Have you ever wondered how a useless bag of crap like Paris Hilton manages to make a fairly significant income? Or Britney Spears? It isn’t because of their talent (obviously). What is it?

Because they’re interesting. But, how does that translate into dollars? Because they attract ATTENTION.

A club owner in Las Vegas, for example, wants to generate buzz for their new nightclub. What do you think will work better? Paying money to Google to advertise in the search engine? Paying to have a bunch of fliers printed up and handed out along the Vegas strip? Or paying Paris Hilton to show up at your club, make an ass of herself, and attract all the paparazzi? Your club is surely going to be on the next episode of TMZ. With Paris Hilton comes attention.

The single most important asset online is eyeballs. People paying attention to what you’re doing. And so much activity online is done in the effort to seek out and win those eyeballs. It is the commodity of the Internet.

The subject of how to gain that attention is a big one and one much bigger than I could go into in one post. And quite frankly, I’m not the world’s expert on the subject anyway. In fact, nobody really is. Anybody who is successful online knows they are not the expert on this and we’re always learning ways to do it.

But, at least we know what the goal is. With attention comes eyeballs. And with eyeballs comes potential prospects that you can market to.

So, if you sit down and look at what you might be thinking of doing online to make some money, what could you do to get some attention? What could you do to stand out?

Just remember, though, that you have to have a balance between being interesting and being interested. If you take your target market online (the people you consider as the type of person who may buy what you’re selling), you have to be very interested in them. What do they need and want from you? What gets them hot under the collar? What do they want from you?

Then, from there, the job of being interesting to those people gets much easier. You give them what they’re looking for and maybe do so in a way that might raise an eyebrow or two. The degree to which you’ll need to be really creative here depends on your market and how much competition you have.

So, sit down and give it some thought.