Making money online is like using a very potent drug.
Once you see significant amounts of money from a product or affiliate sale hit your account, you’ll never really be the same again.
My name’s Onuora Amobi and I am the CEO of Learn About The Web inc.
Learn About The Web™ is an online education platform I created to provide universities with the tools and services they need to credibly teach online business. Businesses and consumers also use our tools and services to learn the steps to creating successful online businesses.
A little about me
You can take a look at my Linkedin profile and see some of the companies I worked for when I was a little younger.
Inevitably on weekends, rather than fly back to my home in California, I would end up in some foreign city (insert Miami, New York, Plano etc etc here).
Being a bit of a nerd, I found that dabbling on the web was a good intellectual exercise I enjoyed and it actually helped me relax after a very long week.
Well, what started out as dabbling turned into a hobby, which became an obsession and then became my life’s passion. I was able to quit my day job 6 years ago and have made my living on the internet since.
I have made a LOT of money (several hundred thousand dollars) online and I get irritated when I read some of the BS get rich quick prescriptions for making money online.
I would love to share the 12 most important things people need to do if they are really serious about making money online.
I promise you that these are not the touchy-feely lists you are used to but are actually based on substantial amounts of real life experience.
This is part one of a three part series so let’s get started with the first 4 attributes.
Focus on Education
This industry is first and foremost about education. You have to know what the different elements are that are available to you.
- Is my idea for an online business viable? How do I research that idea?
- How do I design that idea and then get it built?
- What can I outsource? Should I just buy a website?
On and on the questions keep coming and they never stop.
The difference between being successful online and throwing your money away is knowing the answers to those questions.
Insert Shameless Plug – That’s why I started Learn About The Web. I realized that people simply didn’t know where to even begin and they needed a guide through the process.
(Really) You need to put the time in
It’s so fascinating to me that people equate making money from blogs or software online as something cool fun and easy.
No one looks at medicine, law, architecture that way but they see online business as easy.
It’s not. In fact I’ll tell you a couple of secrets that you almost never hear.
- It’s hard to get started.
- It gets harder every year.
People get confused because it’s cheaper and RELATIVELY easier to get started than being a lawyer or doctor. That doesn’t make what we do a walk in the park.
In order to be successful in this business, you have to know what the heck you are doing and that ONLY comes with time. The sooner you start your website, fail and get back up, the quicker you’ll get to your success.
Online business is way more fun that law or engineering or any traditional discipline because there’s so unlimited potential – you can be as successful as you are smart.
On the flip side, it’s also more challenging than law or engineering or any traditional discipline because the learning doesn’t ever stop.
Never.
Web tools, trends and technology change all the time and there is always something new to learn. It all takes time.
Here’s one of my favorites – Fail cheap, often and well
I have probably built about 50 websites over the past 14 years and most of them were glorious failures.
I have built sites about immigration, online dating, technology, cars, finance, you name it. It was a fun process for me because I learned how to get 10 people a day to my website. That was AMAZING.
Then I learned that if I changed some text or chose a different topic, maybe 100 people a day would come. Real live people!!
Then maybe a thousand or 10 thousand or my all time high – 50,000 visitors in one day!
Quick aside – when that many people come to a site that you built from your head with no one else’s help, I simply cannot explain that rush to you. It’s a drug!
I only got to that point because I learned how to fail.
These sites cost me very little money. I learned that my major cost was my time.
You see it was cost effective for me to start a small web business, see how far I could take it, fail, learn from those mistakes and start again but just a little smarter.
I learned WordPress, Photoshop, PHP, HTML, CSS, Copywriting, Outsourcing, Affiliate Marketing and lots more by failing well.
Efficient failure is a great skill to learn.
Never forget that this is about adding value. You and your audience both have to win
This is by far the easiest lesson to forget and the hardest one to learn. This is also the quintessential online marketing trap that new entrepreneurs fall into.
The biggest temptation that will hit you when you make your first thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand or million dollar payday will be to DO IT AGAIN.
This is almost always the wrong move to make.
You always need to take a step back and continually ask yourself the following:
- Am I adding value to my audience?
- How am I adding value to my audience?
- Am I honestly trying to help them achieve a desired outcome?
- Am I primarily driven by money?
The relationship between you and your audience (if done well) is actually very intimate.
You are a content provider. You (hopefully) provide something that your audience likes and wants and they start to really trust and depend on you.
You need to make every effort to keep that circle of trust intact. Your business will (literally) depend on it.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog series where I talk about finding your voice and being clear.
Use the comments below and let me know if you agree or have gone through any of these steps as well.