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It’s a great time to build an online business which can give you so many benefits:
- Location free. You can choose the workplace of your choice and easily escape from tire 1 cities of your country which can greatly reduce your living costs. There’s no need to worry about high-priced real estate. Building an online business enables you to earn tons of money and at the same time save lots of expenses.
- Time free. You can work on your own schedule. And you don’t have to commute, saving you lots of time.
- No office politics. Work in the comfort of your home.
- Set your own private holiday. You can go travel whenever you want and avoid crowded public holidays.
- No retirement. You are your own boss and can still earn sustainable income after turning 60. So don’t worry about the pension.
- Generational wealth. You can easily transfer your business to your family members. If you work on a 9-to-5 job, you can’t transfer your job to them.
In order to build a successful online business, you have to think and act like an entrepreneur because entrepreneurs see the world differently. And here are 15 principles you should stick to.
1. Know Why You Must Succeed
If you don’t have a strong reason to do your business, you might quit when bad things happen. If you are doing it just for money, it’s not a strong reason, because you can just quit and start another business to make money. You need to know why you are in this business and what keeps you going in this business.
Ask yourself: “Why do you want to build a successful online business?”
- Maybe you want to quit your job and never have to be told by another person what to do.
- Maybe you want to work on your own schedule and have more free time to spend with your family.
- Maybe you want peace of mind that you can support your family and afford the best school for your children.
- Maybe you want to buy a big house.
- Maybe you want to be able to go travel whenever you want. Isn’t it awesome that you can lay on the beach and do your work on an iPad?
- Maybe you found a solution to a problem and you are eager to let everyone know your solution?
2. Money Is Not Evil
Society makes us think that being rich is evil, and you must have done something evil so you have so much fortune, and you are not supposed to set being rich as your most important goal in life. You should have more noble and lofty goals than making money.
While true to some degree, they are not 100% accurate. Is money good or evil? It depends on the person. Think about money this way:
- As long as you don’t do anything harmful to society, it’s totally okay to pursue fortune.
- Being rich makes you free and freedom is a noble and lofty goal.
- It becomes easier for you to make a good influence on society once you are rich.
You are not rich because you don’t want to be rich. If you are broke, you would do anything and even illegal things to make ends meet. Now your life is better, you suddenly lose motivation to make more money. If you truly want to be rich, then you will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
3. There Will Be Ups And Downs
I guarantee you there will be setbacks in your business journey. Business goes up and down, but it’s all a part of the process.
4. Set Clear Goals
You need to have clear goals. Ask yourself these questions and write down the answer on a piece of paper.
- How much money do you want to make per month after 1 year?
- How about after 3 years?
- What else is important to you?
Here are my answers.
- I want to make $15k per month after 1 year.
- $100k per month after 3 years.
- Quitting my job. More free time to spend with family. Travel around the world while making money on a laptop.
Then you need to break them down into small goals. Ask yourself, in order to achieve your big goals, what do you need to accomplish each month? each week? each day?
I don’t know about you but I have a big whiteboard at my home and I find it super useful. I write my goals down on the whiteboard, so it reminds me I need to do something to accomplish the goals and I can review my goals every morning.
5. The Compounding Effect of Business Growth
Don’t fall victim to the get-rich-quick mindset. People overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in 5 years. A lot of people can stay focused for 1 year. Not a lot of people can stay focused for 5 years.
Chinese has a saying that “Everything is hard at the beginning.” When you are just starting out your business journey, the result your get in the first year will likely not be that much. But if you keep focus and continue working hard in the following years, there can be exponential growth. I call it the compounding effect of business growth. Things will become easier and easier as time goes by and your efforts finally pay off. One day you will look back and realize that those small wins really did add up.
There are people who built a 100-million dollar e-commerce business in 5 years, although they didn’t know anything about contracting manufacturers, didn’t know anything about product development when they started out.
6. Stay Focused and Be Consistent
Do you know what’s the number one secret to building a successful online business?
