The 7 Hardest Lessons You’ll Learn Before Succeeding With An Online Business

After being a part of helping and observing thousands of people succeed (or fail) online I have detected some strong trends. Call me crazy, but you can’t prove me wrong on any of these.

1. Affiliate marketing IS NOT a business
Perhaps my most controversial point of the 7, but I’m not the one who said it first. One of the richest affiliate marketers of our time said it. Find the proof here.
2. Those of us who stuck it out with eBay are still making a lot of money. Amazon.com is full of opportunity too. It’s the “boring” stuff that really works.
I’m banking more than ever on eBay, and teaching others to do the same. Sure, it’s only a portion of my online income, but it’s steady!   When in doubt head to where all the buying traffic is. I still love eBay and love Amazon more all the time as an income geneartor.
3. Yes, you have been making others rich buying all those courses, membership sites and ebooks.
The good news is, you know more than you realize.  The solution? Go after some low hanging fruit. This blog post spells out where I think the low fruit is.
4. You don’t start with a website or even a “great” product. You need an audience first.
This blog post will get you thinking correctly about how to find and grow an audience as your FIRST focus.
5. Every new “marketing opportunity” that has come along since email marketing took hold has fallen in one of these three categories: 1. a fad that has (or likely will soon) pass,  2. is best used to grow your email mailing list (i.e. social media), or 3. has been a barely more than a waste of time entirely from day one. (The only possible exception to these three rules is mobile marketing)
6. Your skills don’t matter as much as you think they do.
Stop chasing skills and start building systems. Learn to outsource work to the highest performing/lowest price option. People with skills work for rich people with ideas. Possible exception:  The only possible “skill” you are likely to ever need to succeed online.
7. Relationships rule (not content).
Use your real name, show your face, and help people make hard decisions with the content you create.  Sure, I’m a fan of great content (what other kind is worth your effort?), but relationships earn you the right to even present your message.  Here’s a video of what happens when a bunch of people trust your advice because you’ve built a relationship (watch me earn $7K in a day in that short video).
8. Over-delivering REALLY pays off. Under-delivering is death online.
I call it irrational generosity. Notice I promised 7 harsh lessons. This eighth one is important.  Every customer who thinks your are amazing will tell potentially HUNDREDS of people. Amaze your customers even if it’s expensive.

Please leave me a comment using the link at the top of this article. I want to know your favorite, or if you think I’m wrong or left something off the list.

While writing this article I asked my Facebook followers to chime in their ideas. Here’s what some of them said were the hard lessons they are learning. You are NOT alone if you are thinking any of these things!

Please JOIN THE CONVERSATION! Leave a comment.

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  Tom J Curtis Sometimes the gold is at the very bottom of where you are looking, but most people give up either way before the gold or a quarter inch from it. They’re quick to abandon what seems to not be working when all it takes is one more punch through that last quarter inch of conflict and…JACKPOT!!! I speak of my own experience of course.

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  Jose Lukes Trying to roll out your online biz until it is just “perfect”. If I had waited until every online biz venture I took was perfect, I would have never had any success.

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  Tom J CurtisBy the way Jim, I love this post. No sugar coating from you. People deserve to know that it takes good old fashion rolling up the sleeves and going to work to make anything online or off work in this world. There’s definite glory and joy to be had on the other side of it but not after paying the price, which price is unique to each person, there’s a price to pay nonetheless. I do believe there’s an enchants life once that price is paid…until the next set of challenges of course. But that’s where real accomplishment is found.

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  Roy Pickens Do not accept a set back as failure. Quitters never win and winners never quit.

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  Tom J Curtis That’s why you’re the real deal and I’ve always enjoyed that about you. I think that’s the only way people can build genuine relationships life. Especially with list building…the more authentic the person building it, the more quality the list.

  I’ve learned so much over the last year. I’ve learned it’s not the size of the list, but the quality. It’s a matter of creating raving fans from genuine, personalized content. You are the front runner Jim.

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  Jenni Rosing HuntYou simply can’t be everything to everyone… That’s a tough one I learned early on. Not only did it help me get into a tight niche, it also helps let some criticism roll off the back.

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  Roy Pickens That it takes more than a big pretty website. One of my first misconceptions.

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  Amitav BorahThe biggest point & one of the most common… Stop jumping from one project to another…and just concentrating on One and only One….and finish it up!! & Also..Never Quit!!..even if you fail the first second or third time….. Keep moving until you get it ! Be Stubborn…Be Persistent!

