What REALLY Holds People Back From Making Money Online?

e) all of the above.
I've struggled with all of these along the way and I imagine I'm not alone. But, with each hurdle I've cleared, the path gets both easier and pays better .

To be honest i think it all revolves back to the fear of rejection and failing.

Its a natural human instinct that failure is imminent and going to happen. But you should take it as if you don't try and try 110% then you have already failed.

Without even giving it your all you will always fail.

This fear is what still holds me back sometimes. Until i approach and think of it from this new angle of im already failing.

Tom Brite

The truth is, IM can be confusing and overwhelming at first, and many people get scared, or can't properly motivate themselves to continue studying it. Another reason can be the fact that there are a lot of distractions in IM.

This has happened to me in my first year online and it stopped me then from generating anything close to the income I hoped for. There are a lot of ways to make money, a lot of guides, techniques, tricks, affiliate marketing, CPA, PPC, list building, forum marketing, video marketing, social marketing etc., and many try to do them all.

They start with an affiliate review page, promote that for two weeks, and then read something great about CPA. They buy a domain, promote some CPA offers, and after one week, they find a great thread on the WF about product creation .... and so on.

It's very important to concentrate on what you are doing, to have a good plan and to follow that plan until you reach the desired results. There is no shortcut, and you definitely won't earn a lot of money online if you try something different each week.

Most that I've known is the fear of losing their monthly income from a job. It's the mentality and believe in themselves. What I know is if you don't know about something, you need the word "OUTSOURCE".

Ross

Lately I've realized its because I was mistakenly thinking that "Internet Marketing" was "Internet Business".

Now I use IM to market my business. I don't try to "make money online with IM"... I use IM to get the word out about my products and services.

This question reminds me of the Family Feud game show for some reason.

"100 people surveyed... top 16 answers on the board... Here's the question:

What REALLY Holds People Back From Making Money Online?

Show me..."

Credit card debt.
Lack of time management skills.
No formal business outline/plan/schedule.
Fear of loss/failure.
Lack of tenacity to see a project through.
Inability to understand/recognize the factors which relate to success.
Family doesn't believe in what they are trying to do (I.e. pull money out of thin air)
No entrepreneurial spirit.
Too comfortable in day job.
Inability to manage projects.
Unrealistic goals.
No technical aptitude.
No marketing aptitude.
No passion for the project/niche.
Lack of critical thinking ability (problem solve)
Over analysis/lack of focus.
.

Instability in personal life (health / wealth / relationships) IMO is the biggest factor.

I think a lot of us might actually be sabotaging ourselves subconsciously and not even realize it.

How many times have you heard things like "you'll never make a lot of money online", "you have to have a good job at a company to get ahead", "there's no security in working for yourself", etc... When you hear things like that enough times it gets ingrained in your subconscious.

Most of us are programmed from birth to get a job, be a good worker, and retire with barely enough money to buy groceries sometimes shortly before we die.

I know that I was discouraged my whole life from every trying to have my own business (something I always wanted). I just recently realized that my own "self talk" in my head was holding me back.

I think that is one of the reasons that I would jump from one thing to another - it wasn't that the thing I was doing didn't work, it was once it started working, the little voice inside my head would start to say things like "OK, well, that site will never make more money than this" "or, this method doesn't work because xxxx" Or "yeah, this works good but what if xxxx". Then I would move on to something else and repeat the process.

I always wondered if this is one of the reasons why younger people seem to be able to blast in and make a ton of money right off - they don't have all the self doubt ingrained in them.

Lee

For me, the main problem is a lack of Focus. Constantly being bombarded with the latest and greatest ideas, all of which sound great. Now I am trying to focus on one project until it becomes profitable.

I strongly believe, from experience, that it is important to get profitable in one business model before moving to a second. Don't quit your day job until you are making profit from one business plan. Choose a business model that fits your budget, teach yourself everything you need to know to implement the plan, and work on it in your spare time six days a week. Don't tell family or friends about it. Just do it. Need to talk about it with someone? Find somebody here at WF doing same or similar and trade pm's.

Here's an example of what I would do if I were a newbie right now.

