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How To Run A Successful (Online) Business - 25 Points Of Interest

Today I was reading some posts at the Warrior Forum and run against a nice post from Steven Wagenheim. The title was “How I Made $226.39 Today…Doing NOTHING”.
He said:
“So how did I make $226.39 today doing nothing? Easy. I worked my butt off for 5 plus years. I made a name for myself. I put my wheels into motion and kept at it until I saw that one day I could coast on the work I’ve done and still make a little better than half of what I would make on a day where I busted my butt some more.”

What would you say was the most helpful thing he did for his business during those 5 years? Any particular method or technique that he would do again? Anything he found a waste of time?

Steven answered to these questions with a list of 25 important things to remember when running an online business. But what was the most important thing? It took him hours to put these in order from 25 to 1.

I don’t expect everybody to agree with the order of this list. Honestly, I think there is very little distance between 1 and 15. So many of these I feel are so important. But, while you may not agree with the order, I think you will agree that most of this list is very important to successfully running a home based business.

For those of you who are new to this, please try to keep these in mind. If you do, I think it will help you greatly.

25. Developing A Positive Attitude

It is so easy to get discouraged in this business. So many people expect to start their business on January 1 and be in profit by January 5. Oh how I wish it was that easy. But building a business takes time and it is so easy to start to think negatively. Therefore, it is imperative to have a positive attitude about your business each day, no matter how hard it gets. Negativity just breeds more of it.

24. Making Friendships

There is no secret that it’s not always what you know but who you know. Yes, you can make it on your own, which is why I don’t have this one up higher on the list, but if you make friendships, and you do this by offering of yourself to people with no strings attached, you will begin to see that people will be more willing to work with you. This will help you succeed that much faster.

23. Developing Tech Skills

While this is not a requirement, it will definitely make your life easier, at least until you can afford to outsource some things. Of course if you make friendships, you might be able to outsource in exchange for some skills that you DO have. But you will ultimately need to develop some skills. Having to depend on people for everything technical is going to put a terrible strain on your pocketbook.

22. Product Creation

You’re probably surprised that this isn’t up higher. While having your own product certainly gives you certain advantages, it is not a requirement to have your own product to run a successful business. Many affiliate marketers do very well. But I feel that to get to the next level, product creation is the way to go.

21. Record Keeping

So many people spend so much time running their business from the standpoint of just “making sales” that they don’t bother keeping accurate records for tax purposes and paying affiliates. Let me tell you, not keeping records can land you in a boat load of trouble in so many ways that you don’t even want to know. Please keep accurate records, not just of expenses and income but of all correspondence or anything that has to do with running your business that you’re going to want to remember.

20. Observing Trends

If you don’t know what’s going on around you, you can’t run an effective business. If one form of promotion stops working because Google decided that they’re going to slap it silly (take the recent problems with Squidoo) and you’re not aware of this, you’re going to be spending time on something that could be spent doing something else more profitable. You MUST know what’s going on around you.

19. Branding Yourself

So many people when they start their business, especially if they’re getting into affiliate marketing, don’t take the time to really create an identity for themselves. I did this from the very beginning by branding myself as the “no nonsense marketer”, somebody who would tell it like it is no matter how many feathers I ruffled. And believe me, I ruffled quite a few. If you don’t stand out, nobody is going to remember who you are.

18. Attention To Detail

This may be one of the most difficult things for people to do. It’s hard enough to get a handle on the big picture, but sometimes it’s the details that screw up our business. For example, putting up a sales page with glaring errors on it, or putting together an autoresponder series with missing links in some of the emails. There is just so much that can go wrong because of the little details, which is why it is critical to make sure each T is crossed and each I is dotted.

17. Focus

This is another big problem for new marketers. They start on one project or “business” and then get sidetracked by something else. I see a whole bunch of people laughing right now because they know how true this is. Yeah, I know. I used to be that way so I am speaking from experience. I can’t stress this enough. Focus on ONE thing, complete it and then MOVE ON.

16. Establishing Credibility

The Internet has gotten to the point where nobody believes anything anymore. So it is critical to establish as much credibility for yourself as you can. This is easier said than done, I admit, especially when first starting. But there are ways to do this. When first starting out, if you’re promoting your own product, give it out free to some people and let them try it. Let them see the value in it. If they
do, most likely they’ll provide you with testimonials that will help towards building your credibility. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s something you should be working on everyday because the more credibility you have the easier it’s going to be for you to make sales.

15. Dedication

So many treat running a home business like a hobby. There’s nothing wrong with doing this if you want to get a hobby income. But if you’re serious about making big money then you have to be dedicated to your business. This means putting it above watching the TV or going to the movies or whatever other pleasures you might rather be engaged in. At least in the beginning, until you can outsource your whole business, if you ever get that big, you need to be totally dedicated to running your business.

14. Legal Protection

With lawsuits flying all over the place these days, make sure you’re legally protected with everything you do. That means protecting your products, insuring against liability and so on. There is a reason why these sites all have tons of disclaimers. It’s so they don’t get their butts sued. So find a lawyer and make sure you’re as well protected as possible.

13. Getting Customer Feedback

You can’t run your business in a vacuum. If you don’t know what your customers and potential customers think of your sales page, product, web site or whatever, how will you know what to fix? You’ll be doing nothing but guessing and guessing is a dangerous way to run a business. Every bit of feedback you get is a little bit more information that you’ll have to correct any problems. If 90% of your customers in a survey say that your software is too hard to understand, then some restructuring of the interface is probably in order.

