I envision the Internet as a massive engine, one that is made up of people, billions of people. I see it as being comparable, perhaps, to an angry swarm of bees around a hive, chaotic and deafening.
That magnitude of bees could reasonably be compared to the billions of people on the Internet, and who are responsible for levels of electronic communications and data transmissions that are simply mind boggling. But, if you step back and view this wild, incomprehensible storm of activity from a distance, you begin to intuit a structure and within which it exists. The beehive is real enough, if erratic, made up of the queen, the workers and drone. The honeycomb, a structured mass of interconnected hexagonal prismatic cells, is built by honey bees in their nests to contain their larvae, pollen and honey.
Each wax cell has the utility of a workstation on a network, one housing honey, the other information, and comparable to the bees in their hive, in the world of the Internet, every person has their role, maintaining it, developing it, using it. Whether our discussion be about that community of bees, hive and honeycomb, or the Internet, at the end of the day it is a conglomeration of units from which an entire dynamic instrument has been adapted, evolved from.
The Internet is made up of an incredibly large number of independently operated networks. The system is fully distributed in that there is no central controlling point. It is built to ensure end to end connectivity of all devices connected to it, like being able to pick up a telephone and being able to reach any other telephone in any part of the world. It facilitates the efficient sharing of information which benefits not only people but also science, in which it had its origins. The reasons that bring these people online and sharing information are as wide and as varied as every individual person might be different (or even similar) to every other person. Some come to communicate, to buy or sell, to research information, to find answers to questions, to find services, find benefits, to find relief from boredom, loneliness, or even to make money. I’m sure this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
The Internet is not only those billions of individual people who interact with each other through it, but also the many distinctive pieces that comprise its structure. It is an example of a network that includes, and is made up of many smaller networks of computers and over which things like video streaming, social networks and cloud networks are made possible. Its structure is made up of hardware with interconnecting cables, fiber optics, switches, routers, hubs, wireless access points, broadband network gateways, and companies such as Internet Service Providers, telecommunications companies that provide Internet connectivity, access, and services to individuals and organizations (enterprise) using IP backbone networks broken down into tiers. ISPs also provide software packages (such as browsers), e-mail accounts, and a personal website or home page. ISPs can host websites for businesses and can also build the websites themselves. Finally, satellites also play a role to get an internet signal to you from your Internet Service Provider through the use of communication (geostationary) satellites that can offer relatively high speed data transmission. Also, new satellite internet constellations are being developed in low-earth orbit to enable low latency internet access from space. All of these individual components operate together, along with the software (coded instructions) that ties it all together. In the absence of any one of these things, it would not be what it is today. This is known as web-architecture, the conceptual structure of, and models used to exchange, distribute, and share information in and across a network.
The challenge becomes to attempt to make sense of it, how all of these pieces work together. I don’t think you’d have to do what I’ve done, I have a bit of an inquisitive mind. You don’t have to understand how a car works to make it drive. You just get in, turn on the ignition, release the brake, put it in drive (assuming you’re not driving a manual transmission), press the gas and off you go. But I wanted to gain a sense of how it all fits together.
In its simplest form, aside from communication or information research, one can not only buy on the Internet, they can also sell, anything. Websites are used like a house address in a neighborhood, it is the digital location where you live, like your own house, apartment, or what have you. The website (your website) is like your physical house. Your domain (“mydomain.com”) is your numerical address (123 Apple Street, Any City, Any State, Postal Code, Any Country). Your hosting service provides a “physical” location on which the foundation of your “house” sits (albeit digital in actuality). For that you will pay some amount. It’s generally very inexpensive.
From that digital location (your house on the Internet) you can post goods to sell or services for hire (as a company might or a lawyer might advertise, telling about himself, his education, experience, specialty, and how much he charges per hour).
A blog goes with a website. Point blank. If you only have a website, you’re only at 50% power and that’s all you can ever hope to achieve. If you only have a blog, you’re also limited to only 50% of potential. Think of the absence of one or the other like an inhibitor which limits your horsepower, your potential. One should not be for long without the other. The reason for this is SEO (search engine optimization) which I will elaborate on later, but at its most absolute and basic level, Google, by means of an algorithm, has web-crawlers (spiders) that go across the web looking for new web pages or changes made and when these conditions are met (located), the words on the site are then indexed into Google’s database. When someone in say Tennessee searches for a word (or a string of words), if that same string of words is contained within your website/blog, Google will send the person searching in Tennessee to your site to help them find the answer to their query. So there you have it: crawling, indexing and serving search results, and that’s how Google search works. . The words in that search string are the key and I will later expand on this topic to explain the importance of key words and key word research (on which you can also bid: but later). The point is, think of having a website and a blog as one unit. They will work together as you build your site up into becoming an “authority” in a given product, topic, or genre.
