“Why Most Businesses Fail and What You Can Do About It.”
It is relatively easy to start an online business. But if you don’t approach this in the right way you will never be successful. Many people that start an online business give up on it in a very short time. We do not want you to do the same. In this powerful report, we will identify the 7 mistakes that you need to avoid with your online business. When you avoid these mistakes you will have a much greater chance of making your online business a success.
1. NOT TREATING YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS AS A PROPER BUSINESS
Most people that start an online business do it out of curiosity. They have seen many wild claims about how they can make a fortune with just a few clicks of their mouse so they get themselves a domain name and some hosting and play around. They follow the methods outlined in some training program that promises them the world. Claims of instant traffic and all this kind of BS. When the reality sets in that there is no such thing as making a fortune in their underwear by clicking their mouse and using “miracle software” they lose interest rapidly and quit. If you don’t treat your online business as a proper business then you are much more likely to fail. You do not have to invest a lot of money but you do need to make an emotional investment in your online business.
Setting up an online business is relatively easy – making it a success is not. It doesn’t matter what others tell you there is work involved to create a robust and sustainable online business. You will need to invest in tools like an autoresponder service to make it work properly. You need to believe that you are creating an asset. The website that you build is your asset. As an exit strategy, you can sell your website to an interested party for a considerable sum. When your online business is successful and making regular income there will be a lot of people interested in buying it if that is what you want to do.
To create a successful online business you need to work on it every day. Forget all the nonsense about miracle software. You need to learn to do the right things and get the word out about your online business all of the time. If your online business is just a hobby or a fad to you then your chances of success go way down. Imagine that you invested your life savings into a brick-and-mortar shop in the local mall. Would you treat that as a hobby or a fad? No, you wouldn’t – so imagine that you have invested your life savings in your online business.
There are going to be days when things go wrong with your online business. Something will stop working or the campaigns that you are running are not delivering the results that you want. You need the resilience and commitment to overcome these problems and carry on. Treating your online business as a real business will help you to do that.
2. NOT HAVING A PLAN
How many people that start an online business do you think to create a plan for their business? The answer is very few. Nobody knows how many online businesses fail every year but it will be a lot. Most new online business owners do not set goals or create any kind of plan. They are then surprised when it all fails. If you are going to start an online business then set a goal for it. The easiest goal to set is a financial goal. Think about how much you want your online business to generate in the first 12 months and then turn that into your financial goal.
3.NOT CHOOSING THE RIGHT NICHE
You need to carefully consider the niche that you choose for your online business. If you get this wrong then you can spend a great deal of time, effort, and money and not get much in return. There are thousands of niches but not all of them are a good fit for an online business. In a lot of guides about setting up an online business, they will tell you to follow your passions. There is good intention behind this. If you start an online business with a niche that you are passionate about then you will be more motivated to make it work. That is all very well if the niche you are passionate about has the potential to make you a lot of money. You may well be passionate about sheep shearing in the Outback, but how many other people are going to be?
4.NOT CHOOSING THE RIGHT BUSINESS MODEL
It is critical that you choose the right online business model that suits your circumstances. To open your own e-commerce store or participate in Amazon FBA you will need to invest some money to purchase stock to sell. Do you have this money available? If not then you could borrow it but you are taking a risk here. If you do not have a lot of time available then creating and selling your own products and services is going to be tough. You can outsource the creation of products but you will need to spend a fair bit of money doing this.
5.THE SHINY OBJECT SYNDROME
The grass is always greener over there. You have probably heard this term before. It means that there are better opportunities for your online business success elsewhere. We call this the “shiny object syndrome”.When you choose an online business model there will be people who tell you that you made the wrong choice and that you should switch to another program and purchase their training to show you how to make a fortune from it. A lot of people that choose the wealth creation niche (make money online) are constantly bombarded with new shiny objects to distract them. There are new courses and programs released every single day in this niche. All of them will tell you that you need to stop what you are doing now and follow their lead.
We strongly advise that you resist the shiny object syndrome no matter how tempting another offer sounds. Some people are serial purchases of these new “wonder methods” because they believe that the right solution for them is just around the corner. They have hundreds of courses sitting on their hard drives gathering digital dust. Some people buy these products and then never open them! You do not want to get caught up in this negative spiral. Just focus on what you are doing and do it to the best of your ability. We are not saying that you shouldn’t invest in more training for your chosen business model. You should learn everything that you can about it and be prepared to try new methods to make it work. But what you need to avoid is changing direction completely because the grass seems greener over there.
6.NOT GETTING ENOUGH TRAFFIC
If you had to guess why the majority of online businesses fail what would be the main reason in your opinion? Would it be a lack of interest? Lack of resources? Not having the best Internet connection? In our opinion, it would not be any of these things. The answer is Not enough traffic!
If you do not get targeted visitors to your offers then you are not going to make any money online. You can be promoting a mediocre offer and still make good money from it if you drive enough visitor traffic to it. On the other hand, you can have the best offer in the world, but if you don’t send enough targeted visitor traffic then you will not make many sales if any. Traffic is the most important aspect of any online business no matter what online business model you choose. If you are a freelancer and nobody knows about your services then your online business will fail. As an affiliate marketer if you don’t drive enough traffic to the offers you are promoting then you will not make any commissions. Without good traffic to your e-commerce store, you won’t sell anything – and so it goes on.
Once you have set up your online business you need to spend the majority of your time promoting it. There are several ways that you can do this. If you do not want to spend money then you can do content marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, and so on. If you have a little money to invest then you can use paid advertising to promote your online business. You can purchase pay-per-click (PPC) traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing. Or you can go for social media ads to get the word out about your business. We suggest that you go for a mixture of free promotions and paid promotions. Email marketing is a very good way of keeping in touch with potential customers and encouraging them to make a purchase. You will need to invest in an autoresponder service and build your email list but this should pay you back handsomely if you do it right.
Nothing is more important than traffic generation. No traffic means no business. So make a commitment to promote your online business all of the time. The more visitors you get the more money you are likely to make.
7.NOT TESTING AND ANALYZING RESULTS
One of the major advantages that an online business has over a conventional brick-and-mortar business is that you can measure just about everything in real-time. But a lot of online business owners ignore this or don’t use it enough. If you want to know how many visitors you got to your website last week you can use a program like Google Analytics to tell you this. You can also find out where your visitors came from and which pages of your website they visited. It is also useful to know how long they spent on your website. This is known as the “bounce rate” and you want your visitors to stay as long as possible. If they are leaving quickly then you need to investigate why and fix this.
It is possible to track everything and you should do this. This is especially important if you are spending money on paid traffic. You can use tracking codes that will tell you how many times a link was clicked and more. Most social media platforms have comprehensive analytics features these days. You can use these to see which of your posts are performing well and which are not. Do more of what is working and less of what isn’t. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. With an online business you can measure most things so take advantage of this. It will tell you which campaigns are working and also highlight areas of your website where you need to make some improvements. This information is golden so be sure to use it.
