No BS! What I did to start an online business...You Can't Handle The Truth!

I am a chronic "Butterfly Chaser" (definition below) and I am constantly trying new methods to expand my business and make even more money. If I find something that works or doesn't work, I will review it and give my honest opinion of it here.... So check back often!

Here is how I did it so far!

This is the most important part of the puzzle, in my opinion, so I will put it first. You have to truly enjoy what you are doing, to make it work! This sounds so cliche and dramatic, but it is more true for online businesses than for any other business. The tedious tasks that need done online seperate the success stories from the 98% of other online business ventures. (More about the tedious tasks later)

I had a friend ask me to help him build his business after the success of mine, which I of course agreed to. I asked him what it was and long story short.... It was an ice cream shop. I told him I had no idea that he was into ice cream to which he responded.."oh, I don't want to work in the ice cream shop.... I want to own one and pay other people to run it..."

I didn't want to crap on his parade so I played along, but in the back of my mind, I knew that it would probably never work out for him.

How can you expect to make anything work if you don't care about it? Not just in business but in every aspect of life. I truly believe, and I quote this almost on a daily basis........ YOU GOTTA WANT IT ! I will say it again because it is that important.. YOU GOTTA WANT IT!

I was playing around online, building websites and mini businesses way before I started my own true online business. At first, it was a hobby. I enjoyed building websites for people and I did it for free.... Not only free, but in most cases, I offered and begged businesses to let me create their websites for them on the stipulation that if it started making millions....I would get a cut. This of course never happened but it did do one thing. It gave me a lot of practice and helped me learn the proper ways to run an online business.

Be patient...Everyone is looking for the "get rich quick" way to build their online business. If you need money today....pick another way! Play the lottery and cross your fingers if you need a fast way to earn cash. Not to say your business can't take off like a missle in its first week, but it is highly unlikely.

I would dare to say that 95% of the websites that I have created for clients, have not truly become successful for one reason. They were not treated as "businesses." People want an online business because they believe that once its built, all they have to do is cash the checks. If you want to do nothing but cash checks.....then get a job at a bank! An online business is just that.....A BUSINESS, and must be treated as one. A business plan is a smart idea and outsourcing parts that you are not good at is another good idea. Think of the things that a traditional "brick-n-mortar" business must have to be successful and apply those things to your online business. In some cases, I think it is harder to create a business online. Lets just use the idea of selling shoes for this example:

If you open a shoe store in your town, people will drive past it on a daily basis. You can get listed in the phone book along side of the two or three other places. It will be a little easier to let people know you are there and there is less competition because all of the businesses are geographically isolated. An online business selling shoes has slightly more competition... I did a google search for "buy shoes" and came up with over 232,000,000 results. Imagine if you opened a shoe store in your town with that much competition.... How would you stand out? How would anyone even know you exist?

If you expect to build a website and just sit back... you will be so far back in the results that you are invisible!.................PERIOD.
You must be patient and build the business one piece at a time over the next months and years. (Thats why they call it BUILDING a business) Get rich quick schemes obviously don't work... If they did, ...we would all be rich!

If you are reading this, then you are already doing step number three.....You must educate yourself. Do research on the subjects you care about, find out what people are looking for, keep up with the different online trends and don't be aftraid of changing with the times. The things that worked yesterday, may not work today. There are hundreds of ways to make money online and billions of ways to fail at it.... It is just simple math. Make sure you choose the right ways.

I was told early on to pick a daily amount to shoot for and that is what it would take to have a "successful" online business. For me, this number was $100 per day. Now, you can either build a website that makes you $100 per day or make 100 websites that each make $1 per day. I am a chronic "butterfly chaser," which means I go for one thing and then...ooh, theres another thing, then......OOOOH, I could make that work... and so on. I keep jumping on the next big idea, before the last one is truly finished. For this reason, I chose the 100 websites at $1 per day so that I could effectively chase 100 butterflies. By the way, this goes against everything that is taught in business classes, (sorry professor Palmer).

