Do you want to start an online business?

June 29, 2010 by JD
Filed under: Business, Musings, Personal, Site Build It, Success and Failure

I haven’t been posting to this blog nearly as much as I would like, and you may already know the reason. If you don’t, the short story is that I’m battling cancer and lots of days I don’t feel like doing much of anything. However, the good news is that I’m stronger than I was for the last six months and I believe I’m making progress every day. Hopefully, in the near future, I’ll be able to resume blogging on a regular basis.

I was thinking about the topic of having an online business earlier this morning.

For the last year, I haven’t really been able to do much work, but I continue to get enough income through past efforts to keep my various websites and communities moving along while I concentrate mostly on kicking this cancer’s butt. It really is true that I earn money in my sleep and on days when all I feel like doing is sitting on the porch and listening to the birds and watching the wind rustle the leaves on all the trees that surround my home.

Over the last ten years, I’ve earned a living through my marketing business, even though there have been lots of ups and downs.

It allowed me to work from home and care for my elderly mother for about seven years, and it has kept me afloat for the last couple of years as my health problems took over the majority of my attention.

On Thursday, July 1, I’ll turn 58 years old and I always contemplate what I want to do differently during the next year of my life as my birthday approaches.

Interestingly enough, I find that there isn’t much I want to change other than getting healthy, again. As soon as I’m strong enough and able to think straight, again, I want to resume my marketing business, doing pretty much what I’ve done for the last decade.

That’s pretty remarkable for me. I rarely go that long without becoming disinterested in what I’ve been doing and wanting to try something new.

I love living here in the mountains and working from home. I love it that hundreds of people view my websites every day and enough of them purchase from my recommendations that I still generate some income, even when I’m unable to work.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not generating a lot of income and the last few months I’ve been mostly breaking even, but that still keeps all my websites alive and prevents the loss of all the hard work I put in the last few years.

If I were able to really work on the sites as I did a few years ago, my income would be rising every month and I look forward to doing that again within the next year or so.

If I had been working on a job the last few years and got this sick, I think I would be quite a bit worse off than I am now.

I love being self-employed and I love earning revenue for work I did months or years ago.

What about you?

If something unexpected happened in your life, would you have anything helping you economically? Even if things are going great (and I hope they continue that way!), do you ever wonder what it would be like to work from home and do something you love every day?

I know hundreds of people who are doing just that. Most of them are doing a few similar things in terms of promoting their businesses, but almost all of them are doing something that is interesting to each of them. In other words, they’re not a bunch of lemmings trying to follow the herd and eek out a few dollars here and there. They’ve identified something about which they’re very interested, even passionate, and they’re working to build an online business around that topic (or those topics).

Some are approaching their online business from one direction and others are coming from a different direction, but they all share some common traits: intelligence, a vision of where they want to go, a plan on how to get there, motivation to accomplish what is important to them, the willingness to study and learn what they need to know, and an unflagging belief that they will succeed in reaching their goal, eventually.

That belief is very important.

Life almost never goes in straight lines. We have a series of highs and lows and often have to retrace our steps to find a new path to take us where we want to go when we encounter the detours that life throws at us.

Many years ago, Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

That has been my motto for almost 40 years, since I first read that book in my late teens.

I’ve proven to myself over and over that I can achieve what I want as long as I can clearly see it in my imagination, can develop a plan to achieve it, and then take action to accomplish each step in that plan.

In fact, I’m dealing with my cancer in the same way. I intend to kick this cancer’s butt and regain my health within the next year. I intend to resume working in my marketing business and doing the things I love.

What do you want to accomplish during the next year of your life?

Another of my mottoes is, “A year from now, I will be better than I am today.”

Sometimes I don’t achieve that goal, but, so far, I’ve always bounced back when life knocks me down a peg or two.

You can do the same thing.

I hear many of my friends and people with whom I come into contact say that they want their own business so they don’t have to commute to work and be subject to someone else’s dictates.

Yet, over and over, year in and year out, relatively few of them ever take the steps to achieve that goal. They don’t analyze what they want to do or make a plan on how to get there. They don’t identify the milestones and take the steps every day to reach those goals.

The next year, they are no closer to their goal than they were the last.

Does that describe you?

What steps have you taken in the last year to get you closer to what you want out of life?

Have you done all that you could to get there?

Why not?

What is stopping you from making your dream a reality?

Is it lack of money? That’s just an excuse. Lots of people with no money have worked hard and made their dreams real.

