If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z.
Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein

Every day the media or someone around us tells us the story of the latest successful internet entrepreneur. A person, who started from scratch, with almost no investment, and managed to gain millions just in few years.

And since we are not the ones that have succeeded, we often tend to believe that this person has supernatural powers. We think that they are exceptionally smart, have very rich parents or friends, were lucky enough to have a better start in life than us, possess skills we have never even dreamt of, or that simply fortune smiles upon them.

The truth is that luck has little to do with success, if anything at all. What is more important to note is that most of the entrepreneurs, who manage successful online businesses or somehow make money using the internet, are ordinary people, who simply decided that they would become successful and worked persistently for a certain period of time to achieve it.

Since you have made the decision to become a millionaire, you should already know that time is priceless, so without further ado – let’s start now!

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

Think globally, act GLOBALLY!

We all know the phrase “Think globally, act locally” and many entrepreneurs have followed it implicitly. Indeed, this principle really used to work and it is still valid somewhere but I would like you to think about something before you grab this slogan as a foundation of your online business.

Did you know that the guidance computer used by the Apollo astronauts – thanks to which mankind stepped on the Moon, had a memory of 32,768 bits, or 4kB. Currently, most of us have cell phones having a memory of 64,000,000,000 bits or 64,000,000 kB, which is 16 million times more than the little machine that made that “one giant leap for mankind”.

There is not just a simple phone inside your pocket but a whole library, you have access to all data resources on the planet in any possible language in the form of text (as long as you speak them), images, video and audio materials. Everything is global now, and if we make the mistake to act locally, as the saying goes, then we will raise invisible boundaries around our business, which will develop only within the local market, we have chosen to operate on.

In fact, about 10-15 years ago things were not as clear as they are now. Everyone used to develop local projects – local search engines, local news websites, local social networks, local video portals… Every single American project had its powerful analogue in Russia, France, UK, Germany, and in almost any other, smaller country, and even Bulgaria had its own web leaders, competing with their global rivals.

But things have changed. It is due to the fact that 10-15 years ago the internet was just starting up and it was not as fast and powerful as we know it now. Back then entrepreneurs had to think globally but act LOCALLY, offering what is available in the world but on local level and in the local language. This restriction in mentality and attitude started disappearing when new young people joined the club of the online entrepreneurs, people who boldly travel around the world and who do not allow any geographic frontiers, languages, political, or religious differences become a factor that can affect their ideas.

And that changed everything

Let’s take YouTube.com for example. There is hardly anyone to be unacquainted with this online video sharing giant. This is a website that was launched back in 2005 and from the outset it attracted the attention of the big players. On October 9, 2006 Google announced the acquisition of YouTube for the “modest” amount of USD 1.65 billion in shares.

The hundreds of small and big regional video websites did not seem to be shocked by the news at all because they took it as if an American company had bought an American website and the move would not affect their regional market in any way. And indeed, the situation did not change much for a few months while Google was actively developing and making investments in the project. And then 2007 came and YouTube announced the official start of the website, which, apart from English, was already available in tens of other different languages. This made it possible for every single consumer in the world, who does not speak English, to be able to use the biggest video website without facing a language barrier. It is not by chance that the same year YouTube generated traffic equal to the entire internet traffic for 2000 – something that then grabbed the attention of all market players. This was an event that reminded all online consumers and entrepreneurs that the internet was a global information network, not a local one. And that this is the approach that should be adopted in the strategy of every single internet company, no matter whether it is based in Chile, Estonia, Kazakhstan, or USA.