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  Marlo J McCarthy It’s easy to spend every dime you have learning from brilliant “gurus” but if you never take the jump and apply what you’ve learned it is all time and money wasted.

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  Marlo J McCarthy‎….incidentally – an excellent program can set you on the right path – I’ve just known too many wantrepreneurs that keep buying different programs but when it’s time to apply and work, they buy the next shiny program.

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  Martin Hurley ability to focus on one set goal until achieved

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  Andrew J Titcombe Even if you believe the claims that the “gurus” make it is absolutely no good to you financially unless you are prepared to work. 10% inspiration 90% perspiration comes to mind. THEIR money is safe in THEIR bank Their claims don’t make YOU rich!

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  Win Thomas A lot of it has already been mentioned. I would agree that keeping focused on one project and not being ‘seduced’ by the next life changing programme to come along, until you’ve completed it. Stay focused. Listen to people like yourself Jim who have integrity and practice what they preach.

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  Nikki Stephens FOCUS: Follow One Course Until Successful.

  Follows on from what some above have said – perseverance is key, & you won’t find success simply by buying into lots of different courses.

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  Dave Stevens When you wake up asking how can you help people rather than asking how I can make some money .

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  Michael Markuson Focus and Perseverance! Never Give up!

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  Jamie Smith Don’t believe the hype or the squeeze pages with “who else wants to put $25,987 in their bank account tonight with my black ops super secret CIA affiliate mega bomb success course that literally shoots thousands of dollars into your account effortlessly”. “click below to buy it for the limited time price of $1497″ and p.s. blah blah blah and p.p.s. blah blah blah

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  Todd Fetters You absolutely have to have a mentor who has succeeded online with a business that doesn’t sell how to be successful in an online biz. Find someone who is proven to succeed on their own before they became a teacher. I have taken the last 6 months away from this business just to clear my thoughts and regroup. It would be great to have a pool of resources to utilize so an idea can become a reality. Jim-you are definitely one of the few who has an amazing reputation in a business full of not so honest people. Then again, every business where money can be made is no different. Thanks for holding to your core values!

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  Doug Kramer You will be distracted before you are successful.

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  Joseph Carducci I think the biggest lessons are: 1) Be very very selective in who you follow and listen to (and keep this to a short list, at least in the beginning to avoid distractions) 2) Concentrate on something that you have passion for so that you will actually enjoy doing it (although be careful to do solid research ensuring it is a viable market) 3) While following a few selected “mentors” or trainers, still learn to think and decide for yourself (just because Frank Kern is doing something does not mean it is the right thing, tip or tactic for YOUR business)….this last one took me the longest to really get (and I still need to constantly remind myself)!

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  Leszek Cyfer Things won’t get done by themselves – you have to put yourself to them because no one will do them for you.
  The only way to automation is to make a system, but it needs to be constructed by you.

My $3/hour worker does nearly all my eBay listings. Here’s how I found him.

This is the only pic we have of Mr. S. I blurred it a bit to protect his identity. He's done a great job for over 2 months now - and he's THRILLED with the pay rate.

You’ve heard me rave about hiring workers from other countries to help work in different aspects of my online businesses. Below is a step by step story of one recent worker I found on odesk.com. I take a unique approach to finding and hiring the RIGHT PERSON the FIRST TIME.  This list will help you do the same thing.

I recently found and hired a fantastic worker in India (I’ll call him Mr S.) for just over $3 per hour. He’s THRILLED to have the work and he keeps us profitable on inventory that might otherwise be unsellable (thin profit margins).  He handles many of our listings on eBay. It took me less than an hour of total work, and under a 24 hours start to finish to find and hire him. A day later he was working.

Here’s how it worked:

