This article was published on May 6th, 2014
As you probably know, starting your own business is not an easy endeavor. It doesn’t matter whether yours is going to be a traditional “brick and mortar” type of business, or an online business, there are no quick rich schemes that you can use to make money! And if any one tells you otherwise, then let me tell you quite frankly, they are more interested in lining up their own pockets than helping.
So let me be clear… To have a successful online business requires a lot of work. I have been doing it since 1997 and I remember being elated the first time I received an $87 check from an affiliate program I had decided to market. That check came 4 months after the launch of my first website, and I had to wait for another 3 months before I received another payment.
And as time went by, the frequency by which I was getting my payments went up until it became a monthly event. A year later, I was making around $800 a month, which was not a bad start at all, but was never enough for me to leave my 8 to 9 job.
In the beginning, I remember saying to my wife, let’s use that money for our next vacation, and so the following year, we spent $4500 on a cruise, wiping out in the process every penny I had earned online.
Still it felt great and I knew that if I had been able to generate all that money on a part time basis, what would I be able to earn if I worked a little harder?
And as my expertise of internet marketing began to grown, one day a friend asked me to handle SEO for his site. When my efforts started to show results, a friend of his contacted me, and another and over time, I found myself receiving call for help for an increasing number of people who had heard from me by the best marketing tool of all: word of mouth!
15 years later, I am fortunate to be able to say that from very humble beginnings, I am now able to enjoy the type of life which, as an online businessman allows me (and the people who work for me) the freedom of doing what we like and at the same time be financially settled.
On any given month, we (a team of very knowledgeable professionals and I) take care of an average of two hundred websites. We specialize in getting quality traffic to those websites, which is of course essential to their success.
I know people for whom no amount of money is ever enough and I see them work hard amassing more and more money, and that is of course their rights. I have always taken the view that by over extending ourselves, it is often the case that we become less effective in the services we provide, and this why we are always very careful to select new customers when we think we can help them!
There is a popular expression that tells us that we can run once we have learned to walk. To that I would simply add that first we must learn to crawl, then stand up, after which we can begin to walk, run, jump etc…
Starting a business online is the same thing. There are no short cuts that can be taken. No amount of brilliantly written sales pitch will ever change that. It is just the nature of things. But there are certain ways to make sure that the process of success depends on how serious people are, how eager they are to achieve their goals and how fast they want to be able to fulfill their personal aspirations.
The point is that we are all different, we all have different aspirations and needs, and owning an online business is to my mind the surest way to achieve whichever goals we set for ourselves.
I hope that whatever I have learned along the way will give you the knowledge and the tools to realize your own aspirations and goal. Let me wish you success for your online business.