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Home Business Success - Slowly But Surely...

One of the ways that I develop newsletter articles to send you is by keeping track of what kind of questions my customers are asking.

You’d be amazed at how often the same type of question comes up.  I’ve even considered creating a little archive of answers that I can just plug into the email questions that I get…

This phenomena led me to conclude that there are some very broad misconceptions in the world of e-commerce and more specifically, the Home Based Business Start-Up.

So, let me try to distill some answers from the most common questions that I see on a daily basis.

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 41^st 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 Beetles 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.

My soapbox just burst into flame.

Send your hate mail to

andy@online-store-profits.com

Next week we’ll talk about Puppy Dogs and Ponies, kay?

Andy