12. Market Research

This is a must if you’re going to sell your own products. The first thing you better do is find out if there is any demand for what you want to make BEFORE you make it. This point needs no further elaboration. If you don’t know what the market wants you can’t confidently sell a product that has a better than average chance of selling.

11. Understanding Buyer Psychology

Just recently I made a post of 10 reasons people buy things. Let me tell you, if you don’t understand buyer psychology you can’t write effective ads because you won’t know what buttons to push. You can’t create sellable products because you won’t know why people buy things and what makes them buy those things. If you can’t get into your customer’s head, you can’t make the connection with the customer. If a connection isn’t made, no sale will result.

10. Establishing A Routine

A lot of you may be surprised that this one is up there so high. Let me tell you something. If you don’t get up in the morning and know exactly what you’re going to do from the time you start to the time you call it a night, there is a very good chance that nothing, or very little, will get done. We are creatures of habit, but first we have to get into a habit. Establishing a routine leads to increased
productivity, which in turn leads to our business becoming profitable sooner.

9. Backing Up Your Work

Ever have a computer crash? Ever have one with no backup? I rest my case. If you don’t back up your work you are looking for more trouble than you can possibly imagine. Or maybe losing 2 years of work is okay with you. Backup and do it often.

8. Time Management

This ties in closely with establishing a routine but I feel it is more important for this reason. You can establish a routine but it can still be a pretty bad one because you’re spending too much time on things that aren’t productive. Time management, which involves making a list of all the things you have to do and then designating how much time to spend on each thing, based on priority, will make more efficient use of your day. Sure, you can allocate X number of hours to doing something that is a waste of time if you don’t know it is, but that’s taken care of by something higher up on the list. Point is, you MUST manage your time or before you know it, your day is over and you didn’t get the critical things accomplished.

7. Testing And Tracking

You put 20 ads out on the Internet and make a few sales. Problem is, you have no idea which ad brought in the sale. So how do you know which ad to kill and which ad to keep running? You don’t. Testing and tracking, with so many variables to running a business, is so important that I can’t stress it enough. This applies to ads, sales pages, or anything where you are deciding between using X or Y. leave this out at your own risk.

6. Developing Communication Skills

Oh brother. This is such an important item that I can go on about this for an hour. Communication involves so many things, including ad writing, email communication with potential buyers, autoresponder messages, sales copy for sales pages. All of this, and a lot more is communication. If you can’t effectively communicate with your customers and potential customers, you’re not going to get any customers. That’s all there is to it. The person who writes an email ad that consists of “Hey, check out this web site” is not going to make tons of sales. So learning how to communicate is a must. There is no way to run a successful business without this skill.

5. Education

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t run a business. This one little thread is part of your education, and it is just a miniscule fragment of that education. There is no such thing as a natural salesman. Even if you have the gift of gab and can write, you still have to learn how to do market research, how to track ads, how to test and so on. There is so much to learn it’s mind boggling. So education is another one of those things that are a must if you’re going to run a successful business.

4. Advertising

I have said it 100 times and I’ll say it 100 times more. I don’t care how great your web site is, if you do not learn effective advertising techniques and USE THEM, you are not going to get people to your site. That’s all there is to it. That’s why I say advertising it 90% of this business. Sure, if you have a crap product you’re probably going to get a lot of refunds even if you make a lot of sales, but even with a crap product and great advertising, you CAN make money. With a great product and NO advertising, you can’t.

3. Planning

I learned this late in my IM career and I’m sorry I did. If I’d learned it sooner, I would have become successful a lot sooner. You can’t just say, I want to make money online. You MUST have a plan. You hhave to sit down and decide what you’re going to do and in what time frame. Everything for your business MUST be planned out in advance IF you want to take the most direct route to success. Sure, you can wing it and maybe eventually get there, but after having done that, I can honestly say, it was the BIGGEST mistake I ever made. Plan, plan, plan.

2. Honesty

Surprised? I know a lot of people will be. But my reasoning is simple. If you lie to people ultimately you will be found out and your reputation, your credibility, everything you worked so hard to do, to learn, everything that I’ve listed before this, will all be for nothing. Dishonesty is the one thing that can totally destroy your business. So you’re probably wondering why it’s not number 1. Well, I had a tough time with this because number 1 is just as important, with all the honesty in the world, if you don’t do it, you’re equally as dead.

1. Customer Service

If you don’t take care of your customers, and I’m talking about on a wide scale, you will be out of business before you know it because word will get out. I’m not talking about the occasional pain in the butt customer who you probably don’t want to deal with. I’m talking about something like this. You launch a product, something goes wrong with the download process and you’ve made 500 sales at launch. You also have 500 emails from people saying that they couldn’t download your product. Well, you have 2 choices. You can do whatever needs to be done to take care of these people while you fix the download problem or you can take your good sweet time about it and maybe get it straightened out in a week or so. What do you think is going to happen if you choose the latter? Think word won’t spread around the Internet like wildfire that you had a launch with a problem and it took you a week to get people their product? Think this won’t seriously damage your reputation? Think people will buy your next product?

And this is just one example. Customer service is an ongoing process.

Bottom line: If you want to run a successful business for the long haul, you MUST take care of your customers. This means being courteous, helpful, punctual and whatever else you can think of that you’d want somebody else to do for you.

In other words…

Treat your customers the way you’d want them to treat you.

Now get out there and start running your business!

Albert
(with thanks to Steven Wagenheim)

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