Twenty-two years ago, the newspaper I worked for sent me to Bermuda to write a number of travel stories. Bermuda’s chief source of income was then and remains tourism.

At the time, Bermudans worked on average two and a half jobs!

Most of these positions involved serving tourists: housekeeping, working in restaurants, maintaining landscape – the sort of jobs most Americans turn their noses up at.

But I think there is a lesson to be learned here. For millions of people around the world, survival depends on working more than one income stream.

Perhaps we Americans should be looking into ways to develop additional income.

All across the U.S. hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs. Outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs began in earnest 20 years ago. Today, countless numbers of employees from the banking and investment industry, real estate, construction, and service industries are scrambling for jobs.

Here in Florida schools are being closed -- throwing teachers out of work.

Of course, there has been a continuous erosion of positions in the newspaper industry for more than a dozen years. With the explosion of electronic publishing, newspapers are closing at an even faster rate.

Last spring, Parade Magazine printed government statistics that showed nearly one out of every three Americans reaching retirement age continued to work. We’ve followed the stories of many retirees whose pensions have been lost.

On the other end of the spectrum, 1980s college graduates started having problems finding employment. That percentage has risen steadily since the 90s.

Also the quality of jobs in this country has been eroding for at least two decades. I’m talking about benefits. Employees lucky enough to find themselves still employed today pay more for poorer benefit packages.

Americans need to change their way of thinking. It may no longer be possible to find lifetime employment within a single company or industry.

100 years ago, most of us grew up, worked and retired within a few miles of our place of birth. That is now rare. Today, we can no longer trust the company we start working for or even our job will last throughout our lifetime. 

Perhaps Americans’ best option for long term financial security is to borrow the tactics of people in other countries: save yourself.

People have been leaping on the internet in record numbers in hope of generating an income from home. In fact, a report published in July revealed 12 million new websites had been added to the internet in the first six months of 2008.

Certainly, one of the chief appeals of internet marketing is that no matter what you are trying to sell on the web, working at home from your computer is considered “white collar” work, which most Americans aspire to.

In January 2008 our daughter joined that stampede. She invested thousands of dollars in an opportunity that promised to launch her own successful online affiliate marketing business.

Our daughter has fibromyalgia. She hoped getting into an online business from her home computer would replace the income she lost after she was no longer able to work outside her home.
 
She never found out. The opportunity was a scam. The company took her money and closed shop.

Because of her experience I created my own website to point people wanting to work from home to reliable internet employers. There I also describe there various internet business models, their pitfalls and how to get started.

During my research into affiliate marketing, I discovered Rosalind Gardner’s best-selling Super Affiliate Handbook. Our daughter would have done well to have read that step-by-step tutorial first.

In general, I’ve found that most people looking to start a home business don’t have a clue what is involved. Some figure out they have to spend money registering a domain name and on hosting fees. Some try to educate themselves by spending more money on systems and classes.

But most just hop online, throw up a sales page, invest in pay-per-click advertising and wonder where the traffic is.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, for those of you who are new to internet marketing, is an ad you create with a link to your sales or landing page. You are charged a set rate when any person clicks on your ad – whether or not they buy what you are offering.

If the entrepreneurial streak runs through your veins and you want to launch your own internet home business to add to your current income or replace the salary you lost, you should consider marketing to the social web using Web 2.0 technology.

You’ve probably heard all the hype about Web 2.0. Instead of selling goods or services from a static webpage that people can only read (if they can find it) and that 98.3% will click away from without making a purchase, you can now start conversations in the form of articles and comments on blogs, microblogs, forums and social sites.

Web 2.0 technologies allow interaction between home business owner and customers, between groups of online business owners, as well as between groups of customers.

You find this conversation taking place primarily on blogs and within social or membership sites. But you will also find engagement taking place on free article sites like this one.

That’s right. The authors of Hub Pages don’t pay a fee to engage their readers.

And the rules for this type of marketing follows etiquette you’d find in the real world. For example, if you owned a restaurant, you wouldn’t walk into the diner across the street to invite customers to eat in your shop.

Or if you were attending a social gathering at a neighbor’s, which is like logging into a social site, you wouldn’t bring samples of tennis shoes for other guests to look at--unless you knew them very well.

Marketing to the social web is no guarantee of success.

First, you have to know how to research your customer – find out how they locate the products and services they buy online, what words they typically use in search engines, and where they are likely to be found “hanging out” online.

Before you start contributing to groups and membership sites, you want to know if potential customers are there.

Second, you don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel. If you plan to sell a product or service online, know that hundreds, or thousands, or possibly millions of others are trying to sell the same thing – or something very similar.

If you rely on search engines alone, you may have a tough time having your sales page show up in the top ten results seen by someone looking for what you have to offer.

I recently completed a complete social media marketing reference. The project actually started when I was trying to learn about marketing to the social web and wanted to organize that information.

Two and a half months into the task, I realized I had the basis of an info product.

I knew, of course, that if the information was not easy to access and easy to use, no one would use it. So a month later I farmed the volume out to a programmer who works on the other side of the world.

Now I am offering a one-of-a-kind total reference on marketing to the social web.

Active internal links take you to the subject you want to read about, without having to scroll.

Outbound links take you to the top earning blogs and the fastest growing social sites with instructions on what to look for and advice on how to adopt their strategies to your own.

This is the only reference of its kind that covers everything you need to know to launch your own promotion.

I invite you to take a look now at Social Network Marketing. When you see the Table of Contents you’ll recognize this is the only reference you need to start your own home business or to breathe life into one that is failing.

In six months traffic to my own site grew from 7 visitors in April 2008 to 74 visitors per day in October 2008 using just a few of the strategies in Social Network Marketing.