I was a regular Internet user, minding my own business, doing the regular facebook thing and sending the odd email. Then i started seeing the ‘Make Money Online’ ads.. For a long time i was immune to it, probably because of hearing about all the scams and stuff from friends and media sources.

Anyway, at some stage curiosity(and desperation) overruled skeptisism and I dove right into the whole thing. Now off course the adverts make it look so easy to make a killing online and most promise amazing returns for no or very little work. Now the problem with this is that we as humans love to dream and believe in quick cash, and many of us prefer to attain huge amounts of money by winning a lottery rather than slaving away for it. Even after having said that, i still wont say that its difficult to make money online.

Anyway, fortunately or unfortunately I didnt even have a credit card and was virtually broke, so i couldnt join every ‘make money quick’ site too quickly. The pshycology of most of these sites is to get you excited and make you believe that the sooner you join, the better. Remember that usually you are alone infront of your screen, so you dont have any second opinion, or the time to think through the offer yourself.  So most people will get excited on evey second or third sales or join page and spend a quite a lot of cash before finding something that works or they’ll get totally dissilusioned and bitterly claim that ‘making money’ is a SCAM!

Having spent the last two months extensively looking for ways to make money, I look back and see an interesting journey that I have followed. On the internet, one thing always leads to another, or one site to another or one idea leads to another. Thats the power of linking, and ultimately, that the power of the internet.

I started out looking at some sites, which i today can easily identify as MLM. – S tatistically 3% of participants make good money with these programs.

I then moved on to filling out surveys, reading emails and viewing ads for cash. – Its an easy way to make a few extra dollars, if you have the time and patience (These methods are only lucrative for mainly citizens of North America, of which im not one)

I then started moving more and more into Internet Marketing, or bieng an afilliate, which is a whole world on its own – Now this idea really got me interested…

Contrary to popular belief, bieng a successfull Internet Marketer, is not just something you do in your spare time for fun. A few years back i guess you could, but these days, because of so much competition, there are so many avenues and angles you have to cover and methods you got to use in conjunction with the others.. Its basicaly a full time job.

Finally… here’s my take on this subject. First lets look at the term: ‘Making Money Online’. To really think about it, its such a vast term, its like saying ‘Living On Earth’ . Think about it, if you have used a company website to apply for a job and you got the job.. then you made money online. If you sent an email invoice to a client, and got paid..then you made money online. If you have ever used Ebay to sell something… then you made money online!

I said that to say this. The internet is now fast becoming the preferred way of communication and business worldwide. I will boldly state, that if you live in any western country and you made money recently from whatever way, then the internet was directly or indirectly involved in the process. This is good news and bad news. This ulitmately means that if you are Living on Earth, you gotta make money somehow. Now if we can see the internet as a virtual extension of our earthly life, its easy to understand. The way you make money on  earth is the way you make money online. For example If your passion is photography, you can use the internet to start a photo blog, you can sell photos online and you can get clients through a website.

The key  is to do what you love, do it with passion, get a following of people who see your love and passion for what you do(your niche) , inspire/help/add value to their lives, and Make Money Online!

I got this email on Friday and it really got me thinking:

“Last year I started on a puzzle. It looked like a tough puzzle. Lots of pieces, lots of similar stuff. The background was scattered with yellow leaves. In the foreground was lots of water splashing from one side to the other. In the middle were horses, some spotted all over. It was very ‘busy’.
I got myself completely overawed. Believe it or not, I ended up by trying to collect all those scattered yellow leaves that dotted the entire background. Then I tried to collect all the pieces of the hardest horse – the spotted one! Needless to say I got nowhere. It was just ‘too hard’. I gave up.

A month ago I tried again. This time I ignored the millions of itty bitty leaves. I ignored the swirls of water

that were all over the show. I started with the easiest horse, which was a white one. There weren’t too many white horse bits, so I easily collected them all and fitted them in. Then I was away, onto the next one, no problem.
I realized that the puzzle was not actually a hard one. I couldn’t believe how I had sabotaged myself by trying to make it as hard as possible the first time around.
And I didn’t even know what I had done to myself!
It was the SAME puzzle. Looking at it one way, it was hard. Looking at it another way, it was easy. And I had first chosen to see it as hard!
It is amazing that the same thing can be so different depending on how you look at it.”

That is a great example of how our mindset makes all the difference. Even ‘objective reality’ can change. It was the same puzzle – but she had changed, and so it went from hard to easy.

I look back at my own life through the years, and i realize how i have actually sabotaged myself, always looking at the great obstacles to overcome and high mountains to climb. I believed i was helping myself to always look at the biggest challenge or the most difficult scenarios. i believed it was the way to attain success. I now realize that this mindset actually did the opposite. This way of thinking caused me to see everything as hard and difficult to attain and conquer, this way of thinking made me to procrastinate from doing important stuff, this way of thinking kept me from moving in greatness, this way of thinking has ultimately restrained me from a great destiny.

Everything we are and do, starts in our thoughts. Now the challenge is to change my thoughts, or my perception of life and things. Now to bring about a mental shift from ‘its hard’ to ‘no man, its simple stuff!’. the problem is that to renew the mind is a very hard thing.. oh see there i did it again… i believe something is hard. Now see the irony of this. If i believe that its hard to change my thinking, ill never change it, so nothing will change and everything in my life will stay difficult and hard, and a struggle! isn’t that crazy?!

