Home Business Success - Slowly
But Surely...
An article by Andy Jenkins, ebusiness owner.
People keep asking me “What techniques can I use to guarantee success?”
Use The “DO SOMETHING”
technique.
Let’s not sugarcoat this; you
don’t have to be greedy but chances are we all want to make extra money
by starting a Home-Based Business or E-Commerce operation. But the money
is the not motivating factor, right?
It may be the primary
by-product, but whether you want to improve the quality of your life,
quit your job, take extra vacations, take care of a loved one, and/or
supplement your retirement – you’ve decided that you need to make some
extra money to do it.
Or, maybe it’s just
about making money. Fine, I can dig it.
Audrey and I wanted more time
together and more flexibility in our schedules. In order to do that, we
needed to captain our own ship – We needed money to declare financial
independence and allow us that time.
We needed to DO SOMETHING!
Look, I don’t care if you run
internet auctions, sell information, sell hard goods, run affiliate
programs or MLM – in order for you to make money online you must DO
SOMETHING.
Any Internet Marketer who
actually cares about the success of their customers will tell you the
same thing. If you want to buy an E-Book, fine – do it. But don’t let
it just sit on your hard drive collecting viruses. You must take
the instruction contained in that e-book and APPLY it. You must apply
it every single day of your Internet Business Life! It’s a Business!
It requires care and feeding.
Yes – that’s a good analogy;
“You must feed your business or it will die”
I don’t care how many e-books
or “How To” guides you have, or Membership sites you join. They
are meaningless unless you put the techniques in them to good use.
I get letters ALL THE TIME
from folks who have spent literally thousands of Dollars on “Systems”
who are no closer to making a buck than they were when the spent their
first cent. One the other hand, one of my customers goes and opens
up a Yahoo! Store, their first e-commerce business, and has 17 sales in
the first 3 days. What’s the difference between these two types of
people?
ACTION!
Not “Action” like a superhero
takes action – No, not anywhere near that hard; Just simple,
methodical, regular, educated ACTION.
Here’s an alarming stat for
you: Maybe you’ve heard that the US Bureau of Commerce say, “94%
of all business failures occur in the first year of operation”.
We’ll, the truth is that 76%
of those businesses that fail are classified as failures because they
generated a loss without revenue. Most of the time, the “Business”
never got past filing their “Doing Business As” paperwork.
They NEVER STARTED!
EEEEK!
I’m going to go out on a limb
and speak for ALL of the successful Internet Home Based Businesses out
there. I’m going to tell you how they became successful. They
started a Home Based Business with Good information, and they NEVER
QUIT.
What’s the basic
principal to making money online?
You must do 3 things.
A)
Sell
something of Value. I may be wrong (probably not) but the only way
to earn a buck is to create a situation where a customer wants to give
you their money in exchange for a product or service that you are
offering.
I know that’s basic, but the
point that I’m trying to illustrate here is the only person who makes
any kind of money from that Forced Matrix Down Line Auto-Sign-Up
Super Replicating 41st tier Recommend a Friend Program
is the person who started the system. You can’t make real money by
joining programs, or reading email, or filling out surveys.
You must transact! I
don’t care if it’s Vintage Beer Cans on eBay, Autographed Beatles
Memorabilia, your own “How To Make Fun of Your Boss and Profit” e-book
or personalized Swiss army knives – You must sell something that someone
puts a value on.
B)
You must
have many Diversified Revenue Streams.
Wow, I hate to use a cliché,
but, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket!”
This is probably more of a
“Long Term Success” key than anything else, but it is SO important.
I would rather have 5 niche
businesses that make me $1,000 each every month than one business that
makes me $5,000 every month. Why? Consider this: It’s easier,
and for some people more realistic, to create a business that “Only”
makes $1,000 a month. I mean, if you sell 20 things on eBay each month
that make you $50.00 profit – you’re there! That’s less than one
auction per day. You could even take the weekends off! Quick,
auction experts – Tell me how long it takes to post one auction listing?
See what I mean?
What about an e-commerce
site? If we sell one item every other day that makes us a profit of
$60.00, how much time are we spending filling orders with our drop
shippers? 10 minutes every other day? The Bottom Line: It’s simply
easier to create little businesses that generate modest profits than it
is to create a mega-monster business that you and your family will live
and/or starve by. Think about it! You only need to do this ONE
BUSINESS AT A TIME.
Now, the real genius of this
business model is that you will always have one of your businesses
generating money in the marketplace. Yeah, maybe one of them takes a
downturn and your sales get cut to shreds. So what?! It happens,
even to the masters! They simply get back up after the impact and
create another revenue stream.
If you have 4 other little
business plugging along, you’re less likely to get hurt by a server
outage, a market correction, a drop shipper flub, a merchant account
error or any one of a hundred things that crop up.
Diversify!
I’ll bet you didn’t know that
most of the “Guru’s” out there not only sell information, they sell real
products or services as well.
Marlon Sanders is a partner
of a Shopping Cart Service.
Matt Gagnon is partnered with
a company that sells used Enterprise Internet Servers. Cory Rudl sells
software.
Monique Harris used to run
about 50 auctions a week until she retired.
If these folks are
selling products and services in multiple markets, why shouldn’t you?
C)
You must
create a relationship with your customers. You need to create a mailing
list.
If you’ve been searching for
a Biz Op on-line, I’m sure you’ve come across some sites that have
headlines like “How I Made $27,451 dollars in one week with no expenses
what so ever!”
