The great thing about the internet life is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Gale force winds blow snow horizontally across my home office window and churn the sea below it into angry white horses. Inside I feel grateful. Grateful that I’m not out there, dashing from my car to a meeting or stuck on the M8 motorway late one. I’m grateful that I worked out how to earn my income online from the comfort of my own home all those years ago. And that it has enabled me choose where that home is.
When the weather is like this and worse I can’t help remembering my years in the audio visual Industry as a technician and project manager. Of course I have some rose tinted memories of good times but a lot of the times were bad. Very bad.
I recently wrote about some of the words and phrases my colleagues and I came up with to describe those times. There was the unforgettable BOHICA (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again): Short hand for a hundred crappy situations: A sudden late night when you had plans, a last minute delivery or one man job that should have been three men.
Later when I became a business development manager there were different types of BOHICA: The endless meetings, targets, inter-office politics and again unexpected late nights. I was able to escape a lot of that simply by being “in the field” and largely self managed. But I found this increasingly silly as the internet started to dominate the business world in the noughties.
Knocking On Actual Doors?
Sitting motionless in a traffic jam in my posh company car I’d look at all the other stationary, single occupant cars spewing fumes into the atmosphere. Why are we all doing this I’d wonder. Is it to get to a certain place for 9am or home from it at 5pm? To get to a meeting we could have done on a phone or even then, a video call? To hand out business cards and brochures at a network meeting?
In a business that was already inefficient it started to seem crazily wasteful and stupidly old fashioned. I could do more prospecting for new business online in a day than I could in a week of field work. Thats normal in our post pandemic world but ten years ago most MD’s wanted their people out there knocking doors. Actual doors.
The problem is that this kind of working regime leaves you no time to look for something else. Add a couple of hours travel time to an 8 hour day and you don’t want to do much when you get home. When weekends are often interrupted by events, either operating AV equipment or smooching with clients, time off is used for relaxation. The money’s Ok you tell yourself, it could be worse.
Had it not been for the 2008 recession I might have lived that life for another decade. The pandemic shut down the company I worked for and many others in 2020 so I’d have been on the scrap heap anyway. But in 2010 I was laid off, immediately poached by a competitor and laid off by them in 2012. I was 47.
The Internet Life Evangelist
The last thing I felt then was lucky but with hindsight I definitely was. In their efforts to get rid of me after I’d brought them as many old clients as I could, the second mob inadvertently presented me with an opportunity. After winning the AV contract for a large hotel they based me in it to look after them and find new opportunities. This arrangement left me with considerable time on my hands. I used it to learn all about internet marketing. By the time they laid me off I was making a decent income as an affiliate marketer.
I’ve been evangelising about the internet life ever since. I can’t understand why when its possible to earn a good (or incredible if you want it) income online, its taken a pandemic for more people to do it. Like anything else there is an initial learning curve and some foundations to be built. After that though life is amazing.
As I mentioned earlier location freedom is one advantage of this internet lifestyle. Where can’t you connect to the internet these days? The other big one is time freedom. A lot of the business process: Marketing, sales, delivery can be automated in online business on a 24/7/365 basis. It really doesn’t take much time to feed these automated systems with traffic through advertising. You can outsource the time consuming stuff like blogging and social media.
Anyone Can Create Their Ideal Internet Life
For me as an ex business development manager the size of the potential marketplace online is awe inspiring. Back in the day I had Scotland as a territory and one product to sell. Now I have the world and can sell pretty much anything. It is truly amazing in a world where that word is used far too liberally.
There is room for everyone online. Anyone can create their ideal internet life. Aside from the benefits I’ve enthused about here, the sky is the limit financially. You’ll need to work for it. But its not work like you know it if you’ve slogged in the 9-5 for some years. There are no get rich quick, secret buttons to press and it can be overwhelming to start with. But the lifestyle you can build is inspiring.
I found a fantastic organisation when I was getting started online. I’d throughly recommend you look into them if the internet life beckons. They provide mentorship, training and resources that seriously shorten the journey. They cut down the overwhelm and provide a lucrative business to start with. Clicking on the banner below will take you to a page where you can register for their free information video series. You’ll never look back.