Is it lack of knowledge? That’s also an excuse. The entire world’s knowledge is available to you through your computer.

The same is true for just about any excuse you can throw up to explain why you are no closer to your goal than you were a year ago.

Do you really want to do what you think you do?

It’s a hard question to face. Perhaps you’re more interested in the fantasy than the reality.

Maybe you think that owning your own business and working from home is like living in paradise.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

When you own your own business, you, alone, are responsible for everything that gets done and everything that doesn’t. The hours can be longer than working a job, especially in the first few years of starting it. The pay can be less than working a job, but sometimes the lack of commuting, buying business clothing, eating lunch in a restaurant, and all the other expenses related to working for someone else can be reduced when you work at home so the resulting net loss may not be as much as you might think.

I’ve worked many long hours planning and building my online business and I’ve had successes and failures along the way.

Most of my income came through affiliate marketing and that was drastically reduced when North Carolina’s legislature passed new tax laws and some of the major businesses with which I was affiliated canceled my relationship to them. For example, for years I received income from Amazon.com for recommending products that I knew to be useful and a good value. When people would click on the link to the product and purchase it, I would earn a small commission.

When the tax law was passed, Amazon and others canceled these affiliate relations with me (and all their other affiliates in NC) and *poof* there went one of my major sources of income.

Did I quit?

No.

Did I wallow in self-pity?

Yes, I did, but only for a few days.

Then I turned my attention to developing a new plan for earning an income and it was working well until I became too sick to continue with it. But, I haven’t thrown out this plan, it’s still in place and I’ll pick it back up as soon as I can.

That’s one of the major reasons that I need to keep my existing websites online until the day I can resume marketing them.

I know people who are blind or deaf or handicapped in other ways who are still able to build a business and work at home. Some are making ends meet, others are supplementing their other incomes, and a few are doing very well and earning more than they ever earned working for someone else.

On the other hand, some people I know learned that being self-employed really wasn’t what they wanted to do. They found that they liked working at a job, despite some of the things they didn’t like about it. This helped them to understand what they really wanted from their lives and now they don’t waste as much time daydreaming about the “grass is greener” aspects of being self-employed.

Before I ramble on much longer, I want to come to the point of all this.

Having your own online business may be a very good thing for you, or it may be a disaster in the making. It all depends upon you. Can you identify what you want to do? Can you develop a plan to achieve it? Can you learn all the technical things you need to know to make it work? Can you avoid the distractions that abound when you look for ways to make money online? Are you self-directed and motivated to achieve something, even if the rewards may follow only after two or three years of hard work?

Can you work to build something for the future, or do you want your rewards right now?

It all depends upon you, and I can’t offer you any advice if you really don’t want to do what’s necessary to build your business. I don’t know any shortcuts that work, and the whole idea that it’s easy to make a fortune on the Internet is just a big lie some people tell you to get your money.

Ten years ago, I didn’t know who to listen to and who to avoid. I didn’t know what advice was sound and what was just thrown out there to separate me from my hard-earned money. I didn’t know who genuinely cared whether I did well and how to tell them apart from the sharks that are always circling the online marketing newbie.

So, I tested the teachings of lots of people. I spent money and time learning their techniques and following their advice. Most of those experiments were big fat flops. Only a few really proved to be worthwhile and one stood out head and shoulders above all the rest.

You’ve heard me say this many times before, but I’m going to say it again, Ken Evoy, founder of Sitesell, is the real deal. He cares for his customers and works very hard to help each of us build our individual businesses online.

He wrote best selling ebooks to help us build our online businesses and now he gives them away for free. For example, here’s where you can get a free copy of his best-selling ebook, Make Your Site Sell!

(If you collect ebooks and never read them or put into practice what you learn, then don’t bother downloading Make Your Site Sell!, because having it on your harddrive and not doing anything with it is a waste of your time.)

For the last few years, he’s concentrated on making Site Build It! the best system for building online businesses and tens of thousands of real people are following his guidelines and most of them are building successful businesses in niches they love.

Does everyone succeed with SBI? No. I don’t believe everyone succeeds using any set of tools, but more people do well when they follow his advice than they do following anyone else I know and I’ve been researching this topic for over ten years.

Of course, I don’t know everything, so there may be others out there, too, but I don’t know who they are.

So, as my next birthday quickly approaches, I’m happy to see that I don’t intend to do much differently in my business other than dropping a number of experiments that did not succeed (and which were not recommended by Ken Evoy, by the way).

