A few years ago, back before Hurricane Katrina, back when a lot of people thought Britney Spears was hot, back when Google was just another search engine and not the Beast 666 computer, back in another age and another place… I used to work as an “IT specialist” at a multimedia company. It was not the best-paying job – but it was adequate. It wasn’t a glamorous job (“Hey Shawn I think I got a virus.” “Oh really? You think it could’ve been this smiley-face icon pack you installed? Or maybe this funky search toolbar?”), but it was more fun than a lot of other jobs. Heck, it was better than digging ditches or telemarketing.

But I was the low guy on the totem pole, and even though I didn’t realize it at the time it was probably the best job I could’ve had for reasons other than pay: I learned a lot of valuable lessons.

Courtney Tuttle wrote a post recently in which he mentions sites which are hard to monetize, and reading his post made me think about making money with a blog which made me think about making money in general which made me think about dealing weed which made me think about inventing a drug-dealer robot which would do drug-dealing for me and be impervious to bullets and/or arrest – which for some reason made me think of the lessons I learned at the IT job.

1. Never do a task that you can get a computer to do for you. It’s really elementary, but I know for a fact that most people who set out to make money online never come to this simple realization. They might know about certain tools that can help them automate certain tasks, but they probably think of these tools as optional resources when they are in fact necessities. Let it be anathema for an online business to do things by hand when they can use a program or script. A person should never do a job that a computer can do. (With one exception: if the task is truly a one-time task that will take less time to do that one time than it would take to automate.)

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Okay, so why am I being so dogmatic about this? Because doing things by hand takes time- which you, the money-maker, need so you can make more money. The people who are making money online very often have a dozen or a hundred (or even thousands of websites in some cases) – and if any of these guys are reading this & care to comment to this post I’m sure they’ll back this up. They make money because they have a lot of sites, and they have a lot of sites because their sites can be created quickly via and then run on autopilot – via scripts or other tools.

It only makes sense that if you are doing eBay auctions, you should automate feedback and printing packing slips and requesting payment, or you can never run more than 100 auctions a week – thus limiting the amount of money you can make. If you are into PPC arbitrage how can you effectively run the necessary amount of sites without automating their creation and monitoring? If you do SEO consulting you’ve gotta have automatic methods of monitoring sites, checking rankings, researching keywords, etc. or you only have time for a couple of clients and you won’t make what you can potentially earn.

This ties directly into #3, but I wanted to make a quick point in between…

2. Find your niche. Not just any niche. Not a very popular niche. Not a wide niche. But find a niche that hasn’t been already overdone & saturated with competition, specific enough to allow you to become an authority in that area, and yet popular enough to be profitable. What is that niche? It’s about a million possible things: there is no perfect niche for everyone. That’s something you need to find, like a New-Ager on a vision quest in the woods for the weekend.

3. Have multiple income sources. Call it multiple streams of income or just call it “a bunch of businesses” if you want – but this is how people get rich. They leverage their resources and channel them into more than one thing. It’s called not putting all your eggs in one basket (looking at it from the negative) or (looking at it positively) it can be thought of as putting a bunch of hooks in the water: you become more likely to catch a good amount of fish.

Not only can I throw out cliches until the cows come home (oh man there was another one), but I’ve seen it with my own two vision-corrected eyes. The vast majority of the millionaires I know or have read about have interests in a bunch of stuff. So in the online world the same principle should hold true. (In fact the company I worked for had a few divisions, a few successful sites, and they sold web hosting and resold domains.)

4. Plug leaks. Too many sites have leaks somewhere on their pages that waste potential sales. If you had a bucket with a hole in the bottom, you could transport water. But you’d have to exert more effort and transport more bucketfuls. If you plug the leak, you do less and get more. Same with any sort of website – whether it’s a “made-for-adsense” site or a straight-out business site that sells a product – you need to plug leaks that your sales are flowing out of. This means that customers shouldn’t be able to click on anything that will get them to a competitor – but a lot of businesses link to other sites that link to competing businesses. You know that link exchange directory you’re a member of? Well the free reciprocal link is a leak. (So just pay for the link if you want to be listed.)

If you want a simple way to think about whether you have leaks or not, just make sure that once your customer enters your site they have to either hit “back”, close the window, or click on something that will either keep them on your site or make you a sale. So you’ve given them less options. If they click on an external link it should be to another site you own, and if they click on anything else it should either be a “Buy” button or an ad that you get paid for or it should be another page on your site. Anything else is a leak.

So I hope these few points serve as good lessons and help you hone your thinking when it comes to making money online. We often need work hard to think more intelligently and more creatively. Too many sites say the same thing over and over again – just regurgitated and with different wording. But some of the deeper (and simpler) lessons are unstated, which hinders the vast majority of us who have a desire to make money online.

* By the way, I recommend Courtney’s post because he is basically going to show you how to make money with a website by doing it step-by-step and giving a public update each week. Keep the above lessons in mind while you keep up with what he’s doing and see how he compares.

Stumble it!