1. I signed up with odesk.com. They allow you to post jobs for free.
2. To determine what sort of “talent” was available to meet our needs, I performed a “search contracts” search for the keywords “ebay listing” to see what sort of workers were out there. I found hundreds.
3. I read over the “bio’s” of a handful of the “contractors” that came up. (“Contractors” is what Odesk calls their outsource workers) I could have easily hired one of these worker on the spot, but I didn’t (you’ll cause yourself a big headache if you do that). I suggest you go a couple steps further to find the RIGHT worker the first time. The purpose of reviewing this list was to give me an idea of what keywords and descriptions to use when putting together a job description for my own worker.
4. I set up a brief job description using the “post a job” feature. I pulled some keywords from the “bio’s” of the contractors that I’d just seen.
5. IMPORTANT: As part of the job description I included a link to a simple “Jing“* video for each candidate to watch.  I made the video in under one minute and it instructed the candidates to provide me a link to a recent eBay auction that they had built and launched (since that would be their job). I also asked them to briefly explain in their own words how they felt about this project, and what their eBay experience was. This does several things for me. It confirms that the candidate has a good internet connection (they can see vide0), it confirms that they understand my spoken English instructions, it gets them to send a unique response back to me instead of just a copy/paste response that could have been written by anyone etc.  If I had so desired I could have also requested that they send me back a jing* video response to make communication that much easier (but I didn’t in this case).
6. I received over 60 responses within 12 hours. 80% of them did not follow my instructions to include a link to a recent eBay auction that they had launched. That same 80% was instantly eliminated from my list of potential candidates (Odesk makes it easy to keep track of which candidates are still in the running.)
7. Of the handful of applicants that did make the cut, only about 6-8 of them had good English writing skills. Of those, three were asking for a very competitive pay rate and also had fantastic feedback from other employers (Odesk uses a feedback system much like eBay to rate workers). The decision was easy from there.
8. Bottom line: Hire the most experienced, most qualified and least expensive worker you can find. Narrow down your list by requesting a simple task be performed in their application response.

*Jing is a free and VERY simple “screen capture” video recording tool. I require all my workers to learn to use it because it’s a fantastic way to “show and tell” instructions without a lot of typing. Get it here: techsmith.com/jing.html Watch the demo video here.

For more advanced training on hiring workers from other countries, as well as access to pre-screened and highly qualified workers, please check out the resources offered by John Jonas. He’s my “go to” expert on all things related to outsourcing. Here’s a link to his site: LocalBusinessOutsourcingHelp.com

an hour in the life of a creative online entrepreneur

Yesterday I posted on facebook a detailed list of all of the things that had happened in the previous SINGLE HOUR of my day so far online. So many people responded to that facebook post that I thought I’d share it with everyone here and open it up for questions / discussion. Let me know what you think!

In the last hour or so :

A hired worker in India listed multiple eBay items for sale on my account, we sold ebooks or courses to 45 people from 9 different countries, 140+ people joined one of my email lists via aweber, we sold 3 items on amazon via FBA (ProvenAmazonCourse), 1 new member joined at MySilentTeam.com (27 ppl logged in), 1 new member joined offlinebiz.com (57 ppl logged in), We sold an estimated 2-3 copies of my 101FreeMarketing.com best seller, Mary answered multiple customer support emails, Ronda shipped the several eBay items that sold over the weekend, Brandy made our manual weekly backups of our email lists and answered customer support inquiries, Jen prepped inventory for eBay/Amazon, Approx. 420 people visited one of my 20+ websites, and that’s probably about half of it…

Some lessons/observations:

• Part of continuing your success online means including other people so that you are ONLY doing what ONLY you can do
• I DO what I teach unlike many full time “how to” sellers with no experience DOING it
• I’m serious about “multiple streams” and you should be as well
• Notice my name didn’t come up on that list as doing much. This is because I stay quite busy THINKING, PLANNING,  and CREATING. That’s my job.

What questions/observations do you have about this? Use the comment section to let me know your thoughts and see what others think.

My “Free Marketing 101…” book has launched and it’s TEARING up the charts!

GET THE BOOK HERE

GET THE AUDIO VERSION HERE

The story behind this book:

I was approached by a major publisher nearly one year ago (the “For Dummies” publisher – Wiley and Sons) and they asked me to write a book about how to START or GROW a business (or spread and idea, a cause, an organization etc.) using free and virtually free marketing ideas.

After nearly a year of hard work on this book I think you’ll love what I’ve come up with.

Hit store shelves Fall 2011.

Thanks Paul Hobart for sending this pic of his 3 1/2 yr old starting her biz career early!

What made me qualified to write this?

From the perspective of the publisher I’d achieved something that many others would like to accomplish. I’d grown multiple successful and creative online businesses…and had done it WITHOUT ever needing to invest a wad of cash. In the rare instances where I did spend any money it was either on inventory that would quickly sell for very nice profits, or it was nominal expenses like $5 for a video, or $30 to have a long audio transcribed into writing etc.

I’ve been a ravenous consumer of effective and “Free Marketing” concepts for over 25 years.

Michael Markuson's daughter explaining some of the finer points to him...

