Finding prosperity through the ‘Great Equalizer’

[Editor’s note: Simon’s close friend Craig Ballantyne, now editor of the Early to Rise publication, is filling in today while Simon sits in boring meetings with his Chilean attorneys.]

Imagine being a recently divorced mother of two young women who were about to enter the expensive American college system, and yet your job at a local government agency paid peanuts. Oh, and your hobby was knitting. How the heck would you be able to afford living in Southern California and sending those girls to college?

The answer, of course, is the Internet. The world wide web is the great equalizer in today’s economy. It’s the business equivalent of having a second passport, foreign bank account, and second residence, all rolled into one.

You see, the Internet allows you to play the role of David in the battle against Goliath. It allowed Penny Halgren, the woman I described above, to create cheap websites where she sells hundreds of thousands of dollars of quilting books and information each year. Oh, and her cat helps, too, by being the “voice” of her emails sometimes. (And no, her cat is not named Simon Black.)

But you don’t even need to create your own product to generate a second income or full-time income on the Internet. One of the affiliates for my fitness product, Rusty Moore, started generating thousands of dollars per month through his website by selling other people’s fitness products.

And he did all of this while working full-time as a sales manager at a men’s clothing store in Seattle. Eventually Rusty was able to quit his job and now makes three times his old salary with his website business.

You don’t need a $3000 website. You don’t need to be a technical Harry Potter. You don’t need to know computer language coding or what java script is (Note: It’s not a recipe for coffee).

In fact, I coined my own law when it comes to Internet success. Ballantyne’s Law states:

“The more technical expertise you have about such things as building websites, connecting merchant accounts to your online shopping cart, or writing computer code, etc., the LESS money you’ll make on the Internet.”

(Okay, Mark Zuckerberg excluded, but the majority of the men and women I know who are making six-figures per year, and more, on the Internet don’t know how to put up their websites. Believe me, I’ve met Simon Black, and he’s no Mark Zuckerberg.)

What’s really important for web-based business success is for you to know:

a)      How to communicate
b)      How to connect with other people
c)      How to add value to your customers and to all your business relationships
d)      How to solve customer’s problems
e)      How to be persistent

You don’t need a computer science degree for ANY of those factors of success when it comes to making money with the world’s great equalizer.

The reality is that you can piggyback off the largest companies in the world, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook (Note: Recent state tax law changes have caused Amazon to eliminate affiliate opportunities in a few areas of the United States, all the more reason to follow Simon’s advice on planting multiple flags).

Simply put, if you have an Internet connection, you can start and operate a number of very successful businesses for minimal cost. I still remember the feeling I had when it first really hit me that I could make money anywhere in the world as long as I had the Internet.

I was sitting on a plane in Dubai in 2006 ready to return home after visiting a few friends who had moved from Canada to the UAE for work. Back in those days I was still working part-timer as a personal trainer while building my online fitness business.

Being in Dubai, I obviously had to give up my training income for the week, however, my writing a few emails to my fitness list, I was able to make over $1500 that week in online sales, including $300 the morning I checked my sales on my Blackberry while sitting on that plane ready to go home.

That’s when I knew I had beat the system.

The Internet remains the greatest opportunity for the average person to control their economic future.

Believe me, I’ve gone to dozens of seminars and met literally thousands of Internet entrepreneurs, and the majority of them are unassuming, regular, “folks next door” types who stumbled across the Internet and leveraged this unique opportunity into a business they can run from their kitchen table in their underwear. Or the coffee shop.

And if I may be politically incorrect for a second, a lot of these people are not rocket surgeons. In fact, some of my best friends who make money with the Internet probably couldn’t hold down a 9 to 5 job in the real world.

But my friends can follow proven systems for adding value to the lives of their customers by communicating the solutions to their customer’s problems.  It’s often that simple. Sovereign Man is fantastic example of identifying a problem in the marketplace and communicating solutions to the people that have these problems.

Oh, and one more thing. The successful people I know are persistent. They refuse to give up. They look at a failure in a positive light because of the lessons learned that can then be applied to future success.

Like Simon, I’m an optimist. In fact, I still believe the ‘American Dream’ is possible, no matter where you may live. I’ve achieved it (and I’m Canadian), and I see people achieving it every day, all because of the Great Equalizer.

And you can do it too, from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an Internet connection and the determination to add value and solve other people’s problems.

You can beat the system and take control of your future.

[As editor of the daily e-letter Early to Rise, Craig is an eternal optimist and believes that everyone can still realize their own unique ‘American Dream’.  Craig’s advice about using the Internet to build income is without peer, and you can find out more about how he does it here.]

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