How to Get Started
Have you always wanted to start your own business? Have you tried but never succeeded? Never fear!
This article will teach you the ins and outs of how to start your own online business at a fraction of the cost. With practical advice, step-by-step instructions, and simple systems, you can make this work for you.
This “getting started” guide will show you how to tackle each step with ease so you can finally be your own boss, the “Right & Easy” way.
It is my goal throughout this guide to help you overcome your obstacles and achieve your dreams.
One of the first things you need to remember before we get started is that there is no magic pill out there for you to swallow and become an instant millionaire.
No matter what you do in life or what methods you choose to accomplish your goals and visions, it is going to take some serious work on your part.
It is going to require you to take action!
Let’s Begin to Make Things Clear… There is NO Magic Pill!
12 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting Your Internet Business
- Why do I want my own Internet Marketing Business?
Before deciding to start a business, think about the qualities you possess, what makes you tick, and how that might help you be a more successful business owner.
- What interests, talents, skills, or strengths do I have that will assist me in running my new business? Inventory the abilities you already possess. Then think about all the ways you can use them to grow your business and help others grow their business, as well as work with partners that lack your abilities.
- What are my strengths and weaknesses?
A business owner needs to be able to see his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Recognizing what you are and are not good at will help you decide how to spend your time and when to seek help from experts or outside professionals.
- What skills do I need to learn or brush up on to run my business effectively?
Recognize which skills you need to develop in order to run your business most effectively.
Identify the ones that are worth investing time into learning and which ones you might be better off finding outside sources to perform.
- Do I enjoy challenges?
Businesses provide constant challenges. If you enjoy a good challenge, it will energize you. If you don’t, you may end up feeling as though you’re engaged in an uphill battle.
- Will I be doing work that is meaningful and that really interests and excites me?
When you are engaged in doing something rewarding, it helps to motivate you to keep going even when things get tough. Start by getting back in touch with your values and seeing if there is a synergy between them and the things you will be doing in your business. If not, see how you can spin things so that there is.
- Do I really have a money-making idea?
Not all great ideas make money. A good business idea addresses a problem, need, or pain that a particular group of people or companies face. The problem has to be big enough that it’s worth spending money to solve it or make it better. Before bringing a new product or service to market, test your ideas and make sure they’re profitable.
- Who are my ideal target customers?
Every business needs customers. Successful businesses know exactly how to describe who their best customers are, what “pain” they’re feeling and what they need, want, desire, and are willing to pay for.
- Who is my competition?
Learn everything you can about the others in your field who provide similar products or services to the same ideal customer—direct and indirect competition.
10.What do I offer that the competition doesn’t?
What makes my services or products unique among my competitors? This is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) — what you’ll use to convince prospective customers to buy your product or service rather than the competition’s. Why should your customers make you their Marketer of Choice?
- Have I established business goals?
Setting goals is an important part of any business plan. But setting a goal is only part of the picture. Achieving goals is even more important. Learn how to figure out which goals are important enough to commit to and how to work towards them in a planned way by breaking them down into steps, setting deadlines, figuring out what resources you’ll need, and setting success benchmarks. that
- Am I a self-starter?
When you have your own business, there’s no boss or manager to tell you what to do and when to do it. To get your business off and running, you’ll have to motivate yourself to get things started.
Thinking like a Marketer
Thinking like a marketer is crucial to your success. I’ve talked about this a little bit before, but I want to talk about it again because it’s so important to your success as a marketer.
You will find that everywhere you look, everyone teaches you the systems or how to “make money online,” but very seldom will you find anyone that teaches you that you also need to know how to think like a marketer. This is the missing piece.
Do you honestly want to be a successful internet marketer? If so, then you need to be a marketer.
How can you possibly go about trying to build an internet marketing business without being a marketer? It is like trying to build a house with no foundation. What happens to a house that is not built upon a good, solid foundation? No wonder so many people fail.
But being a marketer would mean you have to sell something, and who wants to be a “sales person”?
It doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? Our minds think of the car salesman, who wants to be seen as the person following you around constantly pitching to you. I have to tell you though, that selling is part of the game and is very essential if you are going to be a marketer, because “NOBODY” makes money until they sell something.
I can teach people my systems of how I make money online and that the very same information that means tens of thousands of dollars for me may be nothing more than confusion and frustration for you. Why do we see the same information in a different way?
