Making Money on the Internet: Watch Out for This Killer Trap

There are two ways of making money on the Internet. Going for extra cash or going for an empire or millions. Different entrepreneurs have different objectives in life. Nothing wrong with that. The issue becomes when you start your own small business and down the line you realize that it’s not a business but a job! Discover how to discover that fatal fact before it ever happens!

A case I can think of from recent memory is a web designer who wanted to make money online selling his services. She was a one-woman shop and did the design work, marketing and business management. She was making decent money from freelance websites such as Guru or Elance. But very soon, she realized that since her hours were limited, she still earned the same amount of money as her previous job while working harder and longer!

(A web design business can be a great way to make money on the Internet from home. Photo: .Fabio)

In other words, this was no Internet business, it was merely Internet independent contracting! Don’t get me wrong, if you are just interested in the freedom to set your own hours, choose your clients and projects then it’s all good. If your objective is to make millions, you are in a serious jam. Your solution would be to land more high paying projects or hire additional designers as a way of leveraging time.

I sat down with the web designer and told her to put on her entrepreneurial hat in lieu of the creative one. I asked her: what web design related problem nags at least a hundred thousand people who would be grateful for a fast, easy, cheap solution. That was her assignment. She had to come to me with the ideas so that we could evaluate the strong opportunities over the weak ones.

She could not think of any. That mental block happens a lot if one’s brain is not trained to recognize problems or opportunities. I quizzed, quizzed and quizzed her for two hours or so until we landed on an Internet money making idea. It turns out that she was a respected authority in tableless web design (yes, I had to look it up on Wikipedia too to understand what it meant!)

“Why not change your own small business and start making money on the Internet selling CSS templates?”, I asked. She liked the idea but told me that there were many websites available that provided them for free and that no one would pay for hers if they could just get them for free.

“Well if you make your CSS templates valuable enough, smart prospective clients will buy them. Couldn’t you for instance create some for professional sites and limit them to a number of downloads?”

We polished the idea and she went on from working as web designer to making money online with a striving Internet business. She could make money while she slept as someone in London could buy her template while it was 3AM Pacific time and she could go on as many holidays she wanted without worrying about the no work/no pay conundrum that most working people face.

There are different ways of making money online. Start you own small business only if it has potential to grow into a million dollar operation. That does not mean that you need thousands of employees like Google. Craigslist makes millions with only 20 employees! The one thing you should seriously watch for is if the online business is actually another unpleasant job in disguise.