Building An Online Income – 5 Things I Wish I’d Known Then – Guest Post

This is a guest post from Lis, Lis Sowerbutts  uses her self-titled blog to document her attempts to make an online income.  She doesn’t make thousands while she sleeps, but she makes more money than when she started online  and she hasn’t quit yet!

So you hate your job, want to be home to spend time with family, want the freedom to live on a beach and still earn money while you sleep. Want to blog you way to thousands a month?

Have you got a business plan? Oh you don’t need one because you read somewhere if you blog they will come, yeah good luck with that.

I’ve been in the is game for a couple of years now – I’m more successful than most (i.e. I haven’t quit yet), but less successful than some (my income is not enough to support my partner and I in a first world country,yet).

From what I’ve seen the people who are quickly successful online fall into two camps:

* those that know how to sell: vacuum cleaners, cars, advertising space it doesn’t matter, they are the people who could sell ice to the Eskimos
* those that find a good mentor and do everything they say, without questioning and with the faith that it will work out in the end.

Both those models work (big caveat on the second one – gotta find the right mentor). Unfortunately neither of them worked for me. That is because I believed that not only was I incapable of selling a cold beer to a thirsty man, I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel comfortable selling, I associated salesmen with sharp suits and sharper business practices. And I was a cynic, I believed in nothing and no one – burnt out from my time in the corporate wilderness of well-paid white-collar professionalism, I believed in nothing much – and was far from convinced by own ability to run my own business.

So how did a 40-something, university educated, burnt out professional who is allergic to sales and marketing, not very good with people and has no idea how to run a business, make at least some money online? I learned some stuff (and I’m talking about html or SEO here), I did quite a lot of soul-searching, I went down some dead ends. Here is what I think are the five most importants things I’ve learnt about being in business online.

1. You are in business. You are not building a blog, or playing on the Internet. There are two basic online business models: you promote yourself and your skills to either make money off line (say a book deal or a consulting gig – this is the “blogging model”) or you develop a passive income from selling on sites from auto pilot (“Internet marketing”). Both can work – but for most beginners I think the second option is a lot easier.
2. Making money online is about selling. Either model involves you being paid by you persuading someone to do something. You may be selling your own product (e.g. an e-book) or skills (consultancy or freelance writing), you may be selling other people’s products (e.g. affiliate marketing with Amazon or eBay), you may be being paid because someone signed up for a product on your site or clicked an advertisement (Adsense). The level and type of selling involved obviously varies hugely. Selling your own product probably involves some copy writing skills, persuading someone to click an Adsense ad requires you NOT to ask them to click the ad – you have to be way more subtle.
3. Lose the cynicism. YES PEOPLE MAKE MONEY ONLINE. Just like their are successful businesses in the real world. With a lot lower financial risk (I don’t care how much your fancy 2-screen warp-powered PC cost -its a lot less than a lease of a retail store!). The real question is can YOU make money online. If you believe you can’t, expect it all to fail and be a scam, guess what – your expectations will probably be realized. This is not kharma, its simply that you spend all your time studying and reading and very little doing After a year or so you will gain a lot of knowledge and have little to show for it in your bank account. Yes everything you try won’t work – but the knowledge gained by trying and failing is much more useful than the stuff you learned in a book (or a blog).
4. There is a lot more money to be made outside of the “make money online / blogging” world than inside it. The make money online is incestuous – that’s why you get the same offers in your emails from different “experts”. That’s why you buy one thing and get the heavy up sell. Selling grass seed to someone who needs sow a lawn or a hammer to someone who need to redecorate has the advantage of simplicity – you are actually fulfilling a real customer need.
5. The single easiest way to make money online is to understand and apply keyword research. Once you understand what a keyword is and why some are more valuable than others you have the basis for almost any online (or indeed off line) busineses.

photo credit: Andy Welsher

Well those were my big learning curves, do any of them sound familiar? What are your road blocks to making an online income?