Student seeks success on the Web

For most of us, an adolescent sense of enterprise meant canvassing  neighborhoods after school with a bag of newspapers slung over one shoulder, or summers spent under the hot sun pushing a lawn mower from neighbor’s house to neighbor’s house.

However, Peter Foti  saw greater possibilities than the pocket change to be earned from such typical teenage jobs.

At only 14 years old, he started his first business building and running maintenance on computers — PowerPC Online.

Today, 19-year-old Foti, a Syracuse native and undeclared sophomore at Albany, maintains his self-motivated entrepreneurial drive.

His interest in computers began with the first family computer when Foti was five years old. In elementary school, when most kids were interested in instant messaging and Napster, he was fixing computers for his teachers. That experience “ultimately blossomed into PowerPC Online,” Foti said. 

His first business faced a serious obstacle, however: his age. Most people would be skeptical trusting something as complex as computer repair to a 14-year-old, but Foti was undaunted.

At 16, he started Foti Networks (www.fotinetworks.com) and turned the focus of his enterprise toward the Internet. “At first it was hard to make money online, but the greatest part is the fact that no one knows your age and other information. You are your Web sites.”
Foti Networks is still at the heart of his online activity, and though he began dabbling in different ways of making money, he’s narrowed his focus down to pay-per-click affiliate marketing, and search engine optimization for small, local companies.

An example of Foti’s recent work is www.jerseyshoredvd.net, which is on the first page when you search Google for “Jersey Shore DVD.” The very day that the hit MTV show’s first-season DVD was released, Foti says, “approximately one thousand people flocked to my site, a portion of which bought the DVD set, and I was rewarded by Amazon.com with a percentage of every sale.”

Like any other kind of enterprise, there are days that are good for business and days that aren’t, but Foti says it “fluctuates from the mid to low hundreds of dollars per day.”

When he isn’t seeing to his school work, following the New York Yankees and the Buffalo Bills or enjoying a good gangster flick (his favorite is Goodfellas), he’s working on his business—usually for 12 to 14 hours a day.

For those interested in breaking into the business of making money on the Internet, Foti offers some advice: “Research and get comfortable with what you are doing, set goals, and don’t sleep until you reach those goals!”

 Foti’s success is directly proportional to the time and energy he puts in.

In the six years Foti has been doing business on the Internet, he’s seen a lot of changes.

“When I first started, there was no Twitter, Facebook was still for college only, Myspace was the big thing, and these days there is a new social media platform popping up every day.”

Foti doesn’t concern himself with social media sites like some entrepreneurs, but focuses on search engines and the consumer market looking to make actual purchases.
One day, Foti wants to achieve the goals he set at 14 of being a young millionaire and a household name, and hopes to see Internet Marketing included in college curriculums across the nation.

Once his other goals are realized, he wants to become an angel investor for tech startups. If his past accomplishments are indicative, the young Internet-marketing whiz has a lot of success to look forward to. For now, he’ll keep working diligently to expand and improve Foti Networks and stay in step with the latest Internet developments.

“One thing I must do …is attack new markets early and aggressively, because there are so many players in the game today that if you hesitate to make a move, someone has already made it, and you can kiss your profits goodbye.”

For more insight into his success, you can check out his blog at www.peterfoti.com