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FINANCIAL
FREEDOM ONLINE – IS IT POSSIBLE?
©
Rosamunde Bott 2008
In years to come, the early 21st
century may well
be described as the internet age.
In the
last ten years, internet use has increased by ten times. There are now
approximately 1407 million
people using the internet compared to 147 million in 1998. That makes for a very
steep line graph!
What
does this mean for the self employed?
Is financial freedom online a possibility for
our futures? In
recent years it has
become almost unacceptable not have an online presence of some sort if
you run
any kind of business. More
and more
people go straight to their computer when they want to find a service,
product
or information. This
has meant that
people who offer computer services, such as website design or online
marketing
tools can earn very nicely.
But
there is another growing business area that benefits
directly from the surge in internet usage.
It’s an area that has, in the past,
suffered a little from public
association with pyramid schemes and other scams.
Thankfully, however, these erroneous
associations are beginning to slip away, and the internet marketing
industry
(or affiliate marketing, online business, mlm – call it what
you will) is
expanding rapidly.
While there are many companies
whose whole business is about
affiliate marketing, more and more mainstream companies are offering
affiliate
schemes for their clients and customers.
Large companies such as Amazon and Ancestry.com have
their own affiliate
systems and even much smaller businesses will offer their customers
commission
for referral sales.
Affiliate
marketing seems to be the business model of the
future. As more
people turn to the
internet to find answers and opportunities, the greater these companies
will
grow and, hopefully, the fear and distrust of such companies will
decline.
As
affiliate marketing becomes more acceptable, the scam
businesses will be less able to pull in the unwary surfer. When any industry becomes
acceptable in
public view, there are more systems in place to prevent fraud. Even now there is really
no reason to fall
for unscrupulous sales talk – there are so many internet
marketing forums where
it is easy to discover just what is valid and what isn’t.
To
look at the subject in a different way, many people have
become disillusioned with the job ethos.
In part, this is due to the rise of personal
development and the
awareness of choice and the ability to choose our own lives. Increasingly, people are
leaving employment
in order to work at home, and in today’s environmental and
economic climates,
this can only be a positive thing.
In
many ways, I think that if we are not taking the
opportunities for financial freedom that the internet is providing,
then we are
missing out on something that is going to explode pretty soon.
The
path to financial freedom online can be a personal one,
too. It can be
customised to suit an
individual’s beliefs and interests.
In
affiliate marketing, there is an amazing variety of programs to choose
from,
suiting all kinds of different individual needs.
Some
people might just choose one program and focus on
that. Others might
choose several and
promote them all from their own website.
Others like to go even further and write their own
e-books, or even
design their own programs. The
possibilities
are literally endless, and the industry is constantly expanding and
evolving.
It’s
a very exciting place to be right now, and I have no
doubt that financial freedom online is one hundred per cent possible
for anyone
prepared to work for it.
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