Are You Investing in The Hottest Commodity Right Now?

If you were to walk out on a street in any major city this afternoon and ask passersby what they think the hottest commodity is right now, what do you suppose the most common answers would be?

Gold?

Oil?

Wind Power?

While each of the preceding answers are indeed hot commodities, they are not, according to some business analysts, the HOTTEST commodity right now.

Before I reveal what the hottest commodity right now is, I want to tell a quick story that perfectly illustrates why this particular commodity is indeed the hottest around.

Yesterday, I met a new client for lunch. She and I first met on Facebook  and through a series of messages, decided to get together at Starbuck’s to see how we could help each other in our respective businesses.

Kym is a dynamic woman who is reinventing herself with her passion for gluten-free cooking and working with children to help them discover the joys of cooking from scratch. Currently in the late draft process of writing her first cookbook, she is clearly passionate about what she is doing.

“I have Oprah on my vision board,” she laughed. “Big plans for me, you know.”

Our second meeting was over lunch, with the pre-planned agenda of how I could help her brand herself using Social Media and the Internet. Less then two minutes after sitting down, she told me her publicist wants her to “write 100 sentences and make a video about each sentence in the next 100 days.”

After telling me this, she flopped back in the booth, exasperated. “Mary Lou, I don’t even know what that means, let alone how on earth he expects me to get it done!”

While she ate her bunless hamburger and naked baked potato, I drew a mind map for her illustrating the process of how to launch an Internet campaign with the goal of creating a buzz and establishing a personal brand online. With each new bubble I drew, her face became more relaxed as she nodded her understanding of what I was explaining.

After the diagram was complete, she smiled and said, “I just learned more about how this all works in 10 minutes than I have in hours of phone calls with my publicist!”

Whether that is true or not, I don’t know. What I do know is this:

Six months ago, I was the one with confusion written all over my face sitting in a booth across from someone who explained to me this whole process of leveraging the Internet’s power to build my business. Today I realize how much the long hours of study and trial and error have paid off in terms of the knowledge I now have to leverage the Internet’s power, not only for my own businesses, but also to help others do the same.

Because leveraging the Internet’s power is arguably today’s hottest commodity, you are doing yourself an enormous favor if you invest your time and resources into everything you can get your hands on to learn everything you can about how to use the Internet for long-term prosperity. The futures and dividends will be huge for the people who have this knowledge and make themselves available to those who don’t — but are willing to buy it for a price.

What’s truly amazing is you don’t have to learn it all! Frankly, there are just too many facets that make the Internet the powerhouse that it is. Becoming really, really good at one aspect of it, like video marketing, for example, will guarantee you will be in business for years to come.

It is never a waste of money investing in something that will pay you back ten-fold down the road, even if you have to give something up now to get it. I invite you to step back from all the work you have been doing online these last few months (or years) and assess the skill set you have developed from your hours of dedication.

If you like this post, pass it along to the social sites. And please share with readers what you discover about the Internet skills you now have — your own hot commodity!