Let's Keep It Real Here...

While I certainly agree with much of what you've said ... unfortunately, "taking massive action" and believing you can do something, is often just not enough. You can spend your whole life digging for gold in the wrong place or preparing for an NBA career ... but if you don't personally have what it takes to succeed at online business, no amount of action is going to get you what you want.


Massive action needs to be smart action ... the right kind of action in the right marketplace at the right time ...



Effort alone is not enough; but granted, it can be a game changer when everything else is aligned.


Steve

I think a major difficulty is that those who have an interest in starting an online business are often bombarded with various get-rich-quick or done-for-you opportunities that mostly lead to disappointing results. It's easy to be tempted by these short-cuts to success and its easy to see why they are popular.

Nevertheless, the entire industry is tarred with this brush and fosters the generalization that everything related to it is some sort of scam. Those who are burned carry this belief with them and share their views online and with friends and family.

You need to stick with it if you want to be your own boss, set your own hours and become a profitable marketer.
It takes some money to do it and those who are really committed will get a job to help make it happen. And while not everyone has every talent to succeed many skills can be learned or outsourced.

The statistic that is bandied about is that only 5% who get involved in the kinds of marketing discussed on this forum succeed. Even with those odds, there are plenty who are willing to give it a try.

I have always believed that if you approach starting a new venture with a pauper's mentality of not wanting to spend any money, you will end up a pauper.

If you're not willing to invest in your business it's just a sign that you dpn't believe in your business or yourself.

Don't have any money to invest? Get a job and save some money to get yourself started. Sell things you own. The one I recommend least - borrow from family and/or friends.

When I see people trying to start a business and they want to do it for free, it makes my skin crawl and my heart sink. Just what the world needs. - another loser with unrealistic expectations, delusions of grandeur and an intransigent stance on being willing to take rational advice from those with real world experience, who would actually like to help.

Off with you! lol

In order to be a successful marketer you need to be able to get targeted traffic to a converting offer.

It is possible to do this without investing any money, but as you mentioned it's not easy.

I think what it really comes down to is, one must be willing to do whatever it takes to be successful.

This is why you have some guys who can come out of nowhere and build a six figure business in 2-6 months, while you have other guys who have been at this for decade and still can't even make $100 a day.

You have to be willing to do whatever is necessary to be successful and you need to do this day-in and day-out. Whether its spending money on tools, or spending 12 hours a day working, or saving up money for a mentor. You have to be willing to do what needs to be done, even if it scares you and makes you uncomfortable.

Yep; you get the energy right, then you move into sound actions based on spending money, learning, practicing, creating and connecting, that help all fall into place. This process is highly uncomfortable sometimes because it involves diving into deep fears - aka spending money, failing, looking stupid, being criticized, feeling you waste your time - which is why folks stop at their fears, struggle and have a tough time, acting deluded.

Broadly agree with the sentiment, even with the right idea, right amount of investment, massive action is absolutely necessary.

One of the lesson that took me the longest to learn is that you have to spend money in business. Having spent so many years pirating my music, downloading illegal copies of software, cracked plugin and theme etc.. it was a long hard lesson to convince myself that i have to actually start paying for this stuff.

But now that i've come round to it, investment is the most important thing you can do in getting your business going, moving.

IMO, someone that can start with nothing and turn it into a business is more likely to succeed because they learn everything from the ground up about their business.

Example, If you hire someone to build a website for you and you're HTML/PHP/CMS/etc... illiterate you're at the mercy of every freelancer for the rest of your life when you could have taken the time upfront and learned a skill that would allow you to make faster decisions throughout the rest of your online business.

Now, you've learned a skill (ex building websites) and later on down the road you can use the experience to hire other people to do jobs. The key here is you'll make better informed decisions.

On the other hand, If you pay someone to do all your website work from day one, you're clueless If the freelancer is hosing you or not.

Learn your business from the ground up. You don't have to be a pro about everything (ex building a website), you just need to know how to make better informed decisions.

Success is dependent on a lot of factors, and each case can be different from the others. That being said, there is no one formula for success. But most successful people are the ones that do not quit. They have the most number of failures as well. And each failure also has contributed to their journey, which they used as stepping stones to success. So yes, it is true that you have to exert more effort that you thought to become successful.

Good Info everyone

You've got a point, and I believe you even got the number right. You must be able to dish out at least 100 bucks a year. If nothing else, the domain name is something you'll have to buy, and since hosting a site yourself is not really a good idea, you'll have to buy the hosting as well.

Still, there are a lot of people like me I believe, that appreciate frugality, even to an unhealthy degree. I think 10 times before spending a dime on anything, and maybe that's even slowing me down sometimes.

I agree with what you have written.

Any business takes both time and effort to grow.. Also, 99% will require stleast some intial capital investment (else what would you make a return on??)

So, put in capital. Work hard on your dreams. Everyone will definitely succeed.



Thanks Sardasia for sharing such useful content..

Great information!! Sometime i felt like that...

It's good to give some advice like this, and motivate too, but really, folks here should know that free traffic is really long to generate some income, but if a campaign is well managed, even without budget, it can be possible to generate something out of it.

I mostly agree with you but let me point out one very serious point here. If you come out with a strategy, and it doesn't work initially, you should anticipate when you need to change your strategy. It is very important. There is no point in keep on putting efforts if your strategy has a flaw and you should learn about the problem in the strategy quickly. Else, you will waste time and money both..

adapting, learning, changing strategy, trying a million DIFFERENT things until one sticks, is part of taking massive action.

If you truly are broke, or you need to bootstrap for other reasons, you don't need to buy most of this list from third-party vendors.

1) Custom domain name

Yep, hard to get around this one. Sometimes a domain name comes with a hosting plan, but having your hosting and domain with the same company can be risky.

And there are some business models where you can get away with using a free platform for awhile.

But the end game is owning your own piece of the Internet. Cost is about $10/yr plus $5-$10/month.

2) Custom tracking link

No need for a paid provider for this one. If you use Wordpress, there are plugins available. Otherwise, a couple of hours learning to build a php redirect page and read the stats in your control panel will handle this.

Once you are making money, you might want to invest in this. I've never found the need.

3) Autoresponder

Again, it depends on your business model. If all you ever do is broadcast emails, you can get by with the Mailman type mailing list apps included with most hosting plans.

If you do plan to build automated series, using a third party vendor is easier for most people than running a self-hosted script.

4) Landing Page/Funnel Builder

Another luxury item for when you are making steady income.

Until then, using freely available templates and a few hours with a good html tutorial will get the job done. People were making fortunes online before sites like Leadpages existed, so I would hardly call it a necessity.

None of these items are worthless. On the contrary, once you can make economic sense, they may save you enough time to be well worth the price. But if you need to bootstrap your business, don't spend money on things you can do for yourself. Make the money, then reinvest it to upgrade your tools.

That's where most wannabe entrepreneurs with no budget fall down. Every time they make a dime, it goes into their own pocket rather than being reinvested in the business.

If you're online because you desperately need to pay the bills, you have to play a different game. You have to chase cash flow rather than business growth. Investing in tools, especially tools with monthly fees, before you have money coming in, makes the game a whole lot harder.

This is one of the reasons why people new to IM fail on this forum.

You don't have a clue what anyone else is doing and just because you need these things doesn't mean the rest of the world needs them (they don't).

It's like telling a plumber he needs an airplane because pilots make money with airplanes. Duh.