The Power and Accessibility of Internet Entrepreneurship — My Firsthand Account
Teaching Business in Honduras
Several years ago I had the opportunity to give a presentation to a group of 20 or so eager students in Tegucigalpa, Honduras who were attending a 15-week entrepreneurship program designed to help them develop the business skills they need to get ahead in an economy that is difficult and a social environment that is relatively dangerous.
Besides taking on subjects like English, accounting, and other basics of business, this group of mostly young adult students (a few were much older) was given the assignment of figuring out how to start their own respective businesses during the period they took the course. Without a solid educational foundation or access to startup capital, lacking the culture of business and (for most of them) with not much support from friends or family, they were supposed to find ways to become successful business owners.
My presentation to this class, given through a translator, boiled down to essentially this: if you’re willing to spend six to 12 months focusing on learning how to steer traffic on the internet using one of the many forms of internet marketing (creating written, graphical, or video content and studying concepts involved in search engine optimization and social media marketing), you can open up dozens of opportunities to make at least $500 per month, which is a very livable wage in Honduras and in many other third-world countries.
A Spanish YouTube Channel Teaching Excel
The specific opportunity I described to this class in Honduras involved starting and developing YouTube channel that would teach people in Spanish how to use Microsoft Excel. The would simply need a computer with Excel installed on it and some kind of screen capture software, a setup that’s pretty easy to come by, even in their meager environment.
My reasoning to them regarding building a YouTube channel teaching Microsoft Excel in Spanish was that becoming adept at Excel is important for almost any business, and one of the best ways to learn something well is to teach it to others. Because English tends to be the language most used on the internet, there was (still is from what I’ve observed recently) a scarcity of information in Spanish on YouTube and elsewhere that teaches what we have available to us in English. There is much more demand for that kind of content than there is supply of it.
I haven’t followed up very well on that particular group of students to see whether any of them took up my challenge to create a $500/month YouTube business. I’m assuming that if someone had taken the challenge and put in the work, I would have been told about the success story. If you know of anyone in Latin America who has a success story along the lines of what I recommended to my friends in Honduras, I’d be glad to hear about it. I still do consulting for the Lifting Generations organization that operates these entrepreneurship camps. It is much more compelling to them when I can demonstrate how someone in a similar circumstance has accomplished what I’m encouraging them to do.
My Own Story of Internet Entrepreneurship
Growing up, I never took much about life too seriously. I was an average baseball, wrestling, and football athlete in high school, kind of a fun seeker who probably didn’t spend enough time studying and likely too much time working on dance moves and weight lifting. I worked jobs when I needed to earn money for school or when I wanted to take a girl on a date. The most entrepreneurial thing I did as a kid was simply participating in the lawn mowing business my older brothers started.
I was pretty much a mostly regular guy who grew up in a large, lower middle class family. I expected that I might fare a bit better financially with my own family than what I experienced growing up, but I was not even aware of what possibilities would exist in my future career.
A couple years into college, while working as a software developer at a startup company, I tried to start a family business, an auto repair and tire shop, with my dad and my four brothers. I spent hundreds of hours doing market research, including walking door to door doing “automotive needs” interviews in the neighborhoods surrounding the area we’d pick out for our store. A single guy in my mid-20s, I bought a starter home and finished the basement working mostly by myself, so I could pull out the equity from the home and combine it with my savings to help fund our family business.
While searching for financing — we needed over $1M to get things rolling — for the auto business, I learned that my father’s and brother’s risk thresholds were much lower than I mine were. The bankers always (naturally) asked us about collateral to be used to recoup their money in case our auto shop failed. The thought of losing a home or other forms of equity caused some of the key players (the mechanics) to bail, which meant the whole idea quickly evaporated.
But I learned a lot from the experience of this particular “failed business”. For starters, I understood that starting a business can be risky, and that one of the most important skills a business owner should develop is the ability to limit risk, to figure out what could potentially take out the business and to hedge against it. Second, I learned that a business that requires a lot of startup capital - in this case expensive real estate, a building, equipment, and tires — has a huge barrier to entry. The risk of failure seems to multiply with each dollar spent on something that might not directly and immediately contribute to the business’ ability to thrive or that limits cash flow.
Moving on from the family mechanic shop experience, I found myself asking over an over, “Aren’t there business models that don’t require so much risk and investment up front, but that still have a lot of wealth-building potential?”
What I quickly found out was this: the internet has created thousands of those kinds of high-reward, low-risk opportunities.
Tapping Into The Global Flow of Money And Resources
Developing Software for Communitect
During the time I was trying to crank up my family tire store, I was working as a software developer at a startup company called Communitect. We were developing a text messaging application that was initially prototyped to be a ubiquitous tool that would allow users to do everything from automatically moving their money from checking to savings accounts or vice-versa to buying a drink or snack out of a vending machine. After experiencing some setbacks and having to pivot a time or two trying to find a niche, I was laid off. [The company later focused on becoming an appointment reminder app for dental offices and did pretty well.]
What I learned from my experience at Communitect was this: there is a constant flow of money and resources throughout the world every day. The money I saw being poured into this tech startup from wealthy investors who wanted even a small chance to capitalize on its profit potential seemed to create in my mind a vision of what could be achieved because of the advances in technology that make the world a small place, and that allow you to almost as easily have customers on the other side of the world as you have just down the street.
I soon understood that my challenge as an entrepreneur was to find a way to tap into that flow of money and wealth, and, in an honest and ethical way, essentially create win-win situations that would allow me to siphon from that endless stream of wealth in exchange for contributing something of value back to that vast collection of data, people, technology.
