Essentials

Bare necessities:

Wich are the barest necessities to have in order to start blogging or publishing websites when you set your aim at earning money on the Internet?

Here’s the list:

Access time to a functional computer
A working Internet connexion
A web browser
Willingness to learn
A Plan or Goal
Motivation
Products to sell or promote
Basic writing skills
Determination
Patience
Knowing what you are getting into

That’s a short list isn’t it?

Is that really all one needs in order to succeed on the Internet?

To my knowlege, yes, definitely yes! The rest is dependent of your skills, experience, intelligence, ability to work and do the things required for money to start coming your way.

Is it really THAT easy?

I did not say that and I would not state that making money by way of the Internet is easy. Some people will make you believe that it is and for some people, making money on the internet is as simple as breathing.

What these people don’t say is how and why it has become that easy to them. But looking closer, the vast majority of these people have acquired and acumulated know-how and skills over a number of years.

If you would ask Michael Schumacher if he thought driving was easy, he’d probably smile before answering you. Internet marketers like Jean Philippe Schoeffel, Jeremy Gislason or Simon Hodgkinson probably wouldn’t smile at such a question. They would probably start scratching the back of their neck while thinking of an answer that wouldn’t hurt your feelings.

I know, because I actually asked one of them this question. It would seem that all successful internet marketers go through the same type of experience. When they become successful, it looks like they attain a certain mythical “rank” and people start referring to them as “gurus”.

That, together with the fame that goes with becoming successful on the internet seems to generate some very unwelcome side effects. It would seem that they start getting the weirdest requests (thousands of emails every day) and that they are submitted to a gruelling amount of questions from people who seem to have decided to hold a contest on who would be able to ask the most stupid question.

You can imagine how time consuming this can be and how much fun it is to start reading the first 500 emails (from a batch of 1800 in total that day) of which 300 start with the sentence: “I downloaded your program. When I click on “Start” it is nowhere. What should I do?” or “I downloaded your manual and I can’t find it on my computer, please send me another one.”

It is like the reaction of readers to the content of this page. Some will laugh it off as balderdash, luckily for me, that’s the smallest part of all readers. Then some will react with amazement, thinking “I had no idea”. They will be the majority of readers. Then there will be those who will put a little smile on their face, thinking: “I know, but it’s a lot worse than he is actually describing”. Those will be the successful internet marketers.

Finally, there will be those that will start laughing. They will be thinking: “That’s life my friend, we all have to go through that”. These are the computer professionals, the people who write the code and refer to themselves as poets or the people who design the hardware. I dedicate this article to them, their patience and their genius.

Thanks to these people there are programs like “facebook” and “FireFox”. Thanks to these professionals we now have 8 Gigabite USB keys and 4 Gigabite digital camera memories and we can run programs through dual core processors.