Top Online Businesses Aren’t Made By Laziness
The allure of online business for many people is the idea that they have more free time—that they can make more money with less effort. This isn’t how the top online businesses are made, and if you want to succeed, it shouldn’t be how yours is made. You will always scrape the bottom with this mentality.
Like any business, online business takes a lot of work.
An airplane doesn’t take off without a lot of force behind it. A space shuttle doesn’t launch without expending huge amounts of energy. It’s a fundamental law of the universe that nothing moves without overcoming inertia and gravity.
Should your business be any different? Just because it has been launched in cyberspace, does that mean that there’s no inertia to overcome? That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Whether you’re starting a business in the physical world or on the world wide web, you have to overcome the inertia in yourself.
You can, of course, take baby steps—and in most cases, it’s the smart thing to do. Few things can be as disastrous as jumping in half-cocked. Just as fear is the forerunner of failure, so is recklessness.
Don’t quit your day job to start your online business.
This may be a no-brainer to some people, but there are enough impetuous souls who get caught up in the whole idea of instant success online. Don’t be fooled, instant success has a lot of planning and work behind it. Even rock stars had to work the dives, sometimes for years, before they got their big record contract and their video on MTV.
Here’s a reality check for you. Let’s say that you have the best product “ever.” Let’s say that your web page is perfect, that you have the best ever SEO strategy out there. You have the full staff of customer support waiting and it’s all ready to go without a hitch. Ready, set, launch!
The sales aren’t coming in. You wait a while. Still no sales. You check Google for your website. You can’t find it. What’s going on here?
The fact is, the search engines run on their own schedules when they index web pages. Even at that, in the beginning, you’re not as likely to rank as well as older web pages—not without a lot of leg work in pushing your ranking. This can lead to…
You have to be ready to put money into your online business.
This is a balancing factor for how much work you put into your online business. There are a lot of things you can do to give your web page a ranking advantage on the search engines. You can spend a lot of time and work on it, or you can outsource it.
Of course, if you outsource this work, it costs you money. There are several services that you can do this with, from your web page design, to off-site SEO such as using Web 2.0 properties to promote your page, to reputation management.
What you choose to outsource depends largely on how much money you have available, and how much free time you want to have. Either way, there’s going to be an investment of time and money. The idea of more money for less work just doesn’t enter the equation of success.
