Mistakes To Avoid If You Want a Successful
Online Business
It is relatively easy to start an online
business. But of you don’t approach this in the right way you will never
be successful. Many people that start an online business give up on it in a
very short time. We do not want you to do the
same.
In this powerful report
we will identify the FEW mistakes that you need to avoid with your online
business. When you avoid these mistakes
you will have a much greater chance
of making your online business a success.
Most people that start an online
business do it out of curiosity. They have seen many wild claims about
how they can make a fortune with just a few clicks
of their mouse so they get themselves a domain name and some hosting
and play around.
They follow the methods
outlined in some training program
that promises them the world. Claims of instant
traffic and all this kind of BS. When the reality sets in that there is no such
thing as making a fortune in their
underwear by clicking their mouse, and using “miracle software” they lose
interest rapidly and quit.
The thing is that it costs very little to get started with an online
business. A domain name is around
$10 a year and web hosting
$10 a month. If you install the WordPress blogging
platform then you can set up a website for free. So with so
little invested it is no wonder that so many people give up when they realize that it is not as easy
as they think.
If you don’t
treat your online business as a proper business then you are much more likely
to fail. You do not have to invest a lot of money but you do need to make an emotional investment in your online
business.
Setting up an online business is
relatively easy – making it a success is not. It doesn’t matter what others
tell you there
is work involved to create
a robust and sustainable online
business. You will need to invest in tools like an
autoresponder service to make it work properly.
You need to believe
that you are creating an asset. The website that you build is your asset. As an exit strategy
you can sell your website to an interested party for a considerable sum. When
your online business is successful and making regular
income there will be a lot of people interested in buying it if that is
what you want to do.
To create a successful online business you need to work on it every
day. Forget all the nonsense
about miracle software. You
need to learn to do the right things and get the word out about your online business
all of the time.
If your online business
is just a hobby or a fad to you then your chances of success go way down.
Imagine that
you invested your life savings into a brick and mortar shop in the local mall.
Would you treat that as a hobby or a fad? No you wouldn’t – so imagine
that you have invested your life savings
in your online business.
There are going to be days when
things go wrong with your online business. Something will stop working
or the campaigns that you are running
are not delivering the results that you want. You need the
resilience and commitment to overcome these problems and carry on. Treating
your online business as a real business
will help you to do that.
How many people that start an
online business do you think create a plan for their business? The answer is very few. Nobody
knows how many online businesses fail every year but it will be a lot. Most new online business owners do not set
goals or create any kind of plan. They are then surprised when it all
fails.
If you are going to start a n online business
then set a goal for it. The easiest goal to set is a financial goal. Think about how much you want your
online business to generate in the first 12 months and then turn that into your financial
goal.
You are probably starting
an online business
because you believe
that it can provide you with the
freedom that you crave. This is fine and a successful online business can provide you with freedom.
No more working
a dead end job and commuting
for hours.
Your online business has the potential to make you a lot of money.
The only thing standing in the way is
you. So use the SMART goal setting process to set your goals. If you are not
familiar with this process here is what it means:
Specific – your goal must be specific e.g. my online business will generate $100,000
in the next year
Measurable – you must be able to measure
how you are progressing with your goal.
Fortunately there are a
lot of tools available to measure
the success of your online business
Achievable – forget the hype here. It is extremely unlikely
that you will make a million dollars
in your first year. Not impossible though
Realistic – think about the time that you have available
and other resources
such as money
Timed – you must add a time to your goal such as 1 year.
Open ended goals are useless
After you have set your goal you need to create a plan to achieve
it. What you want to end up with is a daily
set of tasks that you can work on to move you closer to your goal. So think
about the macro tasks of your plan and
then break these down into daily micro tasks.
A simple plan would be:
Decide on the
niche and online business model Setup
website
Add content
Find offers
to promote Promote
Of course these are high level activities and there would be sub tasks involved
to achieve them. You can start today by deciding on the niche
that you want to enter for example. Write your goals and plans down and carry them with you wherever you go.
You need to carefully consider the
niche that you choose for your online business. If you get this wrong then you can spend
a great deal of time,
effort and money and not get much in return.
There are thousands of niches but not all of them are a good fit for an
online business.
