Now that you know what pitfalls to avoid, you are ready to focus on the important aspects of ensuring your online business success. Even if your business has been around for years, getting back to the basics will help you pinpoint areas you have overlooked in the past, and help you build a stronger business for the future.
The four keys to your online business success are:
- Midset
- Focus
- Education
- Action
Mindset
The way you think directly affects the results you get from your business. If you look at your business as a hobby, you will make a hobby income. If you treat your business as the professional entity that it is, your income will match your expectations. Although it may seem like psycho-babble, the way you think and view your business has a huge effect on whether you can actually buy your shiny yellow Corvette, or whether you can only afford the gas.
Here’s your new mindset: You are the President and CEO of your own company. It doesn’t matter if you are the only person in your company, and your company consists of a 10-year-old computer sitting in the dusty corner of your bedroom. No one cares about your company except you. Your customers only care what your company can provide for them.
Next, take a realistic look at what you want to achieve. It’s easy to see the success stories online and get caught up in the excitement. But look behind the scenes to see what actually happened to achieve those successes. There was a lot of groundwork that went into creating the results you read about. The money is there, but it takes some work to get to it. Remember to keep your expectations realistic.
Look at your business as if you were climbing a ladder. You have to lift your foot up to the first rung before you can reach the second rung. You have to make your first $10 sale before you make your first $100 sale. You have to experience your first $100 month before you have your first $500 month.
With perseverance and the right mindset, you can reach your goals, but you have to walk before you can run.
Focus
The next battle you’re going to wage is with your mind. You need to stay focused on one task at a time. Pinpoint your focus to stay effective. When you sit at your computer, you are there to get a job done. There are hundreds of distractions online and offline, but you need to focus on the task at hand or your work will never get completed.
We all suffer from information overload. When you are online, it’s easy to start out with great intentions of completing a task like answering email, and 2 hours later find yourself surfing mindlessly. You click on a link in an email that takes you to a website that leads you to another website with intriguing information in a link that… you get the picture. We’ve all been there. So you need to guard your focus and not lose sight of what you’re actually supposed to be doing while you are sitting in front of your computer screen.
You have invested in this course to learn how to tap into the financial power of the internet, so focus on the course and ignore everything else for the time being. You will build a solid business faster by keeping your focus.
To prove this point, look at the results of a recent experiment. Whether you agree or disagree with the methodology, the outcome is fascinating.
An experiment was conducted with a group of mentally challenged people. Each person had the ability to listen to simple instructions and carry out a simple task. None of them could do more than one simple task at a time, but all of them were able to complete menial tasks on a computer.
The top person in the group had been taught how to copy and paste text from a Word document into a simple form on a website. Each day, he would sit down at the computer for 20 minutes, copy and paste exactly as he’d been shown and then turn off the computer. This was his “job” every single day, day-in, day-out.
The text he was copying and pasting from the Word document into the form on the website was a simple article. He was given a new article each morning to copy into an article submission website and then push the send button. That was all he did. That was all he knew how to do. He didn’t suffer from information overload. He simply followed the instructions he had been given. Each article promoted a website. After 3 weeks of sending out one article a day, the website made its’ first sale, then another and another until the website was making at least one sale a day.
If a mentally challenged person can generate sales from a website, using one simple tactic, so can you. The key to making it happen is the focus – your focus.
Narrow your focus and block out all the other noise in your life. Focus on this course until it is crystal clear and follow each step exactly as it’s presented. Do not hop around, don’t get sidetracked, don’t get bogged down with information. Follow the steps in the order they have been presented and you will have a solid business that you are proud of.
Education
Now that you have the proper mindset and you are focused, let’s move into training mode. This is the third key to unlocking your business success. The course you are taking right now is your education. By the time you have finished this course, you’ll know exactly how to set up, run and profit from your online business.
As you take your business to new levels of profitability, you want to keep learning and advancing. It’s beneficial to read a business publication or listen to business audio for at least half an hour each day. This way, you are continuing your education daily, but also working on your business. Educate yourself every day, but make sure you put your education into action. Don’t get stuck in education mode and forget to act on your new knowledge.
Action
This is a vital key to success. You need to pare down your actions. Your only productive business actions are the ones that are helping to increase your business. The rest is wasting valuable action time. Surfing the internet is not a productive action unless you are researching new opportunities. If you are researching, you need to limit your surfing to include only the subject matter that is essential to making decisions. It’s very easy to get sidetracked and waste hours upon hours and getting nothing productive accomplished. You need to concentrate and stay focused.
If you have a home-based business, diligently set aside a block of time every single day that is your business time. No one should disturb you during that time. You have to discipline yourself to keep that time as business time.
Before you sit down at your computer, decide what you want to accomplish. If you want to write an autoresponder message and update your website with a new article, those are your priorities. Talking to your friends on Skype, and surfing for irrelevant information can be done after you have accomplished your goals.
If you are able to sit down at your computer undisturbed for several hours, break your time into blocks to ensure you maximize your effectiveness. The most important part of your business is your marketing. It should be the very first thing you do.
If you have 3 hours, your schedule could look like this:
Hour 1: Write and submit an article (marketing)
Hour 2: Edit a report (project development)
Hour 3: Answer email (administration)
Your daily actions will determine how successful your business is and how quickly you join the ranks of the high-level income earners. If you don’t set up little mini-plans for yourself, each time you sit down at the computer, you will easily waste your time and accomplish little or nothing.
Don’t confuse activity with accomplishment.
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