Scripture to Memorize
She makes linen garments and sells them,
and supplies the merchants with sashes.
She is clothed with strength and dignity;
she can laugh at the days to come.
Proverbs 31:24–25
Passage to Read
Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
Ephesians 5:15–16
Guided Prayer
Dear Lord, I want to be very careful how I live. I confess that I have not always lived carefully. Sometimes I have been unwise and failed to make the most of the opportunities that came my way. Holy Spirit, help me to grow in wisdom. Train me to hear your voice and to quiet my mind so I can perceive opportunities when they arise. That’s especially important because the days are evil. As a follower of Jesus, I have an obligation to shine the light of truth into every life I touch. Help me to redeem the time so I can live each day to the fullest. Amen.
Personal
The Proverbs 31 woman’s lamp did not go out at night (v. 18)—are we sure she wasn’t surfing the Internet? Isn’t that what keeps most of us awake at night? Of course the Internet is a new technology. In fact I’m pretty sure I can say I was there the day Internet marketing was born. No kidding. In 1996 an editor I had worked with from Home Office Computing magazine called to tell me she was leaving the magazine to work for an Internet content developer. I had no clue what she was talking about. Neither did 99.9 percent of people on the planet. She invited me, and a handful of others, to join her in this new venture called ivillage.com. My mission, should I choose to accept it, was to develop content—articles, self-tests, tidbits of information—that programmers would “put up” on the Internet. It made little sense to me, but since they offered to pay and I needed the money, I agreed.
I was appointed the resident work-from-home guru and began writing mini-articles about working from home, balancing family and career, that sort of thing. I would send them via email—something I had done for the first time just a few months earlier—to the computer geeks who would post them out in cyberspace where, hopefully, someone, somehow, would find them and read them. My head literally hurt as I tried to wrap my little brain around what we were doing.
Then it happened. One day I went to my little corner of cyberspace and there it was: a brown box with the letters UPS on it. Immediately I called my supervisor to ask what on earth was going on? She exclaimed: “We have our first advertiser: UPS.”
My immediate response: “Advertiser? Why on earth would someone advertise on the Internet? No one’s going to buy anything on the Internet! ” Yes, my friends, those were my exact words. So much for my brilliant, prophetic insight! Today ivillage.com is the largest content provider on the Internet. Alas, I quit shortly after the mysterious appearance of the little brown box, firm in my conviction that no one would ever buy anything on the Internet.
But buy they do. As of this writing, Internet sales were conservatively estimated to be around two hundred billion dollars annually,5 and that number grows by the nanosecond. The simplest way to become involved with Internet marketing is selling on eBay and Craigslist. Forget the hassle of a local garage sale and join the world’s biggest online flea market! Thousands of people buy and sell on eBay and Craigslist every day—even people who are not computer whizzes. These online stores are so easy to operate, my ten-year-old set up one for herself in less than an hour.
With eBay, users must enter their name, address, telephone number, and credit card number to begin bidding and selling products. The site charges a small fee for each ad you post. As a general rule, you should list items worth more than fifteen dollars to justify the advertising expense. On the other hand, Craigslist is free, which explains its growing popularity. It’s estimated to have five billion page views per month.
All you need to get started is stuff to sell, a camera, a PayPal account (which is free and takes less than five minutes to set up), and a little creativity. Here are ten tips for selling online:
If selling on eBay and Craigslist doesn’t interest you, or if you grow beyond those enterprises and want to launch out into the deep, you can easily create your own website using free user-friendly software through companies like Yahoo, Site Build It, 1ShoppingCart, and others. Of course, there is a monthly fee to have these companies host your site, but it’s worth it. The various fees for my website and other online marketing tools cost me about seventy-five dollars per month but typically generate five hundred to one thousand dollars per month in additional income. You can hire a webmaster to create a site for you—just be sure to check his or her references. View the sites the person has created and talk with the site owners to find out how happy they were with the service they received. These days, it should cost around five hundred dollars to have a simple webpage created.
Just keep in mind a few simple tips:
It’s easy to get involved with Internet marketing, even without developing your own product or service, by specializing in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers don’t sell their own products or services. Instead, they serve as informal representatives for a wide variety of other web-based marketers. You could be sound asleep and someone in China clicks a button and stumbles on your website, clicks a button that takes him or her to a website offering products you recommend, clicks another button to buy the product. Three clicks and you are getting paid. The most obvious example is Amazon.com. You can create an informative website about a topic of interest to you—say, for example, cooking. Then you provide a list of recommended cookbooks and a direct link to Amazon. Amazon stocks the books, ships the books, bills the customer, and you get paid by Amazon. That’s what residual income is all about. Earning money while you sleep. Of course affiliate marketers have to provide links to lots of websites if they hope to make significant income.
Yes, you can earn money on the Internet. The options are numerous and the opportunities are limitless, because, contrary to my prophecy of long ago, almost everyone buys something on the Internet—even Proverbs 31 women, whose lamps do not go out at night!
Affirmation: My lamp doesn’t go out at night.
Practical
Investigate Internet marketing as an additional stream of income. Visit www.donnapartow.com/internet for more information.