I have just returned from spending four straight days absorbing tons of useful information while attending Yanik Silver’s Underground 5 online marketing seminar in Washington, DC. Rather than do anything like a blow-by-blow of the conference (which would take not one but several blog posts), I thought I would share with you one of my key take-aways, which involves dividing up the ways to successfully make money online into three distinct categories. (This possibly-perverse need of mine to categorize disparate and complex realities into a set of mutually-exclusive, collectively-exhaustive dimensions in order to get a clearer understanding of those realities is a vestige from my days as a doctoral student in psychology.)

I have created the following three dimensional map to illustrate my thinking. The background for this is as follows: after watching speaker after speaker at the conference, almost each one with his or her own rags-to-riches story, a key insight hit me, which was namely: everybody has their own angle, their own story, their own technique. In other words, after watching 15 or so speakers, I saw 15 completing unique approaches to making money on the Internet, with very little knowledge overlap amongst them. But, what struck me was that the various ways that they are each making money online can be distilled into a few simple dimensions or categories of skills:

1. the ability to create unique content, products or services (e.g., create an eBook, start your own fee-based membership community, sell a product, provide a service, etc.)
2. the ability to build a community (e.g., build a large list of opt-in e-mail subscribers, build a large following on Twitter, build a large community on Facebook, etc.)
3. the ability to achieve mastery over technical or operational elements of how the Internet works (e.g., become an expert at Google Adwords, SEO, buying and selling domain names, etc.).

Also significant (and this is a big one): no one person who is making big, big money on the Internet seems to be a high-achiever in more than two of these areas. Nobody! In fact, the vast majority of the speakers are getting rich (to the tune of $100K/month, $2MM-$20MM/year, etc.) by merely mastering one of these areas – and maybe dabbling a bit in one or two of the others.

Okay, so here’s my map:

A parting thought: an additional, essential element that anyone who wants to make money on the Internet needs to consider is this: you need to be able to monetize what you do. In other words, you could achieve mastery in any of the three areas shown above, but if you are not able to create and execute a vision for turning that mastery into revenue opportunities, your hard-won skills may be exceedingly interesting and fun, but they will ultimately fail to make you any money.