Why Kids Can Make Money Online Better Than Adults

Yes, it's a provocative headline.

After all, thousands of adults are paying tens, hundreds, even thousands of dollars for products and training packages to help them become internet millionaires ... and how many of them are actually succeeding? If adults are failing, you'd think kids would do even worse.

However, a child's circumstances are very different from an adult's, and that gives them a number of advantages when it comes to making money online. For that reason, we introduce internet marketing very early in the Cash-Smart Kids program.

Of course, the big-time adult internet marketers with a staff of 20 or 30 and a huge budget to spend will usually make more money than Johnny Smith, age 13 and 3/4, who has access to nothing more than his local library computer, blogger.com, and free article directories. I wouldn't suggest for a moment that everyone under 18 has more earning potential than Seth Godin or Mike Filsaime.

Mind you, Ashley Qualls and her $70,000 per month is not to be sneezed at. Even young Carl Ocab, at age 13 earning $800-$1000 per month, is doing better than 90% of the adult online marketers.

However, if we leave aside the question of pre-existing resources, and we take one hypothetical average adult and one hypothetical average 13-year-old, of equal ability in basic literacy and numeracy, and they both wake up one morning and think "I'm going to try doing something on the internet to make money", I'll be betting on the kid every time.

Why?

Kids Have Low Expectations

Adults looking at making money online are thinking about replacing their full-time income - thousands of dollars per month. If they make just $50 per month for the first 12-18 months, to them it seems like a failure.

To a child, on the other hand, that much money is a roaring success and an incentive to learn more!

Adults worry about looking bad if they ask the wrong questions or admit they are confused about something. Kids, on the other hand, are usually happy to ask for help, and in fact people usually fall over themselves to offer help when they see kids reaching for a big goal.

Kids Do What's Fun

One of the beauties of the internet is the possibility of earning money from one's passions. Most kids will quickly drop anything that's not interesting, which means their internet activities quickly centre around things they find exciting, and activities they would do whether they were making money from them or not.

Enjoying the journey makes the learning into play, and takes the pressure off for instant financial success.

Adults have a bad habit of taking money matters terribly seriously. This makes everything they do to make money weighty, and significant, and burdensome.

Kids don't have a family to feed and bills to pay, so they are free to play at making money.

Many adults have a steep learning curve once they decide the internet is their passport to financial independence. Most kids, on the other hand, have lived and breathed in cyberspace since they were tiny, and are just as home online as they are in the streets of their real-world neighbourhood.

It may sounds strange to suggest that having a regular job is easier than having an internet business. After all, there's the bitchy co-workers, the horrible commute, the soul-destroying environment, and the feeling of being trapped, having to turn up five days a week, week in, week out, all year round.

On the other hand, a job has one big advantage - it comes AT you. If you have a job, you don't have to be proactive each and every day. If you're feeling lousy, you can turn up and do your best, and you still get paid. In most places, they aren't even allowed to penalise you for performing poorly when you are sick.

Starting a business, any business, requires putting in a lot of energy before you start to see rewards. The lure of just turning up, doing what you are told, and getting an instant paycheck is fairly seductive.

Kids don't have that option until they are teenagers. Before then, everything they do to make money is self-generated. Catch them at that stage, steer them in the direction of something that can grow with them, and produces passive income to boot, and you are setting them up for life.

A new business venture in a new industry will require a significant investment in learning. Many adults are uncomfortable with the awkwardness of being a beginner, and try to avoid it. This can result in spending years pretending to succeed at something, or quitting before they even get going, rather than visibly struggling to master new skills. Some just can't bear the emotional roller-coaster of making mistakes and starting over.

Kids spend their whole lives starting new things - learning to ride a bike, multiply fractions, cook pasta, or train the dog to catch a Frisbee mid-air. The skills of internet marketing are just one more new thing in the endless parade of new things that make up a child's life. Living is learning for kids - they are yet to experience the restful sameness of a year when nothing challenges them to reach beyond their current limits.

Some adults are jaded. Life has disappointed them. They have tried and failed. They have lost things that were important to them, or never quite found them and now think they are too old.

The internet is a place of boundless possibility. It's a place where you can give things away for free, and I mean literally give them away, without even asking for an email address in exchange, and as a result make thousands of dollars. (Don't believe me? Check out Harvey Segal's free eBook, The Ultimate SuperTip, and read through it until you understand where the money comes from.)

The internet can be counter-intuitive. Try talking to a traditional publisher or author about giving away half the cover price of a book as a commission to an affiliate!

Kids are open to the wider possibilities. They are not yet cynical, not yet limited in their thinking, not yet wedded to traditional models of business, not yet locked into their own personal "winning formula". They try things, sometimes crazy things, and then go with what works, no matter how much it flies in the face of convention.

On the internet, nobody knows how old you are.

If the first advertiser to approach Ashley Qualls about advertising on her website had realised she was only fifteen years old, history may well be telling a very different story. The whole deal was done by email, and the adults involved just assumed that with her level of technical knowledge and the traffic her site was getting, she must be an adult, too. It was only when Fast Company magazine rang to ask them about it that they realised how young she was, and by then, everyone was making money.

But all these successful kids don't imply that it's Game Over for the adults .... :)

There is still plenty of room to apply those hard-won skills and experience, and build something profitable and sustainable, whatever your age.

If you look back over the list of advantages kids have, you'll see that you can reclaim any or all of these advantages for yourself, whatever your age. If I had listed the ability to stay up all night and live on pizza and soda, for example, you might have had a harder task.

But these advantages are attitudes, states of mind, and as such, available to anyone. Want to succeed on the internet? Become a kid again. Start small, learn constantly, ask for help, follow your passions, and open your mind to what's possible.

Even if you don't become the world's next internet multi-millionaire, if you approach the exercise with a child's mind, you can enjoy the experience a whole lot more, and gain from it in many ways other than financially.