After tinkering a bit with a business model that involved looking locally for discounted products and selling them on eBay, I decided to build an ecommerce store and sell sporting goods products. That was in 1999. Now, almost 20 years later, I’ve been the proud owner of 8 different successful online stores. Almost all of them were built on a drop-ship ecommerce model that involves setting up wholesale accounts with suppliers, advertising their products using osCommerce, Zen-Cart, BigCommerce, or WordPress/WooCommerce (my most recent platform of choice) shopping carts, and driving traffic (mostly search referrals) to each website through content marketing, social media, and SEO. The store niches have ranged from children’s formal wear to safety equipment to custom made vinyl decals, essentially spread all over the map. I’ve found that the process is highly repeatable, no matter the industry.
I’ve been able to sell in the neighborhood of $10M worth of product over those 20 years, almost entirely working from home. I’ve been blown away with the opportunities the internet has given to me personally.
Venturing Into Content: Prosperopedia.com
Over the years I’ve had a chance to share with a lot of people what I’ve learned about using the internet to create a living that allows me to work from home and spend time with my family much more often than a 9–5 job allows. As the number of people interested in my model grew such that I didn’t have time to help everyone individually, I found it useful to create a Udemy course that reviews the details of the process.
Over the years, the world of ecommerce has become much more competitive. I ignored Amazon for over a decade before I finally jumped in and started selling there a couple years ago. The Amazon store my wife and I created has grown from a hobby into a full-fledged business. That has been good for us. However, I’ve seen Amazon not only take over a good portion of online retail (very niche product stores like my safety products store can still be successful at drop-shipping), but their dominance of the ecommerce world combined with sharply increasing shipping costs (Amazon has trained consumers to disdain paying for shipping, so ecommerce store owners often have to eat some portion of that fulfillment expense) over the years has motivated me to try out content marketing, almost as a hedge against the possibility that my ecommerce model might all but disappear.
With a partner of mine who’s a video and graphics pro, I recently started a website I’ve branded Prosperopedia.com. We call it the handbook for success, happiness, and prosperity. I’m using the website as a method for learning things I’ve always wanted to learn about employment, real estate, mortgages, finance, debt, education, investing, self-improvement and other interesting topics. Along the way, I’ll be brain-dumping what I already know and what I’m currently learning in such a way that it will become a popular hub for people looking for information about the variety of topics I’m covering. By the way, I’m looking for authors who’d be interested in writing for us. If you’re a Prosperopedia-type person, feel free to connect about writing for us. I’m happy to make it worth your while.
My plan for Prosperopedia.com is to reach $20k in monthly revenue (which I’ll split with my business partner, Ben) by the end of 2018 and continue upward from there. Our model for monetizing our website includes advertising (Google AdSense and niche sponsors), affiliate accounts (Amazon Associates, Udemy, and a few dozen others), and doing lead generation for mortgage, real estate, investment, and other companies. We expect to have 50,000 monthly visits to the site by December, 2018, including traffic from Google, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If you’re interested in seeing the blueprints for how we’ll do it, let me know. I’m happy to share it with you.
I should note that I’ve learned quite a bit from other content marketers, whose ideas for growing my content site and monetizing it I’ll be using with Prosperopedia.com. One of my favorites is JustAGirlAndHerBlog.com, who published her blog income reports so that others could get a sense of how she (and her husband…and her helpers who’ve come along) has grown.
Some Ideas for Becoming an Internet Entrepreneur
My journey from Dairy Queen cook and ice cream cone maker to failed tire store wannabe business guy to successful internet entrepreneur has given me a lot of experience about what works and what doesn’t in regards to making money.
Some of the many different ways to tap into the power of the internet and earn a living on your own from home that I’ve seen or have been a direct part of include:
- Drop-shipping: build an ecommerce store and sell products sourced from suppliers who ship to customers after they’ve purchased from your store. →This one I’ve done several times.
- Selling on Amazon, including sourcing your own products (which is what I do currently; we manufacture our own vinyl wall decals) or selling through arbitrage (retail or online). →This one I’ve done a couple times
- Building a content website and monetizing it with ads, affiliate accounts, and lead. → This one I’m doing now.
- Writing content for other websites. This model doesn’t give you the sellable business owner equity you’d have with one of the other methods, since it’s basically getting paid for piece work, which doesn’t scale. However,
- Build a social media following (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter) and monetize it using the pay-per-post model.
- Do fulfillment work for businesses who want to be successful on the internet, but who just don’t have internet marketing in their DNA. This kind of company can be scalable by hiring people to do the fulfillment, like Boostability has done.
I’m grateful for the development of the internet and for the mentors and educational resources that exist to show people like me how to use the internet to benefit me, my family, and others within the sphere of my influence. I hope that you can draw from my experience and be motivated to do your own thing, whether it’s one of the models I describe above, or some other method you come up with on your own.
Some Resources for Getting Started
If you think you’re like to jump into the world of internet marketing and make part-time income or even a full-time career, here are some of the resources I use or have used to give myself the knowledge I draw from every day to continue building my businesses.
SEO and Content Marketing
How Google Works: a video by Matt Cutts summarizing how Google’s search engine works. Other search engines are fairly similar:
Moz
Moz.com is probably the most common place where internet marketing people hang out. They have tools, research, how-to’s, and a community that is focused on the kind of marketing I’ve been explaining. Here are two of their introductory guides to get you started.
Easy to read and graphically pleasant guide to SEO: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Easy to read and graphically pleasant guide to social media: The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media