I’d say there are three basic things that you must get right for an online business to be successful.
If you get these three and apply them, you’ll be successful – and the only questions then is how long it would take you to get there.
These three things are:
Expectations – you need to get your expectations clear.
Many people start an online business expecting immediate results.
They see people talking about their success stories, maybe they were “sold” on the concept by someone talking about how easy and quick it was to succeed.
But anyone who’s made any kind of money online would tell you that it’s neither fast nor easy.
You can see people making money in their first week – that does happen – but those people paid for that quickness with extremely hard work – so it definitely wasn’t easy.
When I started my dropshipping business, I only got sales from one out of my first ten or fifteen products. Each of them takes a lot of effort to list, but only very few will be “winners” that actually make you money.
So the first thing to understand is that it will be hard, and is likely to take time.
Consistency – this ties in very strongly to the first point.
Because you see, if you get that it’ll take a lot of time and effort to start making money online, you’re much more likely to keep going in the face of no or very little results.
I started this blog a few months ago, and for a long time I was writing pretty much to myself.
But I kept posting, aiming at a post every day, and eventually you get seen. For a while now I’ve had at least 1–2 new subscribers to the blog every day.
But for most people, if they don’t see the results quickly, they’ll lose interest.
Discipline – the third critical foundation to get right is the discipline.
Obviously in your online business you won’t have a boss.
When you’ll be tired, or want to watch another episode of that show on Netflix, or go out with friends – nobody will be there to hassle you or push you to work instead.
And it’s those little things that set the winners apart from those who eventually give up.
I schedule my tweets on my business Twitter account, because it keeps my following engaged while I’m at my 9–5 and when I need to work on my business.
I’ve had an instance not long ago when I realised, just as I was getting into bed, that I forgot to schedule my tweets for the next day.
It really wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had just gone to sleep and set the tweets up in the morning.
But it’s a matter of principle, of teaching your mind not to let yourself go, turning it into your support rather than a hindrance.
Those are the three things you must get right, no matter what online business you’ll be starting.
The rest flows from these three.
Hope that helps
Jon
Human Action 