Keeping Your Mental Edge When Starting Your Business
Monday, May 19, 2008
Any start-up, whether web-based or a brick and mortar business, is a tough proposition. The fact is that most businesses fail. The best advice a new business-owner can get is two simple words - be patient. Patience is the key to a successful start up.
“When a business is starting out, you have to weather difficult times. That's the only way the business is going to improve.”
Being patient is easier said than done, however. What happens if in the first six months of a business, you are continually losing money? What happens if your site traffic has hit a lull?
Take someone who has started up a string of affiliate sites. He has followed all of the recommendations: designed quality sites, signed up for affiliate programs with good payouts and keeps the sites updated with traffic. Still, nothing much is happening with the sites. What can a small business owner do if things aren't initially going his way? In addition to patience, any business owner needs adaptability.
Adapting to Difficulty
On this site, you'll find info about how entrepreneurs need to be headstrong and willful. Don't confuse this with being wholly inflexible and uncompromising. There's great value in having a vision, but as they say, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
If you aren't able to adapt to a changing marketplace, you can't hope to excel as a business leader. There are many roads towards bringing a vision to fruition, so you should never stick to one game plan, especially if things are not going well.
Take the above example. There's always more work that business owner could be doing. The fact that the business hasn't taken off is proof enough that more needs to be done. He could direct his content on the site towards specific keywords, using multimedia, such as video. He could add forums to the site or find places to advertise and exchange links, to name a few possible solutions. When a business is starting out, you have to weather difficult times. That's the only way the business is going to improve.
A good business leader does not just project long-term hopes and dreams -- he's good at recognizing and fixing problems. Be certain that problems are going to arise. There has never been a business that didn't experience a few hiccups along the way.
Learning from mistakes is an essential part of growth. A business leader must have a balance between confidence and the ability to see when things are not working. Having a healthy balance between those two traits will give you a strong mental edge as the business gets rolling.
Ecommerce Business Plans
A web-based business has a few distinct advantages. Since ecommerce is far less expensive than running a brick and mortar business, you have much more time to steadily build up a consumer base before you start to panic. This does not mean, however, that you shouldn't always be looking for new ways to improve. You could take this advice and think that all ecommerce businesses are slow-growth opportunities. Ebusinesses will grow according to how much work you put in. The truth is you should always be looking for ways to change and improve, even if you've had a stellar first quarter. Business should always be evolving.
So long as you take these above issues to heart, you'll have a mental edge when starting a business. This is true if you're running a brick and mortar business, which has greater start-up costs. The same issues apply -- increased advertising, new products and so on.
Strength isn't about always being right, but also about admitting when you're wrong. You have the will to sustain the lean years. This is what it is to be battle-tested, and so long as you handle these problems effectively and quickly, you will be much better suited to being a leader in your chosen field.
Affiliate Marketing Success Stories
When you're feeling really down and out of luck, it's a good idea to read through past affiliate marketer success stories to remind yourself that hard work does actually pay off. Take the successes of such websites as HollywoodVideo.com, JogTunes.com, or Jason Calacanis, the mind behind Engadget.com and AutoBlog.com.
What all of those sites have in common is appeal to a specific niche, as well as useful and entertaining content. They're so well entrenched that people may not even realize that they are visiting an affiliate site.
This is what you should be striving for -- not just profits but a complete web presence. The two go hand in hand. Truth be told, it's a much more competitive industry than when a site like Engadget first came on board. However, this does not mean there aren't niche networks waiting to be fulfilled.
