Looking Ahead And Building Equity Online
Go to almost any internet marketing forum and you’ll see posts by some poor soul asking “How can I make $500 in the next 2 weeks online?” The post usually contains a sob story of how they’ll get kicked out of their apartment, the water and power will be turned off, they already sautee’d their cat for food, etc.
The best advice to give to them is “Get a job” and they get offended if someone actually says that in the thread.
The problem is, in order for them to get to that point in their lives, they more than likely have no equity built up in their offline or online lives.
Offline, you build equity by investing either time, money or work into something that either holds stead or increases in value over time. Think realestate. You buy a house and every month you make a payment on your mortgage, you’re gaining equity + any increase in resale value over time.
Online, you need to build equity as well… through ownership, just like offline.
How do you do that? Quite simply (maybe oversimplified) you register a domain name for under $10, get a hosting account for under $20 a month and start building something on the site. But where millions fail is in WHAT they decide to build.
Scraping content from other sites, or simply republishing stuff that can be found anywhere else on the web does not build a good foundation for your online business. There’s no value.
The key to building equity online, is to add value to what you’re building.
If you decide to set up a blog, write engaging content in your own words and through your own personality… that other people want to read, and come back to your site to read more of. If people come back to your site a second or third time, that content is valuable to them.
As more and more people become aware of your content and site through word of mouth, links from other sites, search engines, etc. your blog gains value, and equity.
As more and more people become aware of your site, you’ll make more money through affiliate programs, contextual advertising, direct paid advertisers, etc. The fact that your content is valuable to your readers now starts to pay off.
The more you write the more people come, the more links you get, the more people tell their friends, the more content there is the more searchengines have to index and the more people come from there… The more your income grows…
Just like a mortgage with it’s sliding scale of payments vs. interest, the more you pay and the longer you own it, the more equity you build.
Now, not everyone will have the same amount of success in building equity online, just like in the realestate market, but the quicker you get started with building something… the quicker you start building equity.
Invest some money, time and work in your online business starting today. Not tomorrow, or next week, or after you’ve done more learning and research, or after that new magic bullet internet marketing or SEO course is launched… do it now.
A year from now, if you need $500 or even $5000 to bail yourself out of a pinch, the equity you’ve built should cover it and then some.
[Photo credit: David Wilmot Via Flickr]