I’m going to concentrate more on my SBI sites and much less on the others, including my blogs, like this one.

What am I going to do for my birthday?

I’m going to stay home and celebrate it in peace and quiet, and then the next day, I’m going 100 miles to have a liver biopsy and radio frequency ablation performed on the spot in my liver that may be a result of my colon cancer, and may not be.

I’m taking the next step in the process to regain my health, and that’s at the top of my to-do list this year. I intend to get healthier and stronger so I can continue to work from home.

What am I going to do for YOU for my birthday?

I’m going to tell you how you can download Ken’s ebooks for free (you don’t even have to give your email address). Yes, those books are a few years old, but the information and advice in them is still valuable.

Even better, I’m going to give you access to the SBI Action Guide.

This is the same guide we follow when we subscribe to SBI 2.0, and you can learn the same things we do. However, unless you subscribe to SBI 2.0, you don’t get all the tools, support, articles, tips, and help from the members-only forum.

You do get a step-by-step guide in what to do to identify your niche, compare it to others, choose the one that’s right for you, and information on how to research and build your business.

You don’t get access to the keyword brainstorming tool, the keyword database functions, nor the sitebuilding tools.

For one or two percent of the people reading this, the information you’ll get from reading the Action Guide and watching the video version of it will be enough for you to use any tools you want to build a successful business.

For a few more percent, you’ll be able to adapt what you learn and use something like WordPress to build a site. Before you invest the time and effort in doing this, have you read Sitesell’s page comparing blogging versus building a hierarchically-organized website?

The rest of you would be better off, deciding if this is something you really want to do, and if it is, then purchase an annual subscription to SBI and give yourself one year to start building the online business you dream of owning. Work on it some every day and you may be amazed at what you can accomplish in as little as a year from now.

Is it free?

Of course not.

Is it affordable?

Absolutely. An annual subscription to SBI costs $300 and that’s less than a dollar a day. Most of you waste more than that and don’t get any nearer your dream.

Is it the only way to succeed.

Of course, it is not.

Is it the way for you?

I don’t know. You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

I know that I’m a satisfied customer and host two sites using SBI. In a few minutes, after I publish this post, I’m going to renew my annual subscription to Murphy Gold so it will be ready for me to continue promoting select small businesses in Murphy, NC, a place I love living, as soon as I’m strong enough to do it.

I started Murphy Gold last year on my birthday after identifying a new direction I wanted to take following being canceled as an affiliate for Amazon and others.

If this cancer hadn’t interfered, I be much further along with the site, but I’ll get back to it as soon as we finish kicking this cancer’s butt to the curb.

It was my birthday gift to myself last year and will be my birthday gift to myself, again, this year.

As I said before, my birthday gift to you is access to the SBI Action Guide.

If you really want to do it yourself, and not make use of the tools that SBI offers, at least give yourself the advantage of the free Sitesell ebook downloads. Learn what you need to do, before you go searching for the tools to do it yourself.

I know I’d like to have back all those months I wasted trying other ways to build successful websites. My SBI sites may not be the prettiest, nor the flashiest, nor have the latest three-column designs, but they work. They attract thousands of visitors and they are easy to navigate. The only thing they lack is all the extra pages I have in my head and don’t have the energy to create right now, but that will be coming in the next few months as I continue to get stronger.

Now, it’s up to you.

Do you want to start an online business?

Tags: action guide, Business, online, SBI, Site Build It, Sitesell, website

Comments

6 Comments on Do you want to start an online business?

Mitch on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 3:38 pm

Hi John,

You know I’ve been working on this online business thing for years. I really wanted to just supplement my income for the longest time, and now I’m at the point where I’d love to get it high enough to actually help pay some bills. But I’m nowhere near that, and it’s somewhat depressing.

I think my issue is that I’m fighting some concepts that others say you have to do in order to make any real money online. Basically it seems to boil down to these few things.

One, offer something for free and grab an email address so you can send lots of emails to these folks and not have it considered spam because people opted into it.

Two, create tons of mini-sites and have them optimized for Adsense so that you can make your money in bulk.

Three, create a product, find lots of people to help you sell it, then do your launch and rake in your money as fast as you can before moving on to the next thing. You don’t even have to know what the product does; have someone else create it and put your name on it.

Frankly, all those models kind of stink to me, although the last one I wouldn’t be mad at if people are actually creating their own thing.