Focus and consistency.
The ability to be consistent for 6 months is a superpower. 6 months of focus and hard work can change your life. I’m sure you have heard that a drop of water will make a hole in a stone as long as the water keeps dropping on the stone day after day. And that’s the incredible power of consistency.
When you work a 9-to-5 job, you can get paid every month, because the business has already been up and running. Now you build an online business from the ground up, you won’t get paid in the first several months and this is the biggest obstacle to new online entrepreneurs. They don’t know when they can make the first dollar online and many of them quit when success is near.
My advice is don’t even think about quitting in the first 6 months. Stay focused on your goal and make consistent efforts every day.
How can you stay focused:
- Turn off the political news. Don’t argue about it on social media.
- Turn off your phone, or switch it to silent mode when doing your work.
- Move to a new city alone, so you won’t be bothered by friends inviting you to a party.
- Remove the TV from your house.
7. Learn Time Management
Time is your only truly scarce resource. If you lost 1000 dollars, you can easily earn the money back. If you lost 1 day, it’s gone. Building a business takes time and you need to get the most out of your time.
- Each evening, think about what you need to do the next day.
- Make a list of priorities and focus on what’s most important.
8 Surround Yourself with Like-minded People
Your environment plays a huge role in your online business.
Avoid negative and unmotivated people. Distance yourself from people who always deny your ideas. Listen to your inner voice.
You may have parents who tell you that you should just find a job and forget about the online business thing. Don’t waste time arguing with them, and surround yourself with like-minded people.
9. Ditch Self-Limiting Beliefs
Self-limiting beliefs are the biggest enemy of your life.
What limiting beliefs are holding you back?
- “I can’t do this. It’s too much for me”.
- “I’m not good enough for her.”
Ditch your self-limiting beliefs. Once you become fearless, your life is limitless. If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you are right. Believe you can achieve success no matter what.
10. Don’t Trade Time For Money
Many budding online entrepreneurs fall victim to the cost-saving mindset. They are very calculated when purchasing necessary tools and services for their businesses, and sometimes they are willing to work extra hours to save some money. Don’t do that. Unless you are really broke, you should always focus on the top-line revenue instead of the bottom line. Only think about reducing costs after you scale the business up.
Remember, poor people try to save money every day, but rich people try to scale their businesses every day.
11. Invest in Online Courses
Online courses help you go faster and grow faster.
The benefits of online courses:
- Reduce your time to success
- Reduce your mistakes. You will probably waste a lot of money and time to try figuring out everything on your own.
- Get access to private communities where you can make friends with lots of successful people. Sometimes the private community can share the latest tactics in business with the members that you won’t find elsewhere.
12. You Must Learn First Before You Can Innovate.
When you take an online course, there might be times when you want to do things your own way. My advice to beginners is to just follow the course. Do every single step in the online course. First learn, then innovate.
13. Build one Online Business, Then Build Another
Yes, there are so many business opportunities nowadays on the Internet, but you need to pick one and focus on it until it’s successful, then you can start another business. This is especially true for a beginner who has never built an online business before. Remember, less is more.
14. Do Not Afraid of Change
Things change over time. New products come to the marketplace. New trends come to the marketplace.
You need to keep up to date with changes to stay in the game. Fear not, changes in Internet Marketing is a lot more manageable than changes in IT. If you are an IT professional, you will be overwhelmed by the speed of technology upgrades and you will be constantly learning. Fortunately for Internet marketers, the time you will spend keeping up with changes is a lot less than the time spent by IT professionals. I know it because I have been in the IT industry and I never wish to go back to it.
Changes open up opportunities for newcomers. It’s common for established businesses to resist changes, so this is an opportunity for newcomers who are usually keen on the latest changes. Big brands usually can’t innovate as fast as new companies.
15. Know Your Target Audience
Many businesses fail because they try to market products to everyone. You will achieve success faster when you have a targeted audience instead of a very broad audience.
Wrapping Up
I hope you enjoy reading this post.
