HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE: The Three Basic Skills You Need for Success

I’ve often told my kids that there are two lifestyle decisions that have the largest impact on adult life: who you marry, and the work you choose to do. And one of the things I greatly value is work that does not require me to be in a certain place and a certain time. Flexibility of location and schedule is where the digital revolution can really help, as I know from personal experience since 1988.

If you want to earn a living online from anywhere in the world, on your own schedule, using nothing but a laptop and cell phone, there are three attitudes you need to develop. Since I began earning a living this way (three decades now), I’ve come to realize three basic truths are vital for anyone looking to work profitably outside the usual sorts of in-person employment situations. Below you’ll find a basic list that I’ll go into in more detail  in this article.

The Three Truths of Online Income Success

1. Forget “get rich quick” ideas.
2. Understand the “value” reality.
3. Prepare to develop new skills.

Online Income Truth#1: Forget “Get Rich Quick”

I know some people have gotten very rich very quickly online, but I don’t know how to do this. The best I’ve been able to achieve is to make things work slowly, and modestly, and this is what I’ll share with you here. In many ways, slow and steady is best. Based on what I hear people tell me, getting rich quick isn’t even something that many ordinary people realistically aspire to. Instead I can assure you that ordinary success, creating a stable, profitable, online work regime that I can be done anywhere in the world is entirely possible. My regime won’t be your regime, but there are take-aways you can apply to your own, unique venture. That said, there is at least one thing that’ is truly universal.

True success always takes patience and consistency and that’s why you should give yourself a year without expectations of earning any money online. A year to get going. Chances are good that you will bring in money sooner than this (perhaps much sooner), but don’t think about the profit part just yet. Instead, think of preparing yourself to create and deliver value to someone somewhere. And this thing – “value” – is at the heart of your dream to earn money on your own online, wherever you happen to be. And this brings me to something else that’s vitally important.

Online Income Truth#2: Understand the Value Equation

In one sense, earning a living from home is no different than earning a living in the usual way with a usual location-specific job and boss. Both ventures come down to a fundamental reality that sits at the foundation of all free market success. This simple reality is that we’re paid for value we create, and not a penny more. The equation below says it all:

Skills + Economic Demand = Value

Any difficulty that anyone has earning enough money doing whatever they’re doing (online or not) comes down to something to do with a violation of this equation. Perhaps there’s a true economic need that people are willing to pay for, but you don’t have the skills to meet that need efficiently. Insufficient value delivered means insufficient money for you.

More commonly from what I see, people have skills (often related to personal passions), but those skills aren’t the right kind to satisfy an economic need people are willing to pay for. You can be the greatest maker of ice boxes in the world, for instance, but who would buy something like that when the world has plug-in refrigerators? Real skills need to meet a real economic demand for value to be created in an economic sense.

If you’ve ever tried to earn money online and it didn’t work, there’s a problem somewhere with insufficient value generation. Setting aside accidental flash-in-the-pan success, criminal activities, or perhaps winning a lottery, your financial rewards in life are in direct proportion to the value you bring to other people. It’s common for unsuccessful people to offer excuses such as “it all comes down to who you know” or “if only I had more X, then I could succeed”.  Yes, there are challenges to achieving anything worthwhile in life, but meeting challenges and growing from them is one of the main values of life itself. Don’t shrink from this. Embrace it.

To be clear, I’m not saying that financial value is the only kind of value in the world. Certainly not. But for our purposes here, when I say “value”, I mean the kind the marketplace demands and will pay for. In the end, I want to help you create a steady stream of cash that you can bring to the bank in exchange for working at something you like (maybe even love) on your own terms, your own schedule, and your own location.

Online Income Truth#3: You Probably Need New Skills

Almost no one already possesses all the skills they need to succeed at something new. This emphasizes the importance of mentally uncoupling from results at the beginning of your venture to earn a living online. Why? You need the time and attitude to retool yourself to create value, and this situation reminds me of the two men who invented powered aircraft back at the turn of the 20th century, the Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio.

Like you probably do, these two men – Orville and Wilbur Wright – had a source of what I call “conventional” income. They had a small shop where they made and repaired bicycles. They could have stayed with this for the rest of their lives, but they also had a much larger dream. The idea of an engine-powered, heavier-than-air flying craft was something many “experts” said could not be done. That was back in the earliest years of the 1900s, and the Wrights disagreed with the naysayers. But they also knew there was much they did not yet know about how to make something fly under power. Literally every detail needed to be designed, tested and redesigned, all without any previous knowledge to go by. Countless things needed to come together just right for flight to happen, and it took many attempts and painful, dangerous, expensive crashes before anything like success happened. If nothing else, the Wright brothers were perseverant, and you need to be, too. Do you know what kept these men going? One simple thing.

Whenever the voices of “reason” told them powered flight could never happen, the Wright brothers looked up at the birds. These creatures proved that some kind of powered, heavier-than-air flight was possible, and irrefutably so. Look at the soaring eagle! You have the same fall-back as Orville and Wilbur did. You can look around and see people – more and more all the time – earning a good living from anywhere they happen to be, following a schedule of their own devising. I’m one of these people and I have been doing it  for 30+ years. I’ve also coached three of my five kids to do the same, and all are succeeding to earn enough money from a single income to support families. Eagles are flying all around you, so to speak, and you can probably fly with them if you’re willing to equip yourself to do it.

Think about the Wright brothers in relation to a question: “Could Orville and Wilbur’s craft flown if they had the camber of the wings correct, but the engine wouldn’t run? No. Could the craft have flown if the engine started and ran but the tail of the plane was too heavy? No. How successful would their plane be if the first gust of wind caused a wing to break? Not successful at all. The lesson here is that not only do you need an idea that’s theoretically possible, but all the physical details that could turn that theoretical possibility into an actual reality need to be in place. It’s like a combination lock. You can get two numbers perfectly correct, but if the last number is wrong, the lock won’t open.

Have you heard from people who have tried earning a living online but failed? Perhaps you have personal experience of failure in this area, too? In every case of a “crash”, some detail was not correct. Get the details right and your plane will fly. It must.  A + B must equal C. Just look at the eagles. Faith that success is possible for you is the most important factor because without faith you won’t put in the time and effort needed to build your online work regime.

Moving Forward With Online Income

There’s nothing I can tell you that will let you go out tomorrow and begin earning a living online if you’re not already doing so. However, I can help you develop the ways of thinking and acting that will, if followed, invariably result in success. Whether or not success actually happens for you depends on you. Eventually it comes down to the nitty-gritty of how to do this technical thing or that creative thing, but for now more groundwork is needed. Next time I’ll tell you about the two main types of independent, online work. It’s important that you know what these are and how you and your temperament and dreams fit into them.

This article is intended to be an encouragement to you, but of course there’s much more to it than just this message.  If you have an urge to turn your professional life in this direction, and have some questions, email me at [email protected]