I had a problem with selling to people. I had problems seeing things as opportunities. Instead, I looked at the things I was doing as something everyone else would criticize me for.
A true marketer will see opportunities to make money all around him or her. Do you see opportunities to make money all around you?
What about all of the email messages that come into your inbox on a daily basis? Do you examine them and try to see the marketers’ side of the messages that have just been sent to you?
Do you try and see the methods he is using so that you can possibly use them as an opportunity for you to get results as well?
It is quite probable that you see them as an ordinary consumer would see them. You see them as clutter. You see them as ways to take your money. Maybe you see them as nothing more than a bunch of scammers out to get you.
If you are a true marketer, you will become impervious to economic changes. You will understand that you will always have the opportunity to make money.
The same thing applies to the way you think about money. Even if you get lucky and actually make some money, I have to tell you that it is not enough to just make money. You can make money, even a lot of money, and still end up right back in the same place you began. Broke!
Unless you understand it, have confidence in it and in yourself, and have the same ways of thinking as all successful marketers have, you will never win.
You must first understand how the market thinks about opportunities and money, and how that differs from how you think.
Regardless of how much money you make, you will end up right back where you started if you don’t change your thoughts about the opportunities that face you every day and about the money you will make.
Do yourself a favor and stop and think about the last time you saw a marketing message from one of the marketers that you follow.
What were your thoughts when you read the message?
Was it the thoughts of a true Marketer or the thoughts of a consumer?
Creating your Vision
Many people who search for success lack a couple things that are very important. I want to cover them over the next couple of days with you.
The first one I want to cover is your lack of vision. Of course, we are not going to be talking about getting your glasses checked or checking to see if you need glasses.
Well, in a way, maybe that is not such a bad analogy to use either. I remember when I first needed glasses. I didn’t even realize how bad my vision really was until after I put my new glasses on and went outside. I noticed everything in clearer detail than I had in a long time.
I never even knew what I was missing. While driving home, I noticed individual rocks in the gravel along the side of the road instead of just noticing the gravel. Instead of just noticing the trees had leaves, I noticed the gravel or the trees but was able to see the finer details that make up the gravel and the trees.
I also love flying in a jet way above the world we live in. It gives the world we live in a whole new look. When you’re looking at the world from 20,000 or 30,000 feet in the air, you see a whole new vision in your mind.
The higher you go, the larger the picture that you can see of the world. No longer is your focus just on your little part of the world and the problems you face in your life. You are able to see outside of what you face every day, and you can begin to imagine something bigger in your mind.
Once I get started on a puzzle with my children, I tend to enjoy putting them together, and having a clear vision is kind of like starting a puzzle. If all you had was a bunch of pieces and you did not ever know what the picture was supposed to look like after you completed it, how difficult would it be to put the puzzle together?
I knew I would quit before I got very far due to the frustration of not knowing what I was working towards and what it was supposed to look like when it was finished. Our vision is like the box cover of the puzzle. It helps us begin with the end in mind.
Almost every success in my life has come AFTER having a vision for it. For example, when I first began working towards the launch of “Lay Off Your Boss,” I really had no clear vision in mind. I just knew I wanted money. We set a goal of just making a few thousand dollars to help me out of the trouble I was in at the moment. I did have a vision, but it was targeted way too low. I could just see a few bills getting caught up at the time when I started.
A friend of mine Harry asked what I was shooting for with my launch, and I told him if I could make $10,000 I would be happy, but wasn’t really expecting even that. He looked at me and told me that I was way too low.
He asked me how much I made in a normal year’s salary at the job I had before. When I told him, he told me to go back to my coach and tell him I wanted to make that much money during the launch, to observe his reaction, and then to listen to what he said back to me.
Harry told me something like if I was to set my target too low, I may hit it, but that there was almost no chance that I would ever exceed what I was aiming for. I remember laughing at that point and giving him this crazy figure that was way above what I ever made, and he told me to be careful, because if you set your target too high, you may fail at reaching that target. He followed that up with, but at least I would be a lot further along than the “low” target I was setting for myself.
I decided that the higher goal did give me a better picture in my mind, so I told my coach the new numbers I was working toward. When I told my coach, he was like, “Are you crazy?” “Do you realize what kind of work has to be done for a launch of that size, and are you ready to do the work it takes?
