Internet Marketing Lifestyle - A Blessing Or A Curse?

Do you believe that your Internet marketing lifestyle is a blessing or a curse?

For me, I believe it is all about your passion, but as with any passion, there are always a lot of gains and a lot of sacrifices you must make. Here’s my opinion:

Blessing:

1. Extreme leverage - One thing I will never regret about Internet marketing is the fact that you can outsource virtually anything you can think of - whether it is to humans or machines. You can leverage customer support to virtual assistants, product creation and copywriting to service providers, mass mailing to autoresponders, traffic generation to search engines and other JV partners. Basically you are NOT alone.
2. Daytime freedom - You are not constraint to a 9-5 schedule. Nuff’ said.
3. Greater ROI - Comparing to most ‘investments’, I can get thousands a month from a single site compared to renting property. It may be an apple to orange comparison, but you can definitely vouch for Internet marketing’s low-cost, high return advantage (spending a few hundred on a site versus a few hundred thousand dollars on a piece of property)
4. Unparalleled branding - Blogging is one of the most effective ways to brand yourself as an expert.
5. Direct Response - Online copywriting is one of the fastest ways to pull money out of thin air. You don’t even need a product - just a few lines of text on a Google Ad gives you instant traffic and money from affiliate products.

Simply put - Internet marketing is EASY (if you compare it with the ‘offline’ world where I can’t imagine myself doing all those without the Internet)

HOWEVER… with all great power comes great responsibility! If you plan to join the bandwagon, be prepared for the following tribulations:

Curse:

1. Initial long hours - if you hate spending a lot of time in front of the computer, then you can forget about Internet marketing.
2. Certain fixed hours - This is my personal observation… in spite of my time freedom, I find myself spending MOST of my time online between 8pm to 2am (my local time) in the morning. Why is it so? Because most people in the Internet marketing niche will send emails (or prepare them)  for launches or promotions between this time frame because it matches American timing. Basically Americans wake up during this time or will open your emails first thing in their morning.
3. Declining health - although Internet marketing health hazards are not as bad as being a stuntman or a mafia, you will eventually suffer from a weak back (sitting down all the time) and other health related problems from staring at the screen.
4. Checking emails - do you really feel compelled to check your emails all the time? I do… and in some extreme cases, (I’m just guessing…) some people might be bordering on extreme paranoid where they can’t sleep at night unless they check their email before they go to bed.
5. Social deficiency - if you talk about Internet marketing (with your IM friends in your locality or with others over the net) all the time, you overtime, you might forget how to talk about anything else OTHER than Internet marketing. If you think this doesn’t describe you, then ask your wife/husband whether he or she thinks you talk about Internet marketing all the time or not…

What do you think? Post your comments and share your thoughts