A Rewarding Career In Internet Marketing

By Susan Cruz

For as long as I could remember, I thought the Internet was fascinating! I remember the day I discovered AOL at my cousin’s house. I was more interested in chatting with people online because the idea of talking to someone through the computer was really cool. I made friends with people who I never would have if it weren’t for the Internet when I was in high school. My interest in computers and the interest didn’t end there, as I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Professional Computer Studies with a concentration in Information Systems and a minor in Web Media.

I never thought that I would want to pursue a career in Internet Marketing, let alone Marketing. If I knew how profitable the Internet could be I would have majored in marketing when I was in college. I had my sights set on being a Web Designer, and in college it was offered as a new minor, so I took it upon myself to learn as much as possible about web design. When I went for job positions, I later found out that there was a lot more that I should have learned.

I ended up landing a job in Internet Marketing, assisting the Director of Marketing. I was familiar to the Internet, but didn’t realize that there was so much to learn as I was digging deeper into the position. Sad to say, I wasn’t learning as much as I knew there was to be learned from my work colleagues, so I started to think about what I really wanted to do. I was always interested in helping others, and I decided to try out different career paths not dealing directly to the internet: nursing and criminal investigations. Unfortunately, it was more than I could handle, financially and working full time.

I started feeling really depressed, going over and over in my mind on what I was most passionate about. I knew that I enjoyed working on the Internet, whether it was creating web pages, modifying photos in Photoshop and blogging on my personal blog. I had discovered getting paid to fill out surveys online, and it was actually tough work, not to mention, time consuming! Making $0.50 a survey wasn’t cutting it for me, and what was I really learning? As I sat on my computer trying to figure out what to do, I typed in the search phrase “make money online” in Google and the first site that came up was a very successful blogger that made money online with his blog. I was totally amazed by this and spent a great amount of time on his site. From there, I wanted to learn more on how I could do this. I’ve been blogging online for as long as I could remember, and to be able to make money out of doing that was unreal! For about a month or so I read numerous blogs about making money online and I wanted to find out a way to get started.

I found this other blog by another really successful blogger and he was launching a mentoring program about creating a blog and monetizing it. I decided to join and it was worth it. I finally was able to figure out how to get started because so many blogs out there didn’t really tell you how. I realized that there were so many different elements to a blog, how to write content, search engine optimization, networking and even technical aspects to the actual blog platform. I finally knew that this was definitely what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn as much as possible about building a blog, making it successful and of course making money off of it.

I knew that there was a lot more than writing content about the subject I chose to blog about. If you don’t market it, just like any product, no one will know about it. To my amazement, there are so many people out there that are knowledgeable in achieving this, and I wanted to get in on it too. For the amount of people that knew about Internet Marketing, there were twice or even more people than that that knew nothing about it. I thought to myself, “If only I knew how to market on the web, I could totally help others in doing that!”

If I had a goal in helping others in Internet Marketing, it would definitely be to make their lives easier. Having an Internet presence is very important now, and technology only gets more advanced as time goes by. Just like any technology, learning is ongoing, and I enjoy that because it makes you more knowledgeable in the subject, as well as being the person that everyone will go to for help. Helping others makes you feel good about yourself, thus a rewarding career.

(Written on October 22, 2007)