The Opportunities are Endless
The beauty of pursuing opportunities in the New Economy is that you don’t need anyone’s permission. You just need to find paying customers.
The beauty of pursuing opportunities in the New Economy is that you don’t need anyone’s permission.
Opportunities in the New Economy can be broken into two general categories, freelancing and small business. With each of those, there are unlimited possibilities.
“But wait,” you might be thinking. “These categories aren’t new, right?” You’re absolutely right. Freelancing and small business have been around since commerce began. What are different now are the types of things freelancers and small business can compete to do.
Freelancing
Freelancing refers to providing services as an individual without any long-term commitment to a particular employer. You work for yourself and have any number of clients from 1 to dozens or hundreds. The type of services you provide as a freelancer is up to you, based on what you’re interested in and good at.
It used to be that freelancing was mostly reserved for writers, editors, designers, photographers and programmers. This is starting to change and new fields are opening up to freelancing as well.
All manner of business consulting is also performed by freelancers, including such areas as human resources, finance, information technology, marketing, legal and engineering. Take a look at sites like oDesk and Elance to get an idea of services people are looking for.
Small Businesses
The second major category of opportunity in the New Economy is the small business.
Small businesses that provide a service are in a way like bands of freelancers working together as a single entity. This can take some of the volatility out of freelancing, and give you a nice way to expand your business beyond what you can bill yourself. The types of services offered by small service businesses in the New Economy are as unlimited as I described for freelancers.
Other common types of small business opportunities in the New Economy include creating software applications, affiliate marketing, blogging, entertainment, teaching and selling information products.
In addition to these Internet-dependent small businesses, there are opportunities to create new types of “real-world” small businesses as people become disenchanted by big business and start to look for ways to reconnect with their local communities. These include businesses that appeal to people because they are local, fresh, sustainable, hand made or otherwise have a personal touch.
You don’t have to start your own small business to take part in the New Economy. There are plenty of opportunities to join one of these small businesses and still reap many of the same benefits as owning one, provided the business owner is progressive and results-focused.
The New Economy is something where people can break out from the crowd, make their own game, and build a small and profitable business without obtaining anyone’s permission. Look at affiliate marketing. It’s a $13 Billion business in 2009, and only growing. Those people are finding small fortunes by building their own companies. There are plenty of ways to deliver value in the web-distributed world. It’s a great thing, and I’m making my own game. Here’s hoping you are, too.
Chris Brogan, chrisbrogan.com *