Of course, I told him I didn’t have a clue as I didn’t even know how to make a single dollar online yet. I also asked if it was possible because in my mind I was seeing bills paid off now instead of just caught up. I was seeing the life I lived as a whole lot more pleasurable to live.
When he said, “Of course it is possible,” I told him that is what I wanted to work towards, and we did. We ended up with a launch of over $100,000, as I shared with you before. Of course, it took a lot of work to make it happen, but the work seemed worthwhile because I had a clear picture in my mind of what life was going to be like when I made that happen.
All successful business owners that I’ve known ALL have vision.
Many people have had a vision that they could focus on and then lost sight of that vision. If you lose sight of your vision, you begin to lose the hope that you once had. I have lost hope before, and let me tell you from experience, when you lose the hope that you once had, it is game over.
I look around at the lives of others I see, and it sure is not a pretty picture. It seems like everyone I see is sitting around thinking “poor, poor me.” I remember those thoughts as well, so I know how easy it is to get to that place in life. One of the biggest problems I see that is holding people back in life is a “victim mentality”.
As Marketers we have really helped you out as a market in general to remain in this state and even help you get to this place.
We used to tell you that 95% of you were going to fail trying to achieve the steps we were laying out before you. The reason for this was that you would not take the required action needed to make them work. We put the blame right on you
If a person is not going to take action of any kind and just sits around and complains that they can’t figure things out, then I guess they get what they get. I wish I could help, but it is not going to happen unless I do it for them. Ahhh, isn’t that what we have sort of done now?
We decided if you were not going to do it yourself, we would promote ready-made systems that we would set up for you so that all you needed to do was click “buy now” and start making money.
This is all very cool, except for one part. It was not promoted very clearly in my book that you still needed to follow the systems we were teaching before to make what was being set up for you work. You still had to do the work to make the system work. But because it was not really promoted in a clear manner, it has allowed you to say, “Poor me.” You sold me something that is supposed to solve all my problems by allowing me to make money without any work involved. What a scammer.
You may think this is crazy and even foolish of me to say, but I can send you support ticket after support ticket of people that say what I just said, almost word for word.
We have helped many people, making it easy to blame us for their lack of success. But more often than not, it really has to do with just the loss or lack of vision for your own life.
We have let any vision of success just seem to fade away, and now all we have left is this crazy victim mentality of poor me. Look what the world has done to me. We do have a choice to make at this point. Sure, it may not have been our fault that we are in the position we are in right now, but it is our choice to remain there.
Here is what needs to happen. We need to work on getting our visions back. Make a clear picture of yourself succeeding in life and burn it into your mind. What does this picture look like?
Go ahead and dare to dream again. Once you get that picture in your mind, you keep it there and do not, under any circumstance, allow it to fade. Your mind will seek ways to begin to develop this picture.
Your mind always tries to complete what it pictures, so never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of that mental image you see. You need to always visualize success no matter how badly things seem to be going on in your current state of life.
Remember when I told you I first decided that I wanted to make just enough money to pay a few bills from my launch? What kind of mentality is this? It is the same mentality that many others seem to have taken on, and perhaps so have you. Many of us have taken on a “just get by” mentality.
If your vision is small, the outcome will also be small. How big your goal is will have a huge effect on how big your result will be.
I want to leave you with one more question. Do you realize your potential or value?
Many of the students I have worked with come to me thinking they have no value to offer at all. Can I just tell you that “YOU” are valuable? Don’t sell yourself short. Many times you will see me sign my emails with the line, “Continue to stand in your greatness!”
It does not take very long to realize the value that others have to give when I begin to talk to them. But it’s one thing for me to see it and another for you to recognize your own greatness.
Begin right now at this very moment to formulate that vision in your mind. With everything going on in your life, it may be a little cloudy at first, but do your very best to see the life you want to live and then make it happen.
Your Business Plan
After you have a clear vision in your mind, it is time to make that vision come to life. You need to know how you are going to get things started while having a long-term goal as well.
You need to have step one in place and how and who will be responsible for accomplishing this goal, then step two and so forth.
Each one of these steps needs to lead to the final goal or destination of your business voyage.
So how do you do this? First, let’s see what a business goal really is.
What is a Business Goal?
∙ Clearly describes actions to be taken or tasks to be accomplished.
