Slavery Is Alive And Well On the Internet!

Leveraging the Efforts of Others

One of the reasons that small business owners are generally in the top tax bracket, is not because they tend to be workaholics, putting in 60 hour workweeks – although such is common.  The reason they tend to be wealthy is because they’ve learned that a business can take on a life of it’s own – and you earn not just from your own efforts, but from the efforts of others as well.

Leveraging only your own work into pay can be quite profitable on the Internet, since if you blog well enough, your audience can conceivably be in the millions. (Most local businesses do quite well with no more than a few thousand customers – millions are far beyond any conception for the average small business) Unfortunately, those with the skills to command the attention of millions are few and far between. I know that my name isn’t Matt Drudge.

But if my writing can be interesting enough, and provide the information that people are searching for – I’ll have enough readers to make a success of this website. But there’s yet another way to improve the chances of reaching a wider audience, and that’s to emulate what a small business does – by leveraging the work of many people. This was, of course, what slavery was all about, making money by utilizing the forced work of others.

But you can still profit by the work of others - you don't have to force them - you merely need to provide a good environment where they will want to express themselves - and in doing so, create content for your website.

Instead of relying on only my own efforts to create content, I’ve created a community site where other people can also put up blogs, post comments, post articles – and in general, contribute to the intellectual property of this website.  Thus, I’m not only earning money from my own efforts, but from the time of others who post on this site. Just as a small business earns money for the owner by means of the efforts of his many employees, a community website earns money for the webmaster by means of harnessing the intellectual efforts of many others.

This power to utilize others is a wonderful property of community websites – and at a certain point, it can even exceed any efforts the webmaster can do by himself.  If you get to the point where thousands of people are posting on your website, ‘critical mass’ was achieved, and at that point all you can do is guide your website.  So if you’re considering putting up a blog website, I’d encourage you to consider instead changing to a community website plan.

This is why I decided to put this site up using the Drupal CMS – it’s well designed to form a community, Wordpress, on the other hand, is poorly designed to accomplish the same function.  Wordpress is the world’s best blogging platform, but it doesn’t do as well for a general purpose website, or a community website.  So it’s quite important to decide from the beginning what type of website you want to put up – the decision of which CMS you end up using will depend on it.

If you put up a Blog – then decide later down the road that you want a more community oriented site – you’ll still be able to do it – but it won’t be as tightly integrated as can be done under Drupal – and you’ll be forced to utilize a third-party forum script. If it sounds like I’m a “Drupal-holic”, it seems that you might be right.  I seem to have the fanaticism of the recently converted. But for those who might not like Drupal – I’m under the impression that Joomla or Mambo might equally serve for a community website.  So chose wisely at the beginning – whatever concept you start with (and the CMS you use)  is going to end up limiting you in some ways if you chose wrong.

The biggest and best sites on the Internet are all those that leverage other people's work to their benefit.  What, after all, is Ebay?  Isn't it a place where everyone else puts up Ebay's content?  And then pays Ebay for the privilege!? What a great concept! Google, of course, is another - simply indexing what others have created.  YouTube is another great example.  Example after example of websites that leverage what other people actually do are numerous on the net - so in searching for ways to monitize on the Internet - it would be a good idea to take a clue from those that are successful, and look for ways that we can earn from the work of others - by providing a community for them.