What Nobody Tells You about Starting an Online Business
By: Richard White
Tags: Money, Motivation, Entrepreneurship, Online Business, Business

What Nobody Tells You about Starting an Online Business

Starting a business is hard

Image from Unsplash

The world is full of people who love to brag about their achievements, and how easy everything is for them.

The Internet, with its shield of anonymity, has even more of these people.

“I earned £30million before I turned 19.”

“LOL just start a business bro, it’s not that hard.”

Or they share true but unhelpful platitudes, like:

“There are 6 billion people in the world, you only need 5 to pay you £3,000 a month.” — Okay, sure, but you don’t have access to all 6 billion. Not all are online, and they certainly don’t all speak your language, nor have the financial means to buy what you’re selling.

“Quit your job! Once you have to find a way, you will!” — really? Homeless shelters have their fair share of people who had a dream, took a chance, and failed.

These people do a disservice to online business. Why? Because by making it seem so easy, people think they’re stupid or it’s not going to work out for them if they’re not pulling in thousands a month within a few weeks of starting.

Starting a business is hard

There’s no way around it, it’s hard work. Even if you do find it easy, it requires a lot of time investment. The only way to reduce the time investment is to pay someone to help, which means you need some money. For most people, that means needing another source of income, which eats into the available time remaining.

“Just learn a skill,” they say. Certainly, you’ll need a skill. At least, you will if you want to earn your money ethically and not charge for a service you can’t truthfully provide to a high standard. And learning a skill is essential if you want to charge the thousands a month that the “it’s easy bro!” crowd preach.

“Pick a niche!”

Before we get into this section, let me state that picking a niche is indeed essential. You can be a generalist, but you won’t command specialist prices.

A generalist will know something about a lot of things, but you’ll be held back from really going deep into a niche. When you can go deep, you become more valuable. One client of mine sent me a heap of random thoughts and said, “You’re really good at just knowing what I’m trying to say, can you make a page for me?”

It’d be easy for my chest to swell with pride at that moment, but the reality is I wouldn’t have such a strong understanding of other niches. If a client sent me random thoughts on launching a rocket into space, it’s a safe bet that they wouldn’t tell me “you’re really good at just knowing what I’m trying to say.”

So, yes, “pick a niche” is good advice, but said in isolation it’s also not very helpful.

Anything is a niche, and there isn’t money in all of them. If your niche is starving artists, don’t expect to charge them £3,000 monthly retainers.

Good coaches will help you work out how to properly drill down. And understand that, to begin with, you might have to be more generalist while you figure things out.

Maybe you’ll pick a niche and realize later on that it’s the wrong one.

There’s also some misunderstanding on what a niche is. Many people preach that it’s working with one hyper-specific group of people, like “women aged 35–40 who struggle to conceive, work at senior management level and drive a 7-year-old Porsche.”

There’s actually more than one way to niche down. You can do it by identifying a very specific audience, as above, or slightly more broadly by what you offer. A local business consultant, for example, has a niche of local businesses — but within that, they might work with cheese shops, carpet fitters, and plumbers.

These are things that can slow down your journey to making a full-time income online, and while that doesn’t sound as sexy as making 5 figures a month within 6 weeks, the truth is it’s a necessary stage.

There’s a lot to learn

The “it’s easy” crowd loves to proclaim that you just need a few clients. They’re right, too.

That doesn’t mean you’ll find those clients overnight, though.

In reality, the people who have had success have probably learned a formula for what works for them. At that stage, it’s significantly easier to land new clients regularly because you’ll have an effective lead generation strategy in place. That could be anything from automated cold emails to paying someone to make cold calls and paying someone else as the closer.

There are numerous ways to get new clients, but it’s a process of trial and error finding out what works for you.

If you’re brand new to the space, it’s going to take time to learn, implement, and tweak.

The other thing you’ll likely see a lot of is platitudes along the lines of “if you build it, they will come.”

You know what I mean. People who say “Make an info product, sell it.”

“Make an ebook and price it at £19.99. Sell five of those a day and you’re earning £100 a day!”

Yeah?

No.

We all love sexy headlines like that, but as always the devil is in the detail.

There are three primary ways to sell multiple copies every day with any regularity:

Have a big audience Have affiliates Run ads

Number 1 requires a significant amount of time invested — audiences don’t appear overnight. That’s not to say it’s unachievable; it’s absolutely possible, but you’re looking at months if not years of a strategic approach to build a sizeable audience organically.

Number 2 benefits from having a big audience, but you can also get affiliates by having a good product and networking. It still takes time, and you’ll lose probably 50% of each sale.

Number 3 is the quickest route, but it requires money. Possibly a lot of money. Ads don’t always work, so it can cost money just to make adjustments and try different variations. And, of course, the expenditure means that you aren’t keeping all of the grosses from the sales.

Again, this isn’t to say it’s not worth your time. But it’s always better to go into a project with an idea of the realities, so instead of getting disheartened quickly, you know it’s merely part of the process.

It takes time

It has never — ever — been easier to get started in business.

That is not the same as it being quick to succeed in business.

Years ago, starting a business meant you had to have physical premises, overheads, staff, and a lot of expenses.

Today, you can start a business in a few minutes by opening an Etsy shop, starting a blog, or uploading a PDF to Gumroad.

Over time, those things may net you significant income.

It doesn’t happen overnight, though.

And while it can be frustrating to wait, it’s almost universally for the best.

I understand that frustration — I can be impatient. I want to see the results happening quickly for confirmation that what I’m doing is effective.

Alas, it’s a process.

It’s messy

In the vast pantheon of irritating cliches and oversimplification of everything, online business gurus’ suggestion to “get clients” invariably overlooks the required steps to get one.

Sadly, it’s not usually as simple as offering someone a service and them agreeing.

More often, you need a list of prospects. Then, through whatever method you prefer, you contact them.

Then, you’ll need to follow up.

Then, you might need to follow up some more.

Some will ignore you, some will tell you to get back in touch at a later date.

Certainly, don’t get discouraged when you hear a “no” or “not yet” — many lucrative deals were signed after a long time of communicating.

The danger, though, is that you don’t follow up. You don’t send a reminder. You forget to get back in touch.

It’s essential that you have a method for keeping things tidy and organized. That’s what CRM systems are built for, but if you’re on top of things then there’s no harm in using a free Trello board, a calendar, or pen and paper system to remind you of who to follow up with on what date.

It’s worth it

Okay, this subtitle is the one bit that people do tell you about online business — but I needed to include this, in case everything that’s come before has put you off.

My conclusion?

Earning money for yourself is amazing. Earning money for yourself through online business gives you unprecedented flexibility — you can live and work anywhere you want, and you have unbridled creativity for what you sell.

If you’re aware of the ups and downs, understanding of how long it can take to start earning money regularly, and have enough patience and temerity to persevere, you’re halfway there already.

The key is to start, and don’t quit.