Still, I’ll persevere, along with doing my other things, mainly because there is no other choice. I know you promote Site Build It, but that’s just not my style either. Yup, contrary to the end. lol

JD on Wed, 30th Jun 2010 1:29 am

Good morning, Mitch.

Thanks for another excellent comment.

I know what you mean when you say you’d like to actually pay some bills as a result of all your hard work.

As you say, there are lots of people offering advice and much of it conflicts with what still others are saying. Some of the things just feel icky.

Email marketing works, but it certainly isn’t for everyone and I don’t think you’ll ever feel comfortable doing it, so there’s not much point in even considering building your list. It’s just not for you.

The minisites idea no longer works and Google has slapped these site networks down and canceled a lot of Adsense accounts as a result. They worked for awhile, but Google doesn’t want low-quality sites in their search results and their advertisers don’t want the clicks they get from those sites. (At least, that’s the way I understand it.)

There’s always a market for a product if it is something people really want. Really good products are as good ten years from now as they are today, and that’s the difference between them and all the NEXT BIG THING product launches you allude to.

For example, I know a guy who sells plans for building a variety of backyard storage sheds. Those plans will be just as good 20 years from now as they are today and he has a business that will continue to grow as more people learn about him and buy his plans.

I am not a fan of the huge product launch and I can always tell when one is underway because I get a dozen emails the same day, from different people, saying essentially the same thing.

Most of them are gushing about how great something is, and that something hasn’t even been released yet, nor has anyone had time to properly test and review it. It reeks of collusion and ickiness.

Don’t even get me started on having someone create something and then putting your name on it. I know lots of people do that, but, to me, it’s dishonest and misleading. If I didn’t create something myself, I am not going to put my name on it as if I did.

I learned that lesson early in my online marketing career and I never made that mistake, again. (Double ick!)

I don’t understand why you say that SBI is not your style, either. There are tens of thousands of websites built using the procedures and tools offered with SBI, and they are on vastly different topics, each one chosen by the site owner.

I promote it as a tool for successfully organizing and presenting information, and it works for a variety of different online businesses.

Promoting it as an affiliate and using it as a customer are two different things. I promote it because I know, from experience, how people have achieved great levels of success in many different categories by following the advice and using the tools it offers.

Not everyone succeeds, of course, but I know hundreds who have, and there are tens of thousands of customers using it, and the vast majority resubscribe year after year. I just resubscribed for Murphy Gold yesterday, and I’m happy that I did. That may be the best $300 I’ll spend all year.

I’m not trying to sell it to you, but have you even taken the time to read the Action Guide or watch the videos?

I’m sure there is something in them that can help you do better with whatever style, product, service, or delivery system you choose to use.

Subscribing to SBI certainly isn’t for everyone, but I think you’ll find that everything in the SBI approach revolves around “keeping it real.” By that, I mean don’t trick your visitors, don’t try to trick the search engines, etc.

Just offer quality content in a particular niche.

My two sites really aren’t great examples of how well SBI can work, because there just aren’t too many things in which I’m really interested enough to spend a lot of my time building a site. We’ve discussed this in the past.

I know that Murphy Gold will do well for me and other local small business owners when I regain the strength to go out, meet them, interview them, and promote them on the site. Just this week, I added my first two videos and have many more planned.

Even though there are lots of gaps in what I have planned for the site and what I’ve been able to do, that site continues to grow in the number of visitors and it helps them find local business owners who offer the services and products they want.

I love living here in the mountains and I like promoting Murphy to others who may be interested in the lifestyle the area offers. I can’t wait until I am able to develop the site more, offer more information, and promote more businesses. It’s the perfect concept for me for this stage in my life.

I am very picky, however, in which businesses I promote. I concentrate on the business owner and life is too short to work with anyone who isn’t kind, pleasant, honest, and helpful.

I promote only locally-owned small businesses and not big chain stores, franchises, and national brands.

I’ve already turned down several business owners who I would never recommend to my best friends, so I’ll never recommend them to my site visitors, either.

i know a woman who is earning thousands of dollars every month selling products for weddings. Most of them are drop-shipped for her by other manufacturers, but some she ships herself. in addition to that, she earns good money from Adsense related to her content on weddings, and from other products she promotes.

She works hard offering good information for real people who are getting married and recommends products of good quality that they can buy.

It’s not for me, but it works very well for her. There’s nothing icky at all about her business model.

There are always other choices, Mitch. If something isn’t working, perhaps it isn’t going to work.