∙ Describes a desired future condition toward which efforts are directed.
∙ Without a goal, you will find yourself accomplishing very little.
– They are your goals, and you need to design them to fit you and your business.
Goal setting has two basic purposes:
- The first purpose is to establish a measure or a way to evaluate the success of your business. You must be able to track it and see that it is aligned with your success.
- The second purpose is to set different priorities for all involved. You must decide who will be held accountable for the achievement of each goal you set.
For example, let’s say you are setting your goals for your next project. You have partnered up to do a Joint Venture project.
You will need to decide who will be responsible for each aspect of the project. Who will write the e-book, who will do the videos, who is going to make sure the copy gets done and so forth
As the owner and manager of your business, you need to set goals to help keep you focused on the success of your business. There are so many things that will keep you distracted. You need to have a system set up to help keep you away from all of the distracting activities that will do nothing but keep you from doing the things you need to do. Without a goal, you will find yourself accomplishing very little.
Characteristics of a Business Goal:
∙ Your business goal comes from your mission statement. Your mission statement is nothing more than what you plan to accomplish. Your goals are how you plan to accomplish them.
∙ Your business goals need to be challenging. You need to set goals that will require some effort to achieve. Don’t make them so challenging that they are not obtainable, because that will lead to failure. You need to challenge everyone that is involved and responsible for its achievement.
∙ Your business goal needs to state what is going to be done. It needs to be task-oriented. A business goal must state what is to be accomplished as clearly as possible. Effective goals use action-oriented words like how:
How will we implement this plan?
How will we establish that our advertising is working?
How will we make sure that the product is the right
product for our market, etc.?
∙ Your business goals need to be short-term. Today, business moves so much faster with the use of the internet. Things are changing at “Internet Speed”, so now we need to have goals that have shorter time frames. Most of them should be a year or less old now.
Never just make up one set of goals and then forget about them. You need to be constantly re-evaluating our goals.
Take a look at what goals you have accomplished and then set new goals for yourself to strive to meet.
∙ Your goal needs to be very specific. You must state exactly what is required from each party that is involved. If the goal you set will lead you to a six-figure business in one year, then you need to clearly state that if we follow this goal, we will be a six-figure business in one year.
If we clearly define our goals it will be much easier for everyone or even just yourself if you are the only one
involved, to understand, and achieve. You will also be able to assess your level of success. It will help you to always see if you are still on track with where you are heading.
Examples of Goals to Set
– Create an online Internet marketing business that will provide my customers with high-quality products. Find the products that my customers want to buy.
∙ Create a website for my product that my customers can easily find. Make it a pleasurable experience once they
land on my site.
∙ Create a good relationship with my list of subscribers that have chosen to opt-in, so they become responsive
buying customers.
∙ Put in place a management structure and work with Joint Venture Partners to accomplish my goals more
efficiently and profitably.
What is missing?
Now that you know what a business goal is, you need to write out your business goal
How to Write Business Goals
Writing your business goals should not be something that is complicated. Your business goal should be pretty straightforward.
You will use some of the information from your mission statement. Your business goal is nothing more than making a list of the things that you will need to have happen that will help you ensure your mission becomes a reality.
Remember, one of the characteristics of your goal is task-oriented. Make sure you focus on these characteristics.
In just a sentence or two, describe how each will be accomplished. Make sure they are very specific and make sure you add some challenge.
You may think that setting goals is a bit much to really get into because you are never really planning on expanding or even hiring any employees. Even if you are never planning on having a partner or employees, it is essential to form a business mission statement and set your goals.
Naming Your Business
I know it doesn’t sound like it should take much to just slap a name on our Business and go with it. Well, there is a lot more to this than just slapping a name on a business card and going with it.
You’re Business Name
Why should you have a business name?
If nothing else, it will give you self-gratification. Have you ever dreamed of owning your own business and thought of what it would be called?
Now is your opportunity to make that dream come true.
What Does My Business Name Mean?
It should reinforce the key elements of your business.
Does your name really have to be meaningful? My answer to this is yes.
You do not want to spend an unlimited amount of time explaining your business name to everyone that hears it. You want your name to communicate to your consumers what your business is all about.
Be careful not to name your business a name that will limit your niche or your geographic location.
