Entrepreneurship is hard; so does online entrepreneurship. However, the best thing about webpreneurship is the fact that you can make mistakes, learn from those, and try to do better for the next venture – all faster and more cost-effective than when you do so for your offline businesses. What’s important, though, is your have to learn from your mistakes.
To help you in your journey, check out these five mistakes people do in webpreneurship, and how to deal with those:
Mistake #1: Trying to do too many things at once
I followed the path many take on online entrepreneurship – build or buy as many websites as possible with a hope that one or two will strike gold.
I am a follower of the “fail fast” principle – the more you fail, the faster you will find your success. In this case, I have wasted thousands of dollars trying to find what works – and I realize that there is very little or no shortcut to success in Internet marketing. It’s all hard work, and hard work pays off – either online or offline.
How did I fail? I tried too many things at once. I didn’t have all the resources to support plenty of websites, so I failed miserably at website management.
Mistake #2: Just try everything possible
Related to Mistake #1, I just want to try anything to see whether it works or not; it won’t. Why? Because I’m not focused to grow every single website I own.
You need to focus your effort on your top-performing and top potential websites, while keeping your website building efforts as a hobby – seriously.
Mistake #3: Trying to reinvent the wheel
I wanted to be unique – I wanted to build a cookie-cutter site that will hopefully end up like Twitter, Facebook, and the likes. I failed – miserably. In internet marketing, I try to do things differently – for some reason I can’t understand today.
Why didn’t I get it? Just follow the lead – and, again, don’t reinvent the wheel. When a top Internet Marketer says, “You should do list building,” then off you go – start building a list. If an Internet Marketer says, “reviews work best for an affiliate program,” why are you insisting on displaying large banner ads on your sites without actually pitching to your prospects via your genuine reviews?
Mistake #4: Doing something that even you don’t know what you are doing
This is related to #3 above, and one reason why you need to follow the lead: You need a plan. Doing marketing and promotion blindly will only waste your most valuable resources – time and money.
I often work on a website just because I think it’s interesting, that’s all. I wasn’t doing any researches to prove that what I’m trying to do is still worth doing; I was shooting blanks.
If you haven’t found your own formula to build an online business empire, learn from the others who have done it regularly.
Mistake #5: Limiting yourself
There are practically thousands of ways to make money online – the opportunities are out there, up for grab. With Internet Marketing and website ownership, you need to expand your horizon; your target market is the Internet – never limit yourself thinking that one particular target market or type of web business will take you there.
Also, I advise you to throw away your “I can’t do this” attitude, as it’s limiting your life and your potential income; Internet marketing and web business ownership requires a “can-do” attitude.
I hope this blog post helps you to take your online entrepreneurship journey to the next level.