Somewhere Beyond the Sea

In the past, men would seek their fortunes on and across the seas, setting forth from their homelands, sometimes headed for newly discovered and exotic countries, other times for careers at sea, all seeking adventure and riches.

Some found them, some strayed from the path of honesty and became pirates and rogues, others became military men or rich and powerful businessmen, but between them all they built great empires, be they countries or businesses.

Today we look to use the internet to do much the same, the internet has become the twenty first century ocean that draws many of us into the waves of electronic commerce, sometimes the waves take us to profitable shores other times storms rise up and crush us against the rocks, yet still we go back for more.

Our future is there waiting for us, just beyond the horizon, all we have to do is set sail and go and find it. There are many successes and great fortune that the internet can bring to our lives, it has revolutionised an age. Do you even remember a time before the near limitless resources of the world wide web were available to us?

But here is the lesson I seek to impart, the internet can bring great wealth but like the seas of old it is also a force of nature, it can take as fast as it gives, no one saw the dot com bubble bursting, millionaires that had appeared overnight, disappeared even quicker.

So, the lesson is as impressive and lucrative as the internet is, do not lose sight of the shore, because that’s where all our customers are, that is where are deals are made and lost, in the ports and marketplaces on land, not out at sea in the internet.

We’re all looking for our successes on the world wide web and in the cloud. But those successes come from normal people buying the products and services that we have to sell, and its to them that we need to appeal, not the internet or the search engines.