I get paid a salary to run online businesses for clients. I offer to build, and develop the business, to help market it, to optimize it for the search engines, to reasearch it, maintain it but most importantly, I talk with my clients about how great thier ideas are and how they can be made into incredible online businesses.

In todays world and economy, everybody is looking for the way to financial freedom and freedom from employment. Dreams are what make my business work. People striving to build a better life and future for themselves by creating an online business. Everyone wants to own a successful online business, but many people have no idea how to do it. By figuring out the ways to build websites and promote them, you can offer people a way to get out of the 9 to 5 grind.

If you charge to build a website, then you get one paycheck and your done. I offer to be put on a salary position and I will build all of your ideas into onliine businesses. By doing this, I have met a lot of interesting people and have been offered lots of different jobs. I am now an up-n-coming business broker because I did a website for a Broker firm and they offered to teach me the business. By giving to others first and doing whatever you can to help their "dreams," you will find success!

So pretty much, I find other "butterfly chasers," that have lots of ideas, but little online skill, and I request a salary to create any and all online business ideas that they have.

Ok, I know, I got a little corny! I will "tone it down" a little. If you are just starting out, you probably cannot offer to build a bunch of online businesses for people and this method will probably not work, so lets get back to the simpler ways!

If you want to give this whole website thing a try, just create a website about a topic that you either know lots about or are very passionate about. It will not be successful if you have to write content for your website about a topic that you hate.

Making it is the easy part. You can use website templates and CMS sytems and pages just like the one you are on. This website (squidoo) allows you to create your own web pages in a very simple way. Lots of people make lots of money by creating websites, not from scratch, but fom tools like this one. If you are not very tech-saavy, then why not start here..... I will talk you through it.

Create a lens about something you can write about easily
Get traffic to it
Make Money!

Sounds easy right? Well its not! Again like I stated before. How do you stick out from all the other competitors? Content is the way you do it! If you provide honest to goodness information that people need and want,....they will find you! Take this very lens that you are reading, for example. By giving you free advice about how to build an online business, I am also promoting my businesses in the way of links. These links are pointing at some websites that I am advertising, which will do two things. If someone clicks on the link, they will go directly to one of the sites. This is direct traffic. Even if they don't see the links in this page.....Google, Yahoo and Bing do! The more links to your site, the more important the search engines think it is. Any links help, but links from sites that are related to your site are much better. For example, to make this lens more popular, it would be iimportant to get links from sites that are also about creating online businesses. These links or "backlinks," get you higher ranking in the search engines. This is organic traffic.

Sorry this is getting a bit "long winded," but it is all important stuff!

So in the simplest terms possible, the best way to make money with your website is to create great articles and content and to get lots of links to your site. I highly recommend doing it the old fashioned way, which will allways work and will never change, but is a bit tedious and difficult if you don't like to write.

-Create a website ( If you can't do it with any of the ways I mentioned then Click Here)
-Write content for your website and to send out to other websites to get links ( If you can't write yourself, which is preferred, then Click Here)

I personally use ,>Free Traffic System to get backlinks for my websites.

If you clicked on any of the links in the previous article and bought any of the software that was on the linked pages, then thank you, because I got a percentage of those sales. This is called affiliate marketing and it is the closest thing to free money online. It is free to sign up with companies and to promote their products on your website. For doing this, they are willing to give you a percentage of the sale. You both win, they made a sale and you get a percentage! The whole key is that you must first have traffic to your website. You could have a billion affiliate links on your site, without any traffic, you won't have anyone to click on the links. You can often find a link on websites labeled "affiliates," which allows you to promote their products in exchange for a piece of the pie. You can also try larger companies that are notorious for affiliate marketing.... The very two that I used in this lens.....

Amazon.com
Clickbank.com

Remember, you need lots of traffic to make any sort of money from affiliate marketing. If you have good content, traffic will eventually come, but give it lots of help with backlinks!