I’ve lately taken to researching both the means to have a website created for me as well as watching videos on YouTube that explain how to go about building a website. I now have a blog-site. The next step (in my mind) is to build myself a “house,” a location on the internet. I must admit that I don’t currently have much background (any actually) in web design or web development. I’ve had to plod through a lot of what I’ve found, trying to simply comprehend it much less to actually do anything with it.
As a side note that I will delve into a little deeper later, if you choose to build your own site in order to learn the process, but still choose to retain the assistance of someone who has a greater degree of experience in making websites, just know that “web design,” and “web development,” are, in fact, two separate items. Web designers are more visually creative, focusing on the user, and are more focused on the layout of the website (design). Web developers focus on the core structure of the website, using complex coding languages.
Web design has two distinct disciplines, UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience). Although these are not the intended focus of this blog, I’ll go into a little bit more detail about some of the particulars of web design and web development in a later post. Just to say, you can find plenty of videos about each of these on YouTube.
The idea here is to start an income generating business. In starting any enterprise on the Internet, one should begin with an idea, a blog and a website. My intent here is to outline key points, and to familiarize you with the basic principles and steps to take in starting a digital venture.
It makes it easier when people can find you. If your desire is to implement the power and the vast resources of the Internet to create an income (asset producing cash flow), working in the capacity of an entrepreneur (manager of the enterprise), one needs a base from which to operate, kind of like any (brick and mortar) physical location, say, “Ma and Pa’s Baked Breads” (name of physical website) located at 456 Main Street (the physical address of the physical store) is congruent with the “domain name,” Ma and Pa’s Baked Breads, which is stored in a DNS server (Domain Name System server) and translated from the typed name (for ease of use) into the Internet Protocol address that is then used by the computer to route the query to the correct address across the Internet. The domain name is tied directly to a domain service provider (host) on whose server the website will live 24 hours a day, which customers can visit (traffic) to buy the breads or pastries (niche) that you are producing daily (either manufactured by you/purchased wholesale by you for retail sale, or marketed for some other producer/vendor and drop shipped by them to your customer for which you collect your advertised price, pay the vendor the agreed purchase price and you keep the difference). If Ma and Pa are operating as the actual producers of the baked breads and pastries, their product costs are the ingredients used to produce them (dough, brown/sugar, yeast, milk, eggs, cocoa, etc.). They’ve manufactured (from dough) the items that became the products that they are selling, and fresh out of the oven, they smell so appealing, the wonderful sight of pastries with brown sugar or chocolate and raspberry filling, they taste even better. Customers purchase (traffic, customer acquisition and cash-flow), customers are happy (customer service and relationship), customers return (repeat customers), business turns a profit. This is, typically, how businesses have been started and grown, providing products or services, and eventually moving on to open a location number 2, it could be a cookie cutter replica of the first location (scaling).
The benefit of growing and operating a venture from a strictly digital perspective is that one has the ability to buy and sell goods and run their operation from literally anywhere, be that from a home office or sitting at a cafe or from a hotel room overlooking the beach. With an internet connection and a laptop, you can run your operation and make money from literally anywhere, the term I’ve read is that of a “digital nomad.” All this means is that as an entrepreneur, you are “self-employed” and that without fixed habituation, meaning a brick and mortar (physical) fixed location for your business (as in Ma and Pa’s Baked Goods on 456 Main Street), you can move from and back to some location, at will. According to Wikipedia, “Digital nomads are people who conduct their lives in a nomadic manner while engaging in remote work using digital telecommunications technology.”
Now please bear in mind here that what I am currently discussing is assets, digital assets, and the creation, growth and management of a digital asset, hence the perspective. Digital assets can be created, developed, grown, operated, scaled and sold, used to generate cash flow from any location, and have a potential upside that can be difficult to comprehend.