In a lot of guides about setting up an online business they will tell you to follow your passions. There is good intention behind this. If you start
an online business with a niche that you are passionate about then you will be more motivated to make it work.
That is all very well if the niche you are passionate about has the potential to make you a lot of money.
You may well be passionate about sheep shearing in the Outback, but how
many other people are going to be?
There are two things
that you need to look for when choosing a niche:
Is there demand?
Is there money in the niche?
If the answer
to either of these questions is “no” then you need to find another niche. You
can check the demand for a niche by
using the free Google Keyword Planner. Just enter in some seed keywords that relate to your niche e.g. “drone
photography” and see how many searches this and similar
terms receive each month. The higher the number of searches
the better.
To see if there is money in the niche use a seed keyword and perform a search in Google. Are there a lot of ads on the first
page of the search results?
If there are then this is a good indicator that there is money to be made.
You can also use a website called
OfferVault.com and search for available offers using your seed keyword. If there are a lot then you are
probably on a winner. There are some niches where you just know there will be a ton of demand and many opportunities to make money.
In our opinion the top 3 are:
Health and fitness – weight loss etc
Wealth creation
– make money online, investing
etc
Personal development – better relationships, meeting boys/girls, self improvement etc
If you are in any doubt about
choosing the right niche - go where the money is. Don’t worry if you are not an expert
in the niche right now. You can learn and master it. It is better to do this than choose the wrong
niche that you are an expert
in and passionate about.
There are a number of different online business models that you can choose
from. Some examples
of this are:
·
Affiliate marketing
·
CPA marketing
·
Selling your own products and services
·
Freelance services
·
Dropshipping
·
Dropservicing
·
Amazon FBA
·
Your own ecommerce store
·
Self publishing
It is critical that you choose the
right online business model that suits your circumstances. To open your own ecommerce store or participate in
Amazon FBA you will need to invest some money to purchase stock to sell. Do you have this money available? If not then you could borrow it but you are taking
a risk here.
If you do not have a lot of time
available then creating and selling your own products and services is going
to be tough. You can outsource the creation of products but you will need to spend a fair bit of money
doing this.
Do you have a particular skill that is in demand?
Here are some freelance services
that are always in demand:
·
SEO optimized content
writing
·
Copywriting
·
Graphic design (logos etc)
·
Programming
·
Web design and development
·
Creating mobile applications
·
Search engine optimization
·
Social media marketing
If you have any of these skills then you can market them and make good money online. You will need
to be disciplined if you are going to do this as your customers will
expect work of the highest quality delivered on time.
Probably the easiest online business to get started
with is affiliate marketing. If you don’t know what this is the concept is simple. There are a lot of product vendors
out there that will pay you a
commission for promoting
and recommending their products.
All you have to do is to sign up
to their affiliate program and then drive targeted traffic to the offer. Each time that someone makes a purchase
using your affiliate
link, you will earn a commission from the
product vendor.
You can promote physical products
or digital products. Physical products are an easier sell but the commissions tend to be low. It is harder
to sell digital
products but the commissions are usually much higher.
There are affiliate networks
that you can use to find offers to promote.
If you are interested in physical products then you could join the Amazon
Associates Program. You can find thousands of products to promote but you will only make around 3% to 5%
commissions.
If you go for digital products
then you can join Clickbank.com or Digistore24.com and find products that offer 50% commission and higher. One thing that you need to bear in mind is that because it is so easy
to get involved with affiliate marketing there are a lot of online business
owners doing it so you are going to have competition.
Do you have the latest bestselling novel swirling around in your head? If so you can write your novel and then self publish
it on platforms such as Amazon Kindle
and Barnes and Noble. There is also the opportunity to write nonfiction books and sell these on self publishing platforms
as well.
Dropshipping is where you sell
physical products on your website and a dropshipping company fulfils all of your orders to your customers. You
do not need to purchase any stock as you just promote the products
that the dropshipping company offers. The commissions are not that high for this business
so you need to sell a
lot of products to make good money.
Dropservicing is a fairly
new term but the concept
has been around
for years. It is really
service
arbitrage – you purchase
a service from a freelancer at a low price and sell it at a higher price to the customer.