Check out some reviews on a few of my favorite affiliate products....Review Site

Lets review, I personally make money by:
-Doing small jobs for small amounts of pay
-Building websites on a case by case basis
-Get a salary to help other "butterfly chasers"
-Affiliate Marketing

I take these basic ideas and mulitply them for each project that I do.

Doing one small job doesn't make much but post your jobs on lots of websites.

Ask people if you can build their website FOR FREE, to earn a reputation and to get practice.

Don't be afraid to fail....Successful entreptreneurs fail more than anyone else...They just keep going, thats why they are successful.

Try multiple affiliates, for lots of products, in lots of different ways, to see what works best.

Selling and Flipping Websites

I am trying out a new money making venture, which is extremely successful in the real world....Flipping properties. The idea is to buy a property (in this case a website), make it better or re-market it and sell it at a higher price than you paid. This is a new venture for me and I have my first listing on Flippa now. I also created my own version of Flippa, which you can view here. I hope this can become a part of my web business, because it is really fun to check and see what websites are for sale, but best of all....It lets me do something with all the "butterfly chaser" websites that I have built and created.

I will keep everyone updated and let you know if and how I make money at this project!

Selling Digital Goods

I am also trying to sell digital goods online. The beauty about digital goods is that you only have to buy the product once or simply write it once (in the case of an ebook) then sell it an infinate amount of times and it is 100% pure profit after one sale! The tough part is that its difficult to let anyone know what you are selling....(which is solved by the whole traffic thing, we previously discussed)

You can sell products for free on sites like Payloadz...check it out by purchasing one of my products....C'mon...Do it!
This product comes with full re-sale rights... so buy it, make copies and try selling your own digital downloads!

Or, you can try another site
Tradebit.com

These are easy, free ways to make money, but extremely tough unless you have tons of loyal friends that want to help you out, or a website with tons of traffic.

In my opinion, this is not an efficient way to make money online. If you have a website, which has enough traffic to make money from selling digital goods using sites like Payloadz, then you could probably use it to make money in more efficient ways. Although, it costs nothing to sign up and post products on blogs and websites so why not do it and keep your fingers crossed.....An extra buck or two is better than nothing!

Owning a web business has its downfalls as well. There is a lot of stess and worry and hustling that goes along with creating and maintaining an online business.

-Finding enough work to make enough money to pay all the bills is a constant grind. Finding the work is a full time job in itself. Also it is a huge pain in the butt to chase people around for money. Everyone will tell you that the check is in the mail, but it usually isn't!

-Not knowing if you will make enough this month or whether or not you are even going to get paid at all.

-Learning to budget your money and time is very difficult and there is very little time to learn it before you get into debt up to your eyeballs.

-Prepare to put more hours in owning your own business that you would have at ANY other job. Online business do not shut down becuase it is the weekend or 3AM. It is a 24/7/365 job and it is WORK, not an ATM!

I think that my biggest problem is not thinking that my skills are enough to charge what I need to pay my bills. I have done a lot of jobs for free because I wasn't sure I could truly do them. By doing them for free, the customer could not be mad if I failed or if I told him/her that I could NOT do something.

If you don't think you can handle these things, then get out now! If you can handle the daily "grind," then it can be a very rewarding and worthwhile endevour. There is nothing like working when YOU feel inspired or up to it. And it is a great feeling to push for a goal and achieve it for yourself....not for a boss or company.

Creating Products With Zazzle and CafePress

Creating products is easy enough with both of these websites, and they both offer free accounts and free storefronts to sell your products from. They also both offer a community marketplace, which all of your products will automatically be published into. The beauty with this is that both website marketplaces already have traffic, which is the hardest part when you are trying to create an online business.

Although the traffic is already there, you must come up with a truly original product design and learn to market it in lots of different ways. I currently create products and put them on auction sites like ebay. However, ebay will charge you a success fee once you sell the product. Since the profit is already small, selling products from these sites, the success fee through ebay pretty much eliminates the possibility of making money on ebay. I post my products on free auctions (just do a google search). If you create a unique design that people want, you can make a few bucks using zazzle and cafe press.