In the last few years, the world has changed. With the emergence of online businesses and social media, all kinds of moneymaking opportunities have presented themselves to people who want to make extra cash online. However, not all opportunities are created equal. There are many pitfalls that you need to avoid if you want to succeed as an online entrepreneur.
Don’t Get Discouraged By A Few Bad Experiences
Many people have gotten discouraged by a few bad experiences and quit before really getting started. However, this is the wrong path to take, especially if you want to make money online. You should never quit, no matter how bad things seem to go. Always keep working at it even when you fail. Make sure that you learn from your mistakes and try again. Few things can crush a startup more than a string of bad luck. More often than not, this can happen when you run out of money and have to stop funding the venture. If you get discouraged enough, you might end up giving up and letting your business die.
Focus On The Long-Term
The worst thing you can do for yourself is to get distracted by the money you are making now and forget about your business’ long-term goals. While you should always be thinking about ways to improve your business, you should never be so wrapped up in it that you forget to consider what you are really supposed to be doing. Just remember that your customers come first, and everything else will follow, including your business’ success. To reach your goals, you will have to work hard, be persistent, and stay focused on the bigger picture.
To avoid all these pitfalls, it’s important to follow the advice of successful online business moguls, like Gary Vaynerchuk. In the highly-regarded online course, The Success Files: How to Become an Online Entrepreneur, Gary shares his top-secret insights on how to become a profitable entrepreneur and how to avoid the common pitfalls that most newbie entrepreneurs fall into. Specifically, Gary teaches you the following essential life skills that you need to succeed as an online entrepreneur:
1. Create A Moneymaking Machine.
The first key to online success is to create a moneymaking machine. This involves taking your existing operations and putting them on autopilot so that you can concentrate on growing your business. To do this, you should hire someone to help run your day-to-day operations while you focus on growing your business. This person should be able to take care of things like marketing, sales, inventory, and delivery. They should also be tech-savvy enough to set up the various systems you will need to run your business, like your website, email marketing, and social media platforms.
2. Find Your Niche.
The second crucial step to online entrepreneurship is to find your niche. Essentially, this entails discovering a small group of people who share your interests and are likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Once you know what your niche is, you can find your appropriate audience and start building your business.
3. Position Yourself As An Expert.
The third step to online entrepreneurship is to position yourself as an expert. The best way to do this is by creating educational content that other people are willing to pay for. You can use your various platforms and social media presence to build credibility as an expert in your field. However, beyond just creating content, you can also use your expertise to help guide other people in your field as to what they should be doing to succeed too. Essentially, become a thought leader in your industry. In order to do this, you need to prove to people that you are an expert by accomplishing a number of goals.
- Publish widely regarded articles in high-quality publications
- Give a free online course on your topic
- Establish yourself as a subject matter expert on social media platforms
- Perform live seminars or webinars
- Start a blog
- Join an affiliate program and make money online
By taking these steps, you will quickly position yourself as an expert in your industry, and people will begin to trust your opinions, subscribe to your content, and consider you a guide to follow in your industry.
4. Automate As Much As Possible.
The fourth step to online success is to automate as much as possible. This entails taking your existing operations and outsourcing them to a service that is willing to take care of allocating resources, delivering products, and tracking sales. To do this, you should look for a company that has the systems and people you need in-house already, so there is no need to hire outside contractors for these operations. Outsourcing your day-to-day operations to a service that can take care of everything for you is the best way to ensure consistency and prevent errors. Additionally, outsourcing allows you to focus on what is important to you and your business’ long-term goals without being distracted by the day-to-day minutiae that comes with running a business.
5. Measure Everything.
The fifth step to online success is to measure everything. This is crucial in order to ensure that you are constantly improving your business and not getting discouraged by small setbacks along the way. To do this, you should track the following:
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Revenue
- Lead gen
- Referral traffic
- Site traffic
- Blog traffic
- Social media traffic
- A/B testing
- Tracking clicks, calls, and interactions on your website
- Clicks, calls, and conversions on your affiliate marketing websites
Measuring these things allows you to understand what is working and what needs to be adjusted. If you aren’t measuring, you aren’t improving. At the end of the day, this is how you will determine whether you are succeeding or failing as an entrepreneur.
Once you have followed these steps, the sky is the limit on the opportunities that await you. You can use your existing operations to create a passive income stream and build a business that will provide for your financial security and that of your family. And remember: you can only succeed with a little bit of luck, as long as you are steadfast in your determination to be successful.