Most of the time, I feel like
I need to take a shower after seeing those sites. I thought ,“This
simply cannot be true! No Way!” Well that just goes to show you
that I’ve got a lot to learn. I met a gentleman who I know for a fact
made almost $40,000 over one weekend with his Internet business.
Wanna know how he did it? He has a list of newsletter subscribers that
is HUGE! He created a new product and e-mailed his entire list with a
special offer.
That’s how you make the BIG
bucks each and every month on-line. You create a relationship with your
customers and with people who are interested in whatever business you
have. You give them quality information. You treat them like your
business partners. You never lie to them, and you behave as if you’re a
real person and real business.
Then you do
real research about products and services that you think they could
benefit from. Then you tell them about these products.
Maybe it’s a new arrival in
your e-commerce store.
Maybe you’re running a
special promotion.
Maybe you’re an affiliate of
the product in question.
The Bottom Line? If you're
genuine and you earn the trust of your customers and subscribers, they
will buy from you again. And they will do it because you keep in touch
with them via email.
Cory Rudl makes 3.3 million
dollars a year doing this.
“What
if it doesn’t work”
Then Do it again till it
does.
Have you stopped to consider
how cheap it is to do business on the internet? Don’t be put off by the
Masters who tell you that they spend thousands of dollars a month in
advertising and marketing…
After all, they do make a
high six figure a year in income…
Do you need to make that
much? I don’t, so I don’t spend thousands of dollars a month making my
living.
But, I do “Tough it out”.
I don’t give up and if it fails, I fix it.
I will summarize, then I will
soapbox :)
Your business needs to be
around long enough to be successful.
Let me explain. Yes, you can
open a Yahoo! Store in less than 30 days. Yes, you can make sales and
earn income in your first week of online business - any online business!
But the majority don’t. Even
after they have spent a fair amount of time and effort getting whatever
business they’ve chosen up and running, if they don’t see money raining
from their computer in a few weeks, they give up. If they have a
loosing month, they give-up.
No. Don’t do this –
Please!
Quick Story. Audrey and I
lost money for the first 3 months of our online business. We had
revenue, but overall, including our time and effort, we considered it a
financial loss.
The first month we made a
profit, we thought the clouds had parted. Then the next month, we lost
money again. 5 months later, we had 3 online business that made
about $6,000 a month in gross revenue. I thought we were on top of the
world! Then, we finally got some good rankings in Google. It took
7 months to get them. Our revenue doubled 2 months after that.
Why are we, and anybody else
who is online, making money successfully?
Because we were around long
enough for success to find us. I know that’s a bit on the simple side,
but it’s essentially correct. Yeah, we had to wade through the crap and
the scams and the bad information – but we got there, we cracked the
code.
My point is, you need to let
your business grow.
It’s like a seed. You must
feed it constantly, sometimes it eats your time and sometimes it eats
your money. And sometimes it takes a while for it to mature.
Sometimes it shoots up out of
the ground overnight, but not in our case. And if it doesn’t do that for
you, then you are in good, and common company.
And do yourself a favor –
don’t set unrealistic expectations. So what if you only make a few
hundred extra dollars profit a month? Is that so bad? My soapbox
is starting to break, so let me just address one more issue.
I hope it doesn’t make
you too angry.
A friend of mine who
desperately wanted to start a Home Business was complaining to me about
how he had no money to get started.
He smoked ($90/month), he
bought breakfast every morning from Wawa ($4.50)and lunch every day from
Wendy’s ($7.00).
He had Digital Cable with
HBO, Cinemax, Show Time, and Stars($85.00/month).
He drove a $480 a month
Durango with a 6 CD changer in it. He went out to dinner 5 times a
month.
He took a vacation to St.
Lucia. He put crown molding in his kitchen.
And he lived paycheck to
paycheck.
I said “Tim, stop smoking,
eat cereal and pack a lunch for a week”
Two weeks later, he had
enough money to start an online business.
Look, most of us don’t live
as extravagantly as Tim does. But if you look hard enough, there might
be some things that you can do without in order to get your business
going. We have customers who are disabled, and they still manage
to find a way to get their business into play.
You just have to WANT IT.
Tim eventually got rid of
Digital Cable Saved $60 a month.
He Quit Smoking
Saved $90 a month
Packed a lunch
Saved $120 a month
Traded in his Durango for a
Honda Saved $140 a month
Went to Disney Land instead
of St. Lucia Saved $1,200 that vacation
You know what? All he had to
do was get rid of cable and stop smoking and he would of had enough
money to register a business name, get a tax ID and open a Yahoo! Store
for a month or pay for 20 auction listings in eBay. Instead, he
went nuts, changed his lifestyle and found enough extra funds to start a
business that teaches Corporate Management how to create video
presentations.
And he sells used video
lighting equipment on eBay.
And I think he wants another
Durango.
You
want it? Find a way.
Get good information.
Put it to use every
day.
Sell something of
value.
Create a loyal list of
customers and subscribers.
Feed your business.
Hang in there long
enough to see it grow.
Don’t quit if it
doesn’t make you rich.
Find the funds to make
it happen by trimming the fat.
I’m not a Monday morning
Quarterback. I’ve done all of these things. It’s not Fireman Hard or
Ditch Digging Hard, but it requires effort, and sometimes, sacrifice.
It is, after all, a real
business. Treat it like one, but use the economy of the Internet to
maximize your upside.
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