All of these online business
models have the potential to make you a lot of money. You must choose the one that is right for you and stick with it. There is a lot to learn
about all of these different models. Don’t flit between different online business models
as this will never provide
you with the results that you want.
The grass is always greener over there. You have probably
heard this term before. It means that there are better opportunities for your online
business success elsewhere. We call this the “shiny
object
syndrome”.
When you choose an online business
model there will be people who tell you that you made the wrong choice and that you should switch
to another program
and purchase their training to show you how to make a fortune
from it.
A
lot of people that choose
the wealth creation
niche (make money online) are constantly bombarded with new shiny objects to distract them. There are new courses
and programs released every single day
in this niche. All of them will tell you that you need to stop what you are
doing now and follow their lead.
We strongly advise that you resist
the shiny object syndrome no matter how tempting another offer sounds.
Some people are serial purchases
of these new “wonder methods”
because they believe
that the right solution
for them is just around
the corner.
They have hundreds of courses
sitting on their hard drive gathering digital dust. Some people buy these products and then never
open them! You do not want to get caught up in this negative
spiral. Just focus on what you are doing and do it
to the best of your ability.
We are not saying that you
shouldn’t invest in more training for your chosen business model. You should
learn everything that you can about it and be prepared to try new methods to make it work. But what you need to avoid is changing direction completely because the grass seems
greener over there.
If you had to guess why the majority
of online businesses fail what would be the main reason
in your opinion? Would it be lack of interest? Lack of resources? Not having the best Internet
connection? In our opinion
it would not be any of these
things. The answer is:
Not enough traffic!
If you do not get targeted
visitors to your offers then you are not going to make any money online. You can be promoting a mediocre offer and still make good money from it if you drive enough visitor
traffic to it.
On the other hand you can have the best offer in the world, but if you don’t send enough targeted
visitor traffic then you will not make many sales,
if any. Traffic is the most important aspect of any online
business no matter what online business
model you choose.
If you are a freelancer and nobody knows
about your services
then your online
business will fail.
As an affiliate marketer if you don’t drive enough
traffic to the offers you are promoting then you will not
make any commissions. Without
good traffic to your ecommerce store you won’t sell anything
– and so it goes on.
Once you have setup your online
business you need to spend
the majority of your time promoting it. There
are several ways that you can do this. If you do not want to spend money then
you can do content marketing, video marketing, social
media marketing and so on.
If you have a little money to invest
then you can use paid advertising to promote your online business.
You can purchase pay per click (PPC) traffic from search engines such as
Google and Bing. Or you can go for
social media ads to get the word out about your business.
We suggest that you go for a
mixture of free promotions and paid promotions. Email marketing is a very good way of keeping in touch with
potential customers and encouraging them to make a purchase. You will need to invest in an autoresponder service and build your email list but this should
pay you back handsomely if you do it right.
Nothing is more important than
traffic generation. No traffic means no business. So make a commitment to promote your online business
all of the time. The more visitors
you get the more money
you are likely to make.
One of the major advantages that
an online business has over a conventional brick and mortar business
is that you can measure
just about everything in real-time. But a lot of online
business owners ignore
this or don’t use it enough.
If you want to know how many
visitors you got to your website last week you can use a program like Google Analytics to tell you this. You can also find out where your visitors came from and which pages
of your website they visited.
It is also useful
to know how long they spent on your website.
This is known
as the “bounce rate” and you want your visitors
to stay as long as possible. If they are leaving quickly
then you need to
investigate why and fix this.
It is possible to track everything and you should
do this. This is especially important if you are
spending money on paid traffic. You can use tracking codes which will tell you how many times a link was clicked and more.
Most of the social media platforms
have comprehensive analytics features these days. You can use these to see which of your posts
are performing well and which are not. Do more of what is working
and less of what isn’t.
You cannot
manage what you cannot measure.
With an online
business you can measure most things so take advantage of this. It will tell you which campaigns are working and also highlight areas of your website where you need to make some improvements. This information is golden so be sure to use it.
We have provided you with the 7
most common mistakes that new online business owners make which prevent them from being successful. Now that you are aware
of these mistakes
you need to
make a commitment that you will not make them too. The success
of your online
business depends on this!
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