspace was very popular. What’s the difference you might ask? On the face of it (no pun intended), probably just interface and a few core features. Myspace allowed more customisation of your profile, so you had people with music (quite awkward if browsing your friend’s profiles at work), you could also change the background of your profile and pretty much lay it out as you liked. I also seem to recall that the site loaded quite slower than Facebook. Maybe it was just the internet speeds at that time, but I do remember it being quite slow and clunky. February 2004: Enter Facebook. A crisp, clean, white interface. Minimalistic and reminiscent of that other clean-interfaced internet behemoth Google. It took a while, then slowly but surely Facebook started to siphon members away from Myspace and some other minor social networks.

Facebook was fast, clean, it allowed you to “poke” your friends, write on each other’s walls, and see a running commentary of all your friend’s comments in your Home tab. People couldn’t get enough. Another major drawcard and differentiator in the early days was the implementation of the “Facebook Apps” platform in 2007. The big lynchpin here is this was an open platform that allowed small-time developers or large corporations to develop apps that were hosted on Facebook and could be installed onto your Facebook profile. This was a master-stroke of genius, and the available apps quickly expanded. The apps allowed Facebook users to customise their individual Facebook experience by adding additional functionality, with business apps, games and more. Facebook even spawned one of the biggest online gaming companies in the world in the form of Zynga who first developed games such as online poker on the Facebook platform. In fact, Zynga now boasts a larger workforce that Facebook itself. (there still seems to be some debate over this fact this article puts Zynga at 1200 vs Facebook at 1600 emplyees worldwide).

In November 2007, Facebook launched targeted advertising. That’s the best part of 4 years for Facebook to even start thinking about monetizing their “little baby” and creating revenue streams! Now that is commitment to an idea. All the servers, bandwidth, employee wages, rent and utilities over those preceeding 4 years must have rung up a huge bill. Why does this even matter? Because Mark Zuckerberg and his team were focused on creating a quality service and unique user experience, not on trying to make a fast buck by doing what everybody else was doing. The rest followed naturally. Anybody can create a clone. If you start a unique business selling custom-made dress shoes online tomorrow and start making $20,000 per month, then I enter the market not long after – all I do is split your profits between the 2 of us. That’s 10K each. The next person that decides to take a piece of the pie waters our take down even further. The only way to make a good living online is create a unique, target business while staying true to our own real talents and gifts.

The Crowd Effect, and How To Avoid It

You see most people are dazzled by tales of quick riches. They like to think as the internet as some kind of modern-day gold rush where you buy a domain name for $10 today, and palm it off to a large corporate for a couple of hundred thousand in a few month’s time. Well my friend, it just doesn’t happen like that. Behind every great success story you read or hear about is often years of hard work, research, lobbying, marketing, positioning, leveraging, learning, testing, networking and a good dose of luck and timing to top it off. If you really want to make money online, you have to think of your business as a business. You have to be in it for the long haul and you have to be willing to learn, test, be flexible and evolve as market conditions and consumer sentiment change.

Most people new to internet marketing will be on the lookout for the next big thing. The next whiz-bang software that will propel all their sites to number #1 on google for their highly competitive keyword. Given, their are ways you can give yourself a competitive advantage, but any attempt to game the system will often only harm you in the long-term. It is accepted that getting backlinks by reciprocal linking and writing and distributing articles is a legitimate way to boost your search engine rankings. These are slow, time-consuming processes that don’t produce results fast, but they do work. If you think about it, it’s no different to the offline world prior to the internet. In fact, it’s just good old-fashioned PR. Write and distribute articles and raise your profile and percieved authority in a niche. Of course there, are ways you can leverage your time and energy to produce results faster, see my posts on leverage to find out more.

So how do you avoid the crazy merry go round of the internet marketing product lifecycle. Easy. You create a strategy at the start and stick to it. Stick to it over the weeks, months and years that follow and slowly but surely you will raise your profile (and search engine rankings) online. In fact, I highly recommend you outsource this so you can focus your true talents on your business. If you are a great artist or writer or designer then that is what you should be doing. Produce the best products you can produce. If your passion is electronics, then spend your time testing them, creating how to videos, and sourcing the latest gadgets from all around the globe. That’s your strength – stick to it. Leave the boring stuff to your hired help. With all your internet marketing outsourced, you automatically avoid the crowds that eagerly gather for the next big internet marketing launch. You see it’s been proven that people are drawn to a crowd. It’s human nature, we pick up on the social cues. If there’s a crowd gathering, there must be something going on that I need to know about. Conversely, if a group of people are running in one direction and screaming our forst instinct is to run with them – without even knowing why. Don’t be a lemming, take my advice and avoid the crowds.

Some Final Thoughts.

If you haven’t started, just get started. It’s amazing how exciting it can be just to register a domain name for a new website venture. Just get the ball rolling. You’ll build momentum, and before you know it you’ll be on your way to a legitimate online business earning you money.

Remember to stay true to yourself. It is the road less travelled that leads to success.

One of the largest and most influential IT companies of all time was started by a college student in 2004. It is the huge success it is today because Mark Zuckerberg followed his passion and focused on the end product and user experience. What other companies do you think fit into this category? Apple (simple, elegant, easy to use products [you could argue they leveraged Facebook's idea when they launched the iPhone App store]), Google (haircuts at work, full buffet, hammocks, beanbags – oh and an excellent search engine ), DreamWorks Animation (Awesome film productions that take teams of experts years to create), Disney (Everybody’s childhood is filled with memories of Disney cartoons). Here is a list of the 100 best companies to work for in 2010.

Facebook started in 2004, that’s not that long ago really. What were you doing in 2004? What have you achieved since then?

In 2004 (remember these?):

A lot has happened in the 7+ years since 2004. Follow your ture calling and make the next 7 years your best ever.

Did you find this post helpful? Please let me know in the comments what you’d like to read more of.