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Learn a Thing or Two from Respected Online Entrepreneurs

Written on July 18, 2008 by ChiQ

Filed Under: Blogging

This post is simply a follow up on: How to Become a Successful Online Entrepreneur.

I have opened the discussion with the following questions:

1. What are the hardships you have encountered being an Online Entrepreneur?

2. If you could give an advice to Newbies who wishes to take the same route, what would it be?

So I took the time to ask some respected Bloggers that I admire myself. You see, they are all talking from experience and this could simply serve as a motivation to all of us most especially those who are just starting out.

Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

One of the hardest parts of being an online entrepreneur is being social outside of your business. When you are your own boss and you work at home, unless you create social activities and look for things to do outside of work, it can become a one-dimensional lifestyle. My advice for someone just getting started in Internet business is to find a balance between the work you do and the fun you have outside of work. Yes, working is fun too - but that can’t be all you do or you won’t have anyone to share your successes with.

John of JohnChow.com

The biggest hardship would b staying motivated in face of not seeing any return. When you’re working by yourself without the support system of a typical workplace it can be hard to stay focus on the task at hand. This is where taking time out to network with other like minded people can really come in handy. I belong to many local and Net based networking groups. It’s a great way to exchange idea, keep your focus and stay motivated.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net

There are many challenges to overcome including: Finding your voice, Finding a topic to write about, Developing a readership, Dealing with unexpected hits from outside factors (like being de-indexed by Google out of the blue), Personal attacks, Work life balance self doubt.. the list could go on but I’d depress you. Advice: Take a long term view - it doesn’t happen over night and takes a lot of work.

Chris Garrett of Chrisg.com

I think the main answer to this would be the lack of security. In a full time job you have, at the very least, the illusion of security. A steady pay cheque, nice package of benefits, all that. When you are any kind of solo entrepreneur you have to provide for yourself.

This is why my advice would be to not give up the day job until you have a safety net in place and have a good idea you will succeed in still being able to pay your bills.

The Noob of Bloggernoob.com

The hardest thing about trying to make money online is that you have no one telling you what to do. It would be a lot easier if someone would dictate things to you, especially when you get started. Being productive with your time in the early stages is the only way to success. If you are not productive, your site won’t get traffic or make any money. Most then likely you will quit. I think that’s the biggest problem with most bloggers. They quit.

My advice to newbies would be this. Give yourself enough time to test out the waters. Don’t expect to make thousands in your first week or month. Be realistic. Online business should be treated like a business. Most businesses don’t make a profit until months, even years. Why would it be different with an internet venture?

Paul of InspiredMoneyMaker.com

I can summarize the three main hardships I faced as:

(1) Truly connecting to what I loved to do. I am a “scanner” by nature so I love to learn a lot of different things instead of focusing on just one. Narrowing down my focus to stick to teaching one thing online took a lot of soul searching and help from my coaches. It took a while, but I finally realized that the passion I truly loved and wanted to pursue online was helping / teaching people how to make money doing what they love; and so I launched InspiredMoneyMaker.com.

(2) Funding. Building a business when you have a large reserve of cash is one thing, but trying to build an online business on a shoe-string budget can be challenging. I built InspiredMoneyMaker.com on a very small shoe-string budget. It’s been a challenge, but it’s helped me to get creative with my marketing and forced me to tap into other ways of promoting myself besides just buying advertising.

(3) Time Management. I run my InspiredMoneyMaker.com Blog totally part time in the evenings and on weekends, outside of my regular “job”. This required me to sacrifice certain things like playing video games, watching TV, going out with friends to focus my time on building an online business. So far it’s been well worth it, and I really enjoy the process. A lot of times I hear people say they have “no time” to build a business because they already work full time etc. yet when I ask them a few simple questions I find out that they somehow have plenty of time to watch endless hours of TV, sports, movies, go out and party, etc. In reality, they probably don’t “make time” because they haven’t figured out #1 yet – Who am I and how do I truly connect to what I love to do? If you don’t know what your passion is, you’ll distract yourself with “crap”.

Advice: If you can truly connect to what you love to do, find a way to creatively get around the “I have no money” issue, and the “I have no time” issue, you’re ahead of 99.99% of the people out there.Once you’re in that 0.01% to get to the point where you’re making money online, read my blog.

JohnCow.com

Two things come to mind as the biggest hardships
1. You can not please everyone
2. There is no magic tool

When you first start dealing with customers or even just subscribers, you are going to frustrate and plain and simply, piss off some people. Even though your intentions are 100% pure, someone will interpret it the wrong
way or just be in a bad mood and want to tear you apart. They will even threaten to blast your name all over the internet and the list goes on and on.

The bottom line is you can not make everyone happy and by focusing on the one or two people who are always miserable. You will not only run yourself down but you will also be ignoring the rest of your customers. I am not saying ignore the issues but do not take them personally and realize that some people will just never be happy.

The second thing is there is no magic tool that will take all your problems away. I used to struggle by always thinking there was some magic formula I must be missing or some tool others must be using that I still need. I would spend hours scouring the clickbank directory and opt in to every email list hoping to find it. What I did find was that I was wasting time searching for something that was not there and so I removed my name from all but a few lists (the ones that actually offered info) and then looked at what I had and how I could use that to make money. That was the biggest turning moment in my online career and was what helped me be able to quit my job and run my own business.

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My sincerest gratitude to all of them for taking the time out to answer those questions. I know they have a zillion things to do and still they have imparted their advice and valuable knowledge. Thank You. - ChiQ Montes

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Discussion: Which advice can you mostly identify with? What are your own struggles that you wish to overcome?

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