Following-up on an earlier reply, Obafemi wrote me again, asking how best he could make money online. I chose to answer this question publicly, so as to guide other up-and-coming Internet-based entrepreneurs. I reproduce his email below:
Thank you David,
I do respect your expediency, I like your blog and I like eolutsin’s blog too. I will like you to please give your honest opinion about this project I am working on right now. I am setting up something just like eolutosin’s. Do you think it is a worthwhile venture?
Though I know about some programs online but I am just starting out real-time (Just cutting my teeth). I also don’t want my blog to look like all these get rich quick schemes around. They ask you to buy one book or the other yet after purchase you find out that it’s not what you think. Please I want a steady source of income from the net something stable different from scams etc. For example, 3 years ago it was forex, 2years ago fixed odd, last year crude oil. I know of Adsense and affiliates and am going into that.
Your opinion is greatly cherished.
Thanks a lot.
My response:
Thank you for writing Obafemi.
For a start, you need to know who Emmanuel Oluwatosin is. He is a young entrepreneur from Nigeria. In 2004, he started Nairahost with 3 other people and that means he must have been online before 2004 to have gained the knowledge + experience needed to set-up a business based online. In August 2007, he resigned from a paid employment and started an MBA program at Manchester Business School in the United Kingdom.
What is eolutosin.com about?
EOlutosin.com is a weblog whose focus is to provide relevant and up-to-date information to everyone interested in starting and managing their businesses or those who want to make the best of their current career and / or job. The blog offers motivations and help for personal and entrepreneur development. The focus is on challenging people to move from words to actions.
By sharing a summary of Emmanuel’s profile, I am pointing-out to you that he has a wealth of experience, good education and some useful knowledge to share with the world. Unless you have something really useful to share, setting-up a blog like his is probably not the best idea for you right now. It is very important that you gained some deep-rooted knowledge in a particular field before attempting to share – if you want to be taken seriously. It is not wrong to aspire to be like him or other people making loads of money online but it is also very important to truly understand what you want and how you will get there.
Since money is your motivation, I will add that I am not sure about how much he makes monthly from that blog. However, I am sure that blog is just a means to an end for him, and not an end in itself. He is using the blog to build a brand around his personality and that will help boost his core businesses online.
I agree with you about not wanting to follow the bandwagon of getting-rich-quick on the Internet. It is indeed true that too many of such programmes are only exploiting ignorant people, and others who have some change to loose. I must quickly add that it is indeed possible to make a legitimate income online – enough to take care of all your wants, with more to spare. There are multiple factors that would determine how much you can earn online: your skill, knowledge, experience, persistence (or lack of it), capital, fast Internet connectivity etc.
Since I am not inclined towards long blog posts, I will break here. My next blog post would be for you. Though I originally wrote it on 7th April 2007 and published it on another blog of mine, I have re-edited and re-published it here: Is it really possible to make a living online?
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