From here forward I’m considering the self appointed title of:  “World’s Foremost Expert on Free Marketing Ideas”.    You like it?   ;0)

Seriously though – the book is CRAMMED with my best ideas and the first few dozen reviews are all RAVING.   It’s so stuffed with great ideas that they asked me to shorten it but I refused. Since they initially asked if I had 100 ideas to fill such a book and I agreed…I decided to deliver those 100+ ideas on MY terms.

The final product is the best ideas from my nearly decade of success online. It’s not a cover to cover type of book though. Whether you have five minutes or six hours to spend with this book I hope you’ll walk away inspired (that was my goal).

I can sniff out winning ideas like a bomb sniffing dog on caffeine. It’s a gift and a curse, but I tried to capture that way of thinking and put it all into a single book.

Click the book image or visit 101freemarketing.com for more info.

Want to see the reviews from readers? Click Here for Amazon’s Reader Reviews Page

Tearing up the charts! It’s a #1 Top Seller Worldwide!

Can you help spread the word?

Finally, here’s my invitation to you to help spread the word about this book. I also explain where the proceeds are going (I’m not keeping them).  You’ll also see a video of my wife, kids and I seeing the book for the first time ever just a few days before it hit store shelves – it was a fun family moment!

Be Sure to buy more than just one copy!!

o   Booster seat for toddlers
o   Have any business minded friends? They’ll love you!
o   Have non-business minded friends with insomnia? They’ll love you too!
o   Christmas isn’t that far off!
o   Sell them on eBay? (or Amazon) and get most if not all of your money back? (the book is still at pre-launch pricing temporarily but that WILL change soon.)

Have a question? Leave a comment and someone will help you out.

The ONLY semi-techie skill you’ll ever need for online business success

Use twitter? Give me a tweet!  —>

Success online is NOT a matter of YOU obtaining a bunch of new skills.

Another skilled worker...

I say it all the time.

Success online is for IDEA people…not “skills” people.

People with skills compete and work hard for jobs to serve (and make richer) the people with ideas.

Learning Leverage and Influence are the keys to success online. New technical skills may make you more confident, and they will add to your resume or help you get a job, but they WON’T make you successful as an online entrepreneur. If anything all those “techie skills” will get in the way of your success.

You don’t need web design, Java, HTML, or any other web language skills in order to succeed online. You don’t even have to know how to set up a blog (although that’s getting pretty darn easy to do with blogger.com and wordpress.com). In most cases you shouldn’t even be setting up a website though.

This all runs counter-intuitive to the way most of us have been educated.  In public school we learn a bunch of new random stuff each week and then HOPE that some of it will help us someday as we seek a job (a job that will make someone else rich).  I’m all for a good well rounded general education, but if you try to do the same thing with an online business effort you’ll NEVER GET ANYWHERE.

It’s not your fault.  It’s ingrained in you.  Even “forward thinking” higher education institutions incorrectly approach “Online Business” by starting out teaching “skills” like how to build a website.  Next they might teach you graphic design so you can put in pretty graphics. Next they might teach you how to add or program a shopping cart etc.  Those are all virtually USELESS skills when it comes to success online. I can find someone willing to do all that stuff WAY BETTER than you can all for about $2.50 per hour!

The ONE SKILL (semi-technical skill) that I repeatedly see as being key to someone’s online success though is EMAIL MARKETING and email list management.  The fact is that email marketing has the highest ROI of ANY large scale marketing option in the world. It’s a “must have” tool for any business or entrepreneur I ever consult with.

If I could convince you to pick up ONE new skill in your search for online success it would be the skill of growing and maintaining your own email list. Sure you can outsource this task as well once you grasp it, but you first need to learn what is possible and how it all works.

So where do you go to learn email list management? I use aweber.com. Click here or use that pretty little button over there  –> to check out aweber.

Getresponse.com, constantcontact.com and several other sites offer similar services. I LOVE aweber though for my own list management needs.

I have a full course on this subject at ListBuildingClass.com where I explain how I’ve gone from 0 email list followers to over 100,000. That is 100,000 people that WANT to hear from me and also volunteered to be on my mailing list. Email marketing is a powerful tool for success in any business ESPECIALLY for any online business.

…and it’s the ONLY “semi-techie” skill you’ll ever need.

By the way – the ListBuildingClass.com course is currently on sale. It’s on par with courses that have sold for thousands of dollars, but mine is under $50 right now. It’s a tiny investment in the ONE SKILL that I say you must have in order to succeed long term online.

Please leave a comment or question using the comment link at the top of this article.