Making Money Online: The Generation Gap

I’m an internet marketer, but I don’t tell my family. The older the relative, the less likely I am to discuss my career. You see, I don’t think they’d quite understand. If I told them I swing an axe to chop lumber and make $100 per day, or heal grievous wounds for $1000 per day, I’m fairly certain we’d be on the same page. Those professions—lumberjack and doctor—have been around for hundreds of years, so they’ve become well established as things to do in life. “Internet marketer” not only sounds vague, but also it is a completely opaque field to most people. When I mention my profession to the uninitiated, all I get is a blank stare, because there’s no obvious association with a widely understood means of support. Many older folks would consider it a weird profession. And I can’t entirely blame them.

Perhaps the lack of a physical product is what’s so troublesome. Money is being constantly pushed around, but for the most part, nothing physical is produced. You’d think that people would be accustomed to this notion—after all, Wall Street has been pushing money around for decades—but there’s still something intrinsically new and uncomfortable about the absence of physical product. One industry after another struggles with how the lack CD, VHS, DVD, or printed book affects the value of the material. What’s the value of a song download? How about an ebook? These are questions most people have never even considered.

Generating (a lot of) money online calls for some different skills and ways of approaching moneymaking than are widely understood. You need a solid understanding of both traditional human desires along with a grasp of the ways in which these desires have been modified and twisted by our online existence. First and foremost, we operate extremely quickly online. Click, click, click. If a web page doesn’t load in three seconds, 90% of us will just move on. If a page is not immediately captivating, tab closed. We’re fickle, and we love it. In order to capture the attention of a web user long enough to make a sale or generate a click, we need to submerge ourselves in the motivations of a specific group of web users. And that’s only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

When you reveal that you make your living online, it sometimes becomes an uncomfortable admission. What skill set do you need, and how can your mother brag about her son’s accomplishments to her friends when she herself doesn’t even understand them? Make no mistake: the internet is still newborn. It’s just taking its first tentative steps into our lives, and puberty is years and years away. As with any new profession, that of internet marketer will take a while to seep into our collective mind. I think it’ll be different in ten years when making a living online will be easy to understand, but by that time, it’ll likely be far less exciting.