The Online Sunshine Plan

Running Your Online Business

The trick to running your business is to run it as a business. The following pages have a great deal to say about various topics and really don’t cover every single basic of business there is. And there are more business types than there can ever be books to describe them. What is covered here are some details which are key to Internet Marketing, most of which don’t occur in the common ebooks, special reports and websites you find, either paid or free.

But this book is just one step in your education as a marketer. And it will always be a work in progress, as the Internet is constantly changing and evolving faster than books can be written – but I’ll never expand this book to become an encyclopedia of hints and tips on Internet Marketing. It will always be just a stepping stone.

Let’s get right into running your new business…

A business is formed by its community

Businesses are not there to make money. They have to be profitable to continue to exist, but the money is secondary to their real purpose  – which is: helping the community improve its members’ life-quality.

Really.

This is why I’ve said and will repeat often, that 97% of all books on Internet Marketing are bunk. I will also go further and say that the same percentage applies to business books.  Mostly bunk. Shinola. Garbage. Dung-piles. Foo-foo.  Have I made my point?

They are useless because they send you in search of money, not how you can best serve the clients you depend on.

Here’s the actual business cycle:

• A person finds a solution to a common problem that works to improve their own life-quality.

• By checking around, that person finds others have a similar need and also find that solution workable.

• The person figures out how to make more of these and finds people that need this solution.

• Now our upcoming businessperson starts promoting to find more people who need it. And figures out the exchange so that he makes more than what it costs him so that he can invest in more production facilities and more promotion.

• He takes care of his clients to make sure they are satisfied and goes back to them for ideas of how to improve that solution – or to get them to try out improvements made to the original.

• As this business continues to expand, the businessperson gets more people to promote, deliver, and get the exchange for his solution. He expands production facilities.

• And the company he formed continues to check with their clients and to ensure their life-quality is improved.

• This might mean buying other products from other solution makers that compliment his original solution. Or he might simply concentrate on just producing this product and sell all his output to others who are in the business of just offering wide varieties of solutions in a single location.

• As long as that solution continues to be offered, and continues to improve life-quality – that community will continue to exchange for it.

How you get money

Money follows success. Success is found by following your Passion. It’s that simple.

Success, as Earl Nightingale said, is “having and following a worthy goal.” Your goal is derived from your passion – what you most like to do and is most personally rewarding to you.

Now, if you want to make sense out of all those business books and Internet Marketing books, wherever they say “make money”, substitute “exchange value with your community.” This of course covers, “profit” and anything else related to money. Money is an arbitrary idea which only humankind has, it only really exists in our minds.

But your community is real – it’s composed of actual people with actual lives, concerns, wants, needs, desires, and all sorts of other things. TO the degree that you are able to find, understand, and help these people with these things will measure your success in your business.
Know this: your business wouldn’t exist unless that community needed it. So find and provide valuable service to that community and you will get all the exchange that you could ever want or dream of.

The web works like we think

That’s not so far-fetched. If you look at computers, they really have concepts which are just like psychologists describe people:

• Hard Drives – long term memory

• RAM, buffers – short term memory

• The fallacy of multi-tasking – both computers and humankind only really work on one thing at a time. Give them several tasks and they’ll get done bit and piece, and take a whole lot longer.

Networks and the Internet only really attempt to model after our own social interactions. And if you take this on trust and see how it might just be true, you can see a lot of things starting to come forward that are common sense. The rise of social media is just this. And if you study Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point”, he describes the various functions people (and computer servers) fill in keeping a community connected with each other.
Of course, any analogy can be faulted. And what you do with the data in this book (my opinions as well) is entirely up to you. I hope it helps you start to make sense of all the gibberish passed off as useful and profitable techniques.

The point here is that the Internet is only a tool. It’s an extension of humankind. And it was modeled after our own demands, ideas, patterns, habits. Like any tool, it’s modified after how it’s used and the needs it fills. And as a gun or baseball bat can be misused, so the Internet can and has been.

If you embrace this concept of helping others as a prime reason that businesses exist, then other laws and rules of how humans best interact with each other (like the Golden Rule) can come into play and make all your interactions on the Internet far more valuable to you and to the people you come into contact with. And help the Internet Community as a whole grow into the responsibilities it inherently owns.

What you won’t get here

In this section, which seems shorter than it perhaps should be, I’m not going to tell you what programs you need to use to get your finances straight so you can pay or avoid taxes. (”Render unto Caesar…”) And I’m not going to tell you how to set up any particular model of business. Any business can and should have a web presence – if only so people can look up how to find it and directions to drive there. (If you don’t, someone else will.)

Where you decide to have a web presence, you can use this book to figure out if you can increase the value you offer to your community, increase sales leads, or simply give your professional opinion on how to do things. You can use your web presence to simply improve what people think of you, or you might be able to use it to help you bring in some extra income. This last point is where the bulk of this book is headed.