It is Not that Easy to Make Money Online

This post was written by konagirl on July 17, 2009
Posted Under: Work at Home Ideas

I don’t think the hardest thing about going into business for yourself, selling information products, is the long hours and hard work that are involved. I think the hardest part is waiting to finally start making sales and actually seeing the money start coming in.

It’s just not as easy as the self titled “gurus” would like you to believe as they fill you full of “guru garbage” hype, working on your emotions, and lack of experience, to pull out that credit card and buy.

Don’t Be Fooled by the “Guru Garbage”

Don’t be fooled by all of the claims of overnight success. Don’t believe that you are going to make a gazillion dollars in 7 days because it just ain’t gonna happen. More than likely, it won’t have in 30 days, or 60 days or 352 days, either.

Those that do make the huge amounts of money like Frank Kern, Eban Pegan, or Andy Jenkins, for example, didn’t get rich overnight. It took them a few years of hard work to build up the following and income that they have now. They are also very skilled at what they do and can now charge $10,000 for a private course or $5000 just for a group study course . Andy charges $800 a month for his Stompernet membership. When they started online 10 years ago, things were a lot different than they are now, and it has gotten harder, not easier.

Working online as an Information Marketer is a business and just like any off line business, there are two essential things that you need when starting any business venture.

1. You need some capital to invest in your business.
2. You need a business plan to follow while you are creating your business.

Starting a new business venture online will involve getting an education, especially if you have never started a business online before. Expect to work long hard hours, more than you will be willing to work for your current pay check. Expect to invest money before you see a decent profit. Expect to go through a learning curve that changes rapidly. With all of that said, I am much happier working long hours at what I do online than I was working as a retail manger or spending months at a time away from home as a sales consultant.

Many businesses do not make a profit in their first year, but can earn enough to break even by covering their outgoing expenses. Even if your business begins making more than this, you want to be able to re-invest all of the profits at first, to help your business grow. You may need to keep your day job, while your business is growing, until you are making enough income from your home business to support your family .

Don’t sell the farm…

Don’t give up your day job right away, unless you have enough capital saved up, to live on comfortably for 3 years. I know you hate it and are itching to strike out on your own, but you have to think ahead and plan before you act…

Listen, I run my own businesses, but I really struggled for 3 years before I started making an online income. Granted, I had a HUGE learning curve, as I didn’t know anything before I started. I had to learn everything from scratch like building a website to using an autoresponder.

Perhaps you are more knowledgeable than I was and you already know how to build a website, or create graphics. If you are, it won’t take you as long as it took me, but you still will not be an overnight success as there is much more to it than that, and most of the “gurus” ain’t gonna tell you everything, in all of the stuff that you buy.

Why?

Because most, not all, really don’t want to help you. They only want to give you just enough information, so that you will be hungry to buy the next report, to learn more. Granted, there is no way you can get absolutely everything in one e-book as it would be so huge, it would be larger than the World Book Encyclopedia, but IMHO (in my humble opinion) they could at least give you everything that they know on the one topic.

If you have capital, which I didn’t when I started out, you can always outsource the job to someone in another country to build your sites for you. In fact, you could outsource a lot of the every day tasks such as bookmarking your sites or handling your e-mail.

By the way, if you are more of a hands on person for building your own websites, I recommend using XSitePro. It is one of the easiest ways I have found to build you own websites. You only have to pay for it once, at a very low price in comparison to the really expensive and difficult to learn Dreamweaver program. Also, I recommend using Aweber for your autoresponder, as it is the best autoresponder service out there.

Anyway I stayed on with traveling the country as a retail sales consultant for a couple of years until I started making enough online to slowly begin declining contracts that didn’t suit me, or ones that would keep me away from home for 3 to 6 months at a time.

When I was on the road, I’d work during the day, and be on the computer at night and on my days off. When I was at home, between contracts, I must have been on the computer learning and doing sometimes16 hours a day, almost every day. Often I’d only break to cook dinner or do a few chores around the house.

These days, 6 years later, I’m no longer totally online. I have recently started a couple of offline ventures that I was able to put together from what I learned from working on the Internet. This is great because they are more streams of income for me, and I still no longer have a J.O.B.

If I grow to to the point of making a million dollars online, I will probably hire someone else to run things for me, but until then, I enjoy what I’m doing, I’m happy have multiple streams of income from both worlds, and you just never know what the future may being!

Some of the most successful people I know online are either still managing an offline business and work online as well… or they waited until the cash was flowing big time online before they quit being a wage slave and quit their job.

Listen, this is especially important if you have responsiblities. Your wife, kids, family come first. Make sure there is a roof over your head, food on the table, medical insurance, and some backup money.

You can still have big dreams! You can still take risks, but make sure they are planned. What can you afford to lose??

Now, I’m doing fine in my current situation. And it gives me both stability and the freedom to do what I want, which is very important to me! I have kids and grand kids at home in Hawaii, and also in Alaska and Minnesota. I like having the freedom of taking off whenever I want to go and see them. I like having the freedom of staying until they are sick of me, if I want to (Grin), without having a deadline of getting back to the J.O.B.

Figure out and plan what you can afford to risk; consider combining another form of income until your business is rocking… there is nothing wrong with that. Offline businesses have been doing that for ages!

It is realistic for a business to show a profit after only 6 months online! True story. I’m not saying it will happen that quick, nor am I saying it will take as long as it took me, but I do want you to look at it realistically, and have an Information Marketer’s business plan set up.

The key is persistence, determination, and focusing on your goals; never giving up and knowing what the risks are….

If you decide to succeed, you will in time, and that is a promise.

OR you could get lucky and strike gold with your very first information product… ya never know!

Who else wants to learn a shortcut to the steps I took so long to learn on how to do everything online, to start making money online, selling information products? You can go to Quit Being a Wage Slave to learn how I first began making my living online.

Answer To: “How Do I Make Money Online?“