But, as with some of the things I do that I enjoy, but which are not profitable, I do them for the enjoyment, not for the revenue.

I’m not going to try to convince you that SBI and its processes and approaches are for you, but I still think you have some misconceptions about what it is all about and how it can help people build successful niche-oriented, content-rich websites that generate profits.

But, we’ve had this discussion before. We’ve disagreed, and still remain friends. I think that’s one of the most important things in life.

Act on your dream!

Mitch on Wed, 30th Jun 2010 7:43 am

Hi John,

For someone who wasn’t going to try to convince me otherwise, you certainly tried to convince me. lol

I’ve seen the video. I’ve read the book. In my mind, it’s not how I wanted to go. Why? Can’t tell you, because it was years ago and I’d have to read the book and watch the video again to remember what I didn’t like about it.

No matter; as you said, my mind’s already locked, so it’s not going there. As for you, just get healthy and get back to it all and prove me wrong; that would work for me.

Jane on Thu, 1st Jul 2010 8:26 am

Hi John,
I read through your blogs here. I sorta understand how this works. If you could give more exapmles of what kind of things people sell on this it would be very helpful. The wedding lady… You said she has somethings shipped from others… How does that work. I truly don’t understand how to do this. Now if you wanna discuss multi-personalities I know that! lol I had thought about doing reserach for college students for papers.

JD on Wed, 7th Jul 2010 10:22 am

Good morning, Mitch.

I wrote my last reply when I woke up in the middle of the night and was hurting too much to sleep. I should have taken the time to re-read and edit it down before publishing it, but I didn’t. Mea culpa.

I wasn’t trying to convince you to buy SBI or even to use it.

A lot of things have been added to the SBI system in the years since you looked into it and I was trying to convince you to go through the Action Guide. I’ll stop. If you don’t want to do that, it’s totally up to you.

All the best,

JD on Wed, 7th Jul 2010 10:49 am

Hi Jane,

Sorry for the delay in responding.

One reason it’s hard to explain SBI is because so many people use it for so many different things. Some people sell products, others sell services, others sell information, or rent property or villas. One guy has a great site selling information and products related to juggling. There are a lot of ways that people can build successful online businesses.

The wedding lady I wrote about is a work at home florist and her website is:

http://www.wedding-flowers-and-reception-ideas.com/

Many of the products she recommends are created by other companies and dropship them when she makes a sale. (At least, that’s the way I understand part of her business, I don’t have first-hand knowledge of it.)

Dropshipping has been done for decades. A manufacturer and/or distributor enters into an agreement with a seller. When sales are made, the shipper puts on the seller’s labels and ships the product to the buyer.

Here’s a brief overview on the subject at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping

That’s just one way to sell products.

A more traditional way is for the seller to purchase the product at wholesale, mark up the price to earn a profit, and sell it at retail through a store, auction, website, or wherever.

In the latter case, the seller takes possession of the product, pays for it, and the product is shipped twice: once to the seller, and then to the buyer (assuming the buyer doesn’t pick it up at the seller’s location).

The seller has to pay for all the merchandise in the store and only earns something when each product is sold at retail.

With dropshipping, the seller doesn’t buy or take possession of the product. They send orders to the distributor, who ships to the customer. Depending upon the agreement, the buyer may pay the distributor who then pays a commission to the seller, or, more likely, the buyer pays the seller, who sends an order to the distributor and pays a discounted amount.

Sitesell has many examples of the businesses their clients have built.

There are a number of case studies showing how some of their clients have done so:

http://case-studies.sitesell.com/sellmoreonline.html

They provide proof of the success of some of their clients’ businesses:

http://proof.sitesell.com/sellmoreonline.html

With over 10,000 clients using SBI, it’s impossible to show all of them.

Obviously, some do much better than others in terms of profit.

Quite a few earn more than they did when they had full-time jobs.

Others earn a few hundred dollars a month.

Others earn practically nothing.

There are lots of factors involved in any type of business and while people may be created equally, they do not perform equally.

Just remember this. Building an online business is just as much work as building an offline business, but it can be done for much less money and carries much less risk, as a result of the lower initial investment.

If you have specific questions, I’ll try to answer them.

Act on your dream!

PS. Sitesell has opened a page on Facebook at:

http://www.facebook.com/SiteSell

There’s a good discussion where some of the clients are telling us about themselves and their businesses at:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=114982205206334&topic=121

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