A Marketing Revelation
“Let’s begin by figuring out what you know, or think you know, about making money on the Internet, and in the home business profession,” Tom said.
I shrugged my shoulders and glanced at my watch. “I’m serious about learning what you do, Tom,” I said. “Unfortunately, I have a job, and it beckons. Will you be here Saturday morning?”
“I can be,” Tom said. “Meet me here at 7:00 AM, sharp. I’m meeting some friends on the coast tomorrow night, so I can help you out for an hour or two.”
The rest of the day dragged on as I struggled to stay focused on my work. Over the years I had tried various home business opportunities, but had never been able to make money with them. I was sold on the idea of making money from home, and I loved the concept of “making money on autopilot,” but up until I met Tom, I had never personally known anybody who pulled it off. If Tom was making money from his laptop, I wanted to know how.
I walked into the park at 6:45 Saturday morning and found Tom already busy on his laptop. The park sprinklers were doing their thing, so I waved to Tom and then walked the long way around to the pagoda.
“Take a look at this, Jon,” Tom said and turned the laptop screen in my direction.
“I’m looking at an article about email marketing?” I asked.
“Well, that happens to be the topic of the day for me,” Tom said. “I have a goal to write at least one piece of digital content per day. Today I chose to write an article about my experiences with email marketing.”
“And how exactly do you make money with that?” I asked and squeezed onto the bench next to Tom.
“I don’t,” Tom said. “It’s just information. Hopefully, if I got the keywords right, this article will show up on search engine results and I’ll get some free traffic to my blog.”
“You know, I’ve heard about this,” I said and skimmed the article. “But I can’t get over the word, “free.” Exactly how do you make money by giving stuff away?”
“I can answer that,” Tom said. “But, I would be getting ahead of myself. There are some fundamentals about “old school” versus “new school” marketing that you need to learn first.”
“Let’s start at the beginning and learn something about how our attitudes about how money is earned may be impacting our level of success.” Tom sat his laptop on the wooden floor of the pagoda and turned towards me.
“This is a subtle but very important concept, Jon,” he said.
“When you report to work, you exchange your time, energy, and talents for a wage. I call this the “time for dollars” system. Most of us grew up believing this was how to make a living. It’s the old, “earn your bread from the sweat of your brow” lesson you learned in Sunday School.”
I nodded my head in agreement. Like my parents before me, I had held a job in one form or another, my entire adult life.“But imagine this,” Tom said and grinned widely. “Rather than working for money, what do you think of the idea of having money work for you?”
“That would be nice, Tom,” I said and shook my head.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have any money to work for me.”
“You don’t need money to make money,” Tom said and slapped his knee. “The biggest money makers in the world today make their money with systems. In today’s economy, your system is an asset, and it can make you more money than any stock portfolio or real estate investment ever dreamed of making.”
“System?” I asked. “Tom, you’ve lost me.”
Tom sighed and extracted a water bottle from his computer bag. “I can see this is going to take a while.” Tom sipped the water and gathered his thoughts for a moment.“It’s not what you do, or what you market that matters,” Tom said and placed the cap back onto his water bottle. “It’s how you do it.”