Your name needs to allow growth. If you have any desire to grow or expand your business as you go, you do not want your name to be associated with a specific niche focus. If you were to start up a gardening business and you wanted to grow into landscaping in the future, you would not want to have a business name like Lorraine’s Petunias. Without a lot of thought, you might come up with Lorraine’s Outdoor Garden Center.
Now I know you can be a little more creative than what I just did there, but can you see where it limits your business to selling petunias, or maybe expanding into annual flowers? But would you expect a name like that to have vegetable plants or even landscape products?
Make sure your name does not limit you to a specific niche unless you know for sure you will never go any further.
Make sure it does not limit you to a specific geographical location.
We wouldn’t want to include Michigan in Lorraine’s Outdoor Garden Center because it would limit visitors to your site.
This would be especially true if you are online.
If you want to only sell to a specific location, then by all means, use your town or state or even your country in your business name. Would you click on my links if they took you to Michigan Internet Marketing services? Well, you might if you were in Michigan.
But my business reaches worldwide, and I just put a limit on who I might reach with my online business.
- Make your name easy for people to pronounce.
- Make it simple to spell, especially for people searching for your company online. You don’t want them to be seen by anyone else.
- Ensure that your name is appropriate for your goals. If you are already reaching a point of frustration, let me tell you right now that one quality one must possess or develop is the willingness to invest time and effort even if direct results do not seem at all apparent.
- Make sure your name describes the company that you have in mind.
- Confirm that you like the name of your company.
- Double-check that your name is unique and not already in use.
Secure your Domain Name
Once you come up with a name, you may go through the disappointment of discovering that someone else has already beat you to it.
This is especially true in the .com market today. There are over 50 million .com names registered and it is getting harder to get that special name you desire. But don’t let it get you down. Keep going and you will find that special name. To find out if your name is available, you can use places like Hostgator or NameCheap.
This can help you find out if there are other businesses using your chosen name already or similar names that are close to the name you have chosen that could be associated with your name.
Sites like these can also help you narrow down your choices. They will also give you alternative names for the name you have chosen if it is taken. If you can’t have your top choice of a business name as a .com domain, you might want to consider alternative spellings, choices, or other top domains (i.e., “.net” or “.us”).
Willingness to Invest Time and Effort
What if the next promotion I get doesn’t do any better? I guess it must be time to quit then, right? No, although several months may pass without good news, it is important for someone who wants success to hold on and continue to move forward.
You must have this quality for success. This quality will keep you from giving up after putting so much of yourself into the business. I must be willing to put in the same amount of effort into the next promotion or project that I put into the one that didn’t work out.
If something didn’t work as you thought it should, then invest some time trying to figure it out. And before you say, “I can’t,” let me say, “Yes you can”.
You have the whole internet full of information at your disposal right now. If you have not been given the information you need yet, what is keeping you from going to that search bar and typing in your problem and looking for self-help videos on places like YouTube?
Whatever it takes is what needs to be done to get the answers you need.
Don’t dwell on the failures for too long. Yes, it is good if we can figure out why something failed so that we can correct things, but you may not ever really know what it was. You might even do the exact same thing again and it will work.
I think that at this point, before we go any farther, it is a good time to check your mindset and make sure we have no problems as we continue. You may be saying to me right now that your mindset is perfectly fine. You are excited, motivated, energized, and ready to get going.
Well, that may be the case, and feel free to skip this article in the book if you feel you are not experiencing any problems whatsoever with your mindset.
Just know that you can come back to this article at any time. After all, if something is not positioned in your mind at the proper time, it will make no sense and be of no value to you.
We will talk about positioning in a different article.
I remember feeling that I had nothing to learn or change about my mindset. Every time my coach would say anything about it, I would just look at him like he was all crazy.
What was all of this “mindset” stuff anyway? I was someone that never really backed down from a challenge and had everything under control. I could do anything I set my mind to doing. So I thought.
As my coach and I worked on my training, it became clear that I had some problems that stemmed from things I had been taught that were so deeply ingrained in me that I had no idea I had problems that had been holding me back for years.
It was time for a change.
I wish I could say the changes were easy and that they came all at once. But that was not the case at all. It was a process that took place over time, and I can honestly say that I am not finished yet.
Maybe it is time to make some changes in your life and mindset as well. If you’re willing to keep going, which I’m sure you are, let’s take a short break and see what we learn about ourselves.