SEO Site Manager

Don’t believe what all the Guru’s tell you it’s not easy to make money online. Via my Blog and forum I get to chat to lots of people who all have one thing in common they want to make money online. Often this is to supplement a poorly paying full time job, to bring in some extra money to help out with bills or just so that can get away from a mundane 9-5 job. Unfortunately about 95% of these people won’t get to realize their dreams and be able to make a significant online income. There are 5 basic mistakes that people make when they set out on an online career. The sad thing is that most of these can be easily avoided with a bit of planning and preparation. Let’s look at the mistakes and how you can avoid them.

1 Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail

I suspect that 99.9% of people who star out on an online career haven’t created a business plan. Ask yourself if you want a hobby or a business, if the answer is a business then it’s time to get serious. Include your personal strengths in your business plan and aim to focus on these initially. If you find you lack certain basic skills then use the first few months as an apprenticeship and learn the skills you need.

2. Don’t the believe the hype

It’s a successful Internet marketer’s job to make you believe what you read in their sales letters. Having read the sales letters or email you’ll be certain that you need whatever product they are promoting this week to be successful. STOP! You don’t. There is no replacement for hard work. Learning how to do things yourself without relying on some tool will be the best long term investment you can make.

3. Lack of spending control

I lost count of the number of people I know who have spent thousands of dollars on tools and e-books and still have not made more than $100 online. If you spend $100 on tools then you need to make $101 before you make a profit. Start out by joining a forum and see what people are doing to make money. Test their methods and if they work and you make a profit then buy tools that will help speed up the process.

4. Failing to Focus

Earning money online takes time, if it was easy everyone would be doing it and then who would deliver your mail and work in your local stores? Most people tend to forget this and if they don’t earn money in a few weeks they convince themselves that the methods don’t work and try something else. The methods do work but they take time and you need to learn all the skills required before you can master them.

5. You think you know all you need to know.

Technology and the Internet are changing at an ever increasing pace. 18 months ago Blog and Ping was the best way to get your site indexed and ranking in the search engines then almost overnight social bookmarking and RSS feeds took over. You need to keep an eye on upcoming trends and ways of marketing. I’ve had well known marketers email me recently telling me that Hubpages or Twitter was the next big think in marketing…sorry guys I’ve been using them and writing about them for the last 9 months.

Making money online is not easy but that doesn’t mean it’s overly difficult. If you find you are making some of the mistakes above then now you know what to do to rectify them. Take some time to Annalise what you are doing and where you are going worn and you will find that you’ll soon be on the path to a good online income.