The triumph of gaining Elive Net, financial freedom, and independence are mind-blowing. Having an online business can be spectacular. You determine your working hours and your place of business. What’s not to like about it? Let me tell you what. An online business can also be frightening, scary, and painful at the same time. The ticket to success is not free of charge. Have you ever wondered how some people succeed with their online business? So have I. When I started my own online business, I made all three mistakes that I’m describing below. Let me explain all about them so that you can avoid them from the start.
I started my online endeavors with no big plan in mind. All I knew was that I wanted to start an online business, and that was it. I listened to all the amazing stories about people making a fortune online and said to myself: “What the heck, I will try that too!” I don’t consider myself to be a dumb person. Besides, how hard could it be anyway? So I started by building my webpage. I was familiar with SEO from my job and read all the Google SEO recommendations for 2016. I knew that the content was the king. So I started producing content. Nothing out of the ordinary, just stuff I learned while working for others. During my regular employment, I gained much experience in digital projects, project management, animation, publishing, etc.
I published a piece of good quality content now and then. Producing quality content went quite well because I had a lot to share. But soon, I realized I was not getting any readers. I made a Facebook page. I posted links there. I built subscription forms and so on and so on. But not much happened. I wasn’t getting any readers. No one was subscribing to my newsletter. Then I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I had no plan. So the first mistake I made was:
1. Not having a plan
You don’t need a formal business plan or anything fancy like that, but you do need a plan. A plan for:
Content creation and publishing –
Once a week, twice a week, every day. Anything, as long as you have a plan that you know you’ll be able to follow. Decide what you can deliver and then stick to it. Be consistent. Readers love the routine. If you provide astonishingly great content every Wednesday, people will expect it. So you better have it, or they will leave.
Sharing content –
Start small and use a social media platform that is familiar to you. Mine was Facebook. I wasn’t there much before, but at least I knew something about it. It would be best to concentrate social media starting efforts on a platform where your audience is. Speaking of:
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Target audience –
Deciding about content will give you an idea about your ideal audience or vice versa. Think about demographics, interests, needs, and what they can afford. Once you determine that, you can research where they most commonly hang out in the digital world. Is it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or dedicated forums? Whatever you find out, you need to go there as well.
What products to sell –
This is very much related to the demographics of your target audience. You cannot sell a $10.000 product to someone who can only afford to buy a $100 product at most. You cannot just put an effect on your web page and hope for the best. Again it would be best if you had a plan. Further down the line, you will need to adjust your overall strategy. But have your initial plan in front of your eyes the whole time—eyes on the target. Setting your long-term goals is just as important as selecting short-term ones.
Keep them somewhere in front of you at all times as your constant reminder of what your direction is. If you find yourself working on something else, look at the written goal before you and ask yourself: “Is this activity getting me closer to my goal?” If your answer is no, stop doing it right away and focus on your goal-achieving activities.
Another piece of advice. You might want to keep a list of things to do and a schedule will to keep you on track when you get distracted. And let me tell you from my experience; it happens so fast and covertly. You didn’t even realize it when an hour passed while distractions occupied your attention.
2. Focusing on little stuff
When I started, I was too thin on all the needed tasks. I’m a designer and animator by profession. The thing is, I haven’t been working in the field for almost a decade. But I tasked myself with making my logo, designing, and setting up my custom web page.
Don’t do that.
Once you start a business, treat it like a business. You’re an entrepreneur, so do entrepreneurial stuff and leave the design stuff to designers. I realized I would have never taken off my business if I had done all the work myself. In the end, I decided to use WordPress. I picked a theme I liked and worked with that. Hopefully, I was against using WordPress for numerous reasons, the top being a lack of control of the coding and SEO. It doesn’t matter how the web page looks initially as long as the content is readable and the call-to-action buttons are visible enough to get users to click on them. But concentrating on it at the business’s beginning makes no sense. I will not be able to compete with organic traffic for a while anyway. So what’s the point?
Just take a look at Google.
Do you still remember their minimalistic homepage? Even now, it hasn’t changed all that much from that. But when you look behind the first visual impression, it offers an awesome service. This is something you should concentrate on as well, service, not how to make things look pretty. Unless, of course, you’re a designer selling your design services online. Get someone else to do the following stuff for you once you reach that point in your business, but you mostly don’t need it from the start anyway:
design a logo, business cards, stationary (if you use it), pretty web page,
more social media channels coverage, once you outgrow the basic ones,
accounting,
email services,
and so on and on.
3. Underestimating things
Since I can remember, I had issues with setting the correct timeframe for task completion. My tendency to underestimate was enormous. I thought completing a task would take an hour, but it took 3. I could’ve finished all the lessons I planned for the day, but I had been left unchecked with more than half of them.
I underestimated a whole lot more.
I had a vague idea of how online marketing works. I had a slightly better idea about how social media marketing works. Well, I was wrong. I only thought I did. Nothing worked as I had thought it would. A lot has changed since the last time I did any of those social activities. Facebook logic is completely different now. Of course, they want to make money. Google Ads became quite expensive. Well, at least for certain keywords, organic traffic from Google is impossible. And let me not go into my expectations about my timeframe for getting results. It isn’t very comfortable. Let me tell you one thing I learned, though: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” And neither will your success. There are tactics you can use to get to your success faster, but there’s a lot of work involved even with those. Here are some tips for you:
Don’t think that making money online is easy –
You might find some get-rich-quick schemes out there and earn some money with them, even overnight. But after that scheme is gone, you’ll be looking for a new one. As for the long-term goal of making money online, I’m talking about sustainable income for years, which is hard work. And after that, it’s a lot of hard work.
Success will come, just not overnight –
Suppose you’re diligent every single day. You produce quality content and get it out there for your perfect audience to see; they are bound to find it. Sooner or later. But don’t expect success overnight. It might have happened to some people, but it’s more likely we don’t know the whole story of that particular online millionaire. Consistently take action—every day. Persistence is the key.
