Why I’ve Staked My Future on Internet Marketing

Why has a 37-year-old married guy with 2 kids decided to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to return to college and get a bachelor’s degree in Internet Marketing?

I could say that it started when I first got on the Internet using an Apple IIe via a dial-up in 1994.

I could say it was when I took part in the 2nd 30 Day Challenge 2 years ago and made my first few dollars online.

I guess those things, and many others, played a part in it, but I think the idea was crystallized in December 2008 when I purchased an iPhone and started the laborious process of moving my contacts from Google Contacts and Outlook to my phone.

I discovered that I had quite a few numbers for businesses and government agencies in my contacts that I no longer needed to keep because of the capabilities of the iPhone.  It was much easier to use the voice search feature of the Google app or just call Google 411 to get those numbers when I needed them rather than scan through the 2,800+ contacts in my phone.

I also realized that with more and more smart phones coming on the market this was going to become commonplace. If you are a small business owner and your business doesn’t show up in those results your potential customer is just going to use the other business that does.

I firmly believe that Google, Facebook, and the rest of social media will be the Yellow Pages of the future. Already people under the age of 30 turn to site like Yelp!, Amazon, and Epinions rather than Zagat or Consumer Reports when they want they want  a review of a restaurant, store, or product.

I want to take part in that revolution and I want to do it by helping companies get their brand online.

As I write this I am one day from the end of my first class, Introduction to Internet Marketing, and I have to say that I have enjoyed it.

Our textbook for the class was The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott and it was an eye opening look at how marketing and PR are changing from the perspective of someone inside the industry. You also can’t argue that any book that has a foreword by Robert Scoble has to ‘get’ social media’ and power of going online.

My entire degree will be completed online.

That’s right, I will never set foot on a traditional college campus* for the duration of my degree. The complete program will take 24 months. At a traditional college you take 3-4 classes a semester, which is about 4 months long, and then you have breaks in between each semester and longer during the summer.

In the program that I’m in, we take 1-2 classes at a time and they are one month in duration. When a class finishes on say the 31st, the next one starts on the 1st. There are no breaks. No spring break, summer break, holidays, etc… That is how I can get a traditional degree that would take typically four years done in two years.

The real reason I did it.

I love the web and the possibilities that it provides. I enjoy surfing the web and playing around with every new social network that comes along. I enjoy creating videos and content and putting it online. I already have a lot of the knowledge that I’m learning in my degree program, but now I have some way to validate that to an employer. When I create a business, or find a job, doing this on a daily basis I will have to keep pinching myself to remind me that it is not a dream, I’m actually getting paid to do what I love.

Christopher Johnston is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Follow Christopher on Twitter: @chrisjohnston