So, right now, while writing this.. i decide and i declare that its not hard, its simple! i choose to believe that to believe and think differently is an easy transition. I make a paradigm shift right now and i change my posture and position. i choose to believe in the goodness of life and the greatness of God, i choose to believe that its easy and exciting to do and accomplish great things, i choose to believe that its easy to be great!

I can do anything i wanna do,and you know what… you can to.
You can become a great doctor
You can become a great nuclear scientist
You can become a great funeral director, musician, marketer, housewife, door to door salesman

Hell you can even become a great … (fill in the space)
And the best news of all is that it don’t have to be a struggle, it don’t have to be hard. I declare over you that its EASY!!

Now i realize this is a vast subject and we can write complete volumes on this, but for simplicity sake and to emphasise this concept, i will sum it up in one word… EASY

Easy Money

A few weeks back i went into another frenzy in tryin to find ways to make money online(it happens every few years)
anyway, this time i was more determined and probably more desperate. in the beginning stages of this frenzy, i went into the pshycee or pshycology of money. i had a few aha moments, the most significant one bieng that most, if not all people who have a desire to make money online, actually have a desire or need for more money(pshycology at grassroots level)

now, just to keep the advanced people to continue reading this… the previous sentence is actually a symbolizem of a backlink to strengthen SEO(search engine optimization) indexing. and to not get the newbies from loosing me.. it essentially means that it is a repeat of itself in such a way that you actually find it interesting. i have found that search engines like repeats or confirmations of the same thing from different locations. and in cyberspace the search engin is king. you make search enjin happy, search enjin displays your site… you piss search enjin off.. search enjin ignores you!!

Anyway, this post is about my journey into the abyses, crevices, dark alleys and corprate powerhouses of cyberspace in search of something so vast and vauge, that i certianly didn’t initially know exactly what i was looking for, but it was truly a journey and growth in knowledge as i traversed along.

Rough diagram of existing heavy traffic cyber highways

in my online journeys, i found that there are many ways to travel in cyberspace and many modes of transport. the basic ways to travel are known as surfing, browsing, searching and i even did a bit of moon walking, while paying tribute to Michael Jackson, the pop king who has recently left the planet, but has gone totaly viral in cyberspace.

Now the primary modes of transport are called links. Links are what make the internet so powerful. Think of a link as a teleporter. Those of you who watch a lot of sci-fi, will totally understand this, but for the other few’s sake – a teleporter is a gateway or door that you step through to be instantly taken or teleported from one planet or sphere to another. so practically, lets say you are currently in a yahoo server that is situated somewhere in silicon valley, california. you see a link. you click on the link and you’re instantly teleported to a russian porn site, situated in St Petersburg(and some of you know all to well how unorthodox those russian porn sites are!). anyway im not going to get into the pshycology of porn now, we will keep it above the belt. its just a means to an end.

ok, cyberspace is alot like planet earth. so im going to draw a few rough correlations between earth and cyberspace. now its about to get contraversial in here.. so be warned and realize that this is just an example. i will not be held responsible or consider joining any sects, factions or movements that are formed out of the wisdom found in these writings!!

The internet has a hierachy, like planet earth. at the top of the food chain we have … God of course!
In cyberspace we have Google as king. so in the internet, Google is God. God decides who he likes to display and who not. Those he shows on his first page are guaranteed alot of traffic(people who will go visit their sites). So you want to get into God’s first page, because most people would not even go to the second page when searching to go somewhere. now God uses certain algorythims(which only he knows) to determine who gets first page. many SEO experts(priests and bishops) claim they totally understand God, but none do completely. those who have figured him out the best, make quite a lucrative living online selling their knowledge and preaching their propoganda all over the place.

God of Cyberspace

Now you may ask … does God have a son in cyberspace? hell yes! he has many, his most prominent brainchild bieng… you guessed it… Gmail!!

Now off course we have others who try to take God’s place in the search enjin arena. the main ones at the moment are Microsoft and Yahoo. Microsoft has recently launched a search enjin called bing, and bieng microsoft, it believes completely in itself. there is one god and his name is Allah(microsoft) and his prophet is Mohammed(Bing). i dont have much to say about Yahoo at this stage but for all practical purposes we will now simply refer to Yahoo as Hare Krishna.

Since the birth of the internet in 1994, it always tended to emulate or mutate the dynamics of planet earth. One of the first earthly things it emulated was Communication. It had a look at the postal system and created its own very own version, called email. it then went and emulated businesses and created a virtual copy of them in cyberspace, where people could stop by and do their business online. Like the universe, cyberspace is constantly expanding, and nobody knows where the center, the beginning or the end is. In 2003 there was a cosmic shift. up to then, many people were living an earthly life and an alternative life in cyberspace as a second persona. in 2003 everything changed. the internet became personal. Social networks like Facebook and Myspace were birthed. what Facebook basically did was it started making virtual clones or copies of the inhabitants of earth. it then created networks of these people and sorted them in databases and networks of who their earthly friends were. Myspace did much the same thing, but as of early 2009, its rapidly loosing the market share and (according to some reports)is fast becoming a network consisting mainly teenagers, musicians and me. so for all practical purposes, Myspace has become Facebook’s bitch. That does not neccesarily mean that i dont like myspcae anymore.. why, on earth i find bitch people very interesting and sometimes even cool.

So.. go have a look online, you might find a copy of yourself, caught somewhere in a social network. if you dont, then just create a copy there. and thanks for reading about my findings on my journey thats far from over and my travels somewhere between heaven, earth and cyberspace