There are considerations involved in starting, operating and growing a business venture/digital asset. One is whether one should operate as a sole proprietorship, a limited liability corporation, an S corporation, a corporation, or as one of several other available structures. (In the explanation that follows, I will assume that my location as the business owner and the seller is in California.) In California, the fee for filing as an LLC is $800 annually and you’ll be dealing with the Franchise Tax Board (FTB). When registering as a business entity, the Internal Revenue Service will issue a Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN). This business federal tax ID works similar to how a social security number would be used if applying for a job. The EIN (“tax ID number”), allows you to file tax returns (or electronically), as you are now operating as a business entity. The EIN is often required to open a merchant bank account when starting a business, and this helps one to properly pay and account for business expenses. An EIN helps your business to build credit and maintains the business as a legal business entity. An EIN is required when applying for a Sales and Use Tax Permit. This allows you to purchase at wholesale prices from a vendor for which you are responsible to collect the taxes on the goods when you sell them. You must register with and pass the amount collected on to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA). You can click on the link for a Basic Sales and Use Tax Presentation.
There are issues to consider when collecting sales tax for an online transaction, and that’s whether that purchase was made in California or outside of California. Software will typically handle the tax calculations which will be dependent upon the state in which your purchaser resides and, being across state lines (article credit: The Balance), what that state’s tax rate is. I’ve here included a sales tax grid (credit: Sales Tax Institute) that covers all 50 states for easy reference. Another issue to be aware of is “nexus” (article credit: Sales Tax Institute) which defines the level of connection between a taxing jurisdiction such as a state, and an entity such as your business, and the conditions under which your business will have nexus in some particular state. Other issues one may want to familiarize oneself with are “use tax” (credit: Bank Rate). Generally, if sales tax would apply when someone buys physical merchandise in California, use tax applies when another person makes a similar purchase from outside of California and for which California sales tax was not collected. The final term in this category with which you might want to spend some time is “value added tax.” This is a tax on the amount by which the value of an article has been increased at each stage of its production or distribution. The difference between sales tax and value added tax (credit: Thompson Reuters) is that on “Sales tax: Resellers issue a tax exemption certificate to the vendor and do not pay tax on purchases of items to be resold. On VAT tax: Resellers pay tax to the vendor and reclaim the VAT for the tax amount paid on business inputs.” I think these terms are important and rather than waiting until you stumble across them, they are now in front of you and in one place. I’d suggest that you can search YouTube for videos that go into much greater detail on these important topics.
Let me say again, what you actually see, given some particular hosting company, may well vary somewhat from the step-by-step I’ve attempted to provide here. However, this template should be close enough to move you in the right direction. Just as a side note, try YouTubing the WordPress installation process for whatever individual hosting service you’ve chosen and you may well find a pre-made video on it. In a worst case scenario, you can do what I’ve done and watch every other video related to making a WordPress site, some of them 3 to 6 hours at a shot, and yes, I’ve been doing exactly that, although in truth, I’m still not where I want to be. That being said, I checked 2 books out of the City Library, TEACH YOURSELF VISUALLY, WORDPRESS, THE FAST AND EASY WAY TO LEARN by George Plumley, which is on Amazon.com listed for $21.99, and WORDPRESS FOR DUMMIES, 8 BOOKS IN 1, by Lisa Sabin Wilson, Cory Miller, et al., which you can pick-up on Amazon.com. I found it listed at $75.88, paperback, on the site. I’ve not made my way very far into the “WordPress For Dummies” book but it seems to be very well put together. But I am going through the “Teach Yourself Visually: WordPress” by Plumley and can say in no uncertain terms that it’s a very good book and this old truck driver is learning, slow but sure. PS: Just as an aside, what I just did here, without even realizing it at first, is and could be, an excellent example of Affiliate Marketing, if I were to choose to take it in that direction, because I’m sharing something with you that I actually know about, find value in, and if you chose to take my recommendation and purchase the books for yourself, I could potentially receive an affiliate commission that Amazon might pay to me for advertising these books and for any purchases made. But I will say for the record that I am in possession of these books and although I haven’t yet dug into “WordPress For Dummies,” I’ve taken a look at it and the amount of information actually contained within the book is striking. But I’m going through Plumley’s book (Visual WordPress), and can recommend it, hands down. You could become an Affiliate Marketer for just about any product. Clickbank.com has a rather large number of products offered on their website for which you can receive a commission if you’re responsible for driving traffic to said product(s) and this results in sales of those products.
To be continued…
Interesting articles:
A Brief History of the Internet (1997): The Internet Society Website How Much Data Is Created Every Day in 2022? By: TechJury