1. Take your favorite hobby and go to eBay and make a list of all the products and accessories that are sold on eBay or Amazon for that hobby. Choose three or four word product names to use as post titles. For example, you make the best cookies on the block and you have chosen plastic cookie cutters as your niche. You decide to focus on plastic gingerbread cookie cutters, farm animal plastic cookie cutters, patriotic plastic cookie cutters, and wild animal plastic cookie cutters. This is just an example, I have no idea if these things are being sold on eBay or Amazon...not one of my niches.
2. Create a free blog at blogspot.com with original posts. It's your hobby and you know all about it. Make one post about each type of accessory for the hobby. Keep the site small and focused. Include three to five product posts, and you will also want to include a privacy statement and contact information. In this example you will write at least 300 word posts, one on each of the type of plastic cookie cutters.
3. Apply to the eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associates and submit that site as the site you will use to promote eBay or Amazon products.
4. Once accepted by these programs, add the products in two ways. For Amazon I recommend a long left sidebar widget and for eBay I recommend a sniplet inside each post. You create the Amazon widget at the Amazon Associates page and you create the eBay sniplet at the ebay partner network page.
5. Okay, that's the easy part. Now the rest of your time you just leave that site alone. Don't add to it, don't try to make it pretty. Leave the theme alone. Just let it be. The rest of your time will be spent learning how to promote your site. So far your expenses are zero. All you need is one sale to turn a profit, right? Your blog is going to get indexed very quickly as it is a blogger blog, owned by Google. So don't worry about getting indexed. Start getting links of every type and in every free way you can teach yourself about. That is covered in many many threads here at WF and all over the internet. Get good at search here and in Google. Any anchored backlink is good, regardless of the PR of the site where you get it, regardless if it is do follow or no follow. Just get the links. Make a linking schedule and follow it religiously. You will want to go get links for hours every day. It is boring. Making sites is more fun. But go get links for your site. Treat each post in your blogger blog as a different url that needs its own links. Use article marketing, bookmarking, directory submissions, forum signatures, guest book signatures, blog commenting and whatever else you read about. Try it all. Do it all by hand and really get to know how it is done. About once a week, go to yahoo site explorer and check to see how your linking is doing. You should see the number of links rising, slowly but surely. These links take some time to show up.

The money will come. I remember the day the first pennies showed up in my EPN dashboard. I went jumping for joy around the house over those twelve cents. For me, the twelve cents showed up 45 days after my site went live. It was a long 45 days. I thought I had been lied to, that I would never make money online. Now my sites make me money everyday. Once they are created I leave them alone and just get links.

Whew! That turned into an online book! But, that's my advice to all newbies. Start off with a free site and do your linking by hand. Later you can automate some of your linking and can create a website that needs a domain and hosting paid for by you. But I advise starting off free and staying focused on one business model. Everything you learn with your free website will be needed by you when you move to self-hosted sites later, if at all.

They do not take action. Plain and simple. forums a bad for wasting time reading. Learn so much but forget to implement.

There are some great posts here and it is obvious that there are numerous reasons holding numerous people back from making money online.

Another option is that there are people who have found a way to eek out a living online that is somewhat labor intensive. They don't have a reservoir of funds so cannot take the next step that may vault them into seriously good money, because that next step would mean either completely abandoning their source of income now, or at least cutting back on the amount of time that they put into it, and they cannot afford to do so.

One of the things that holds me back from doing better is reading all the great threads here on WF... well, back to work.

The answer is simple :

1)Patience and
2)Willpower.

My husband says that what's really holding me back is my lack of guts/ confidence. I've been attending some seminars and talks with experts who have been willing to mentor me and so far, I seem to already know a lot about what they've been talking about. That means I may be the only stumbling block to my success. I am so afraid of failing.

All of the above. Plus, even the best of us gets tangled up in one housekeeping issue or another and grinds progress to a halt. Oh, you also forgot about time. Most people are trying to do IM AND full time jobs and not doing either the best that they can.

TomG.

I Think 1st is fear then second easily become info junkies
and not action takers.....

The read and buy and buy and dream but never take that action
or they take some action to test the waters and it does not go as planned and they just give up...

Never give up, Never Back Down,Never loose Faith!

Many people fall victim to treating their business like a hobby and expect full-time results from part-time effort. They refuse to develop the mindset required to be successful in this industry, and thus either quit altogether, or jump from one opportunity to the next, hoping to strike gold in "the next big thing."

As the statistics show, IM is not the easiest business in the world, but it doesn't have to be the hardest either. People over-complicate things by trying to focus their attention on EVERY marketing technique available, instead of simplifying the process and mastering a couple techniques until they see results. Once they see results, they can use their knowledge to educate others, thus adding value to themselves. And while they do that, they can begin mastering another technique and adding it to their repetoire over time. Most people try a technique once or twice, and when they don't see immediate results, they try something else. Not a good practice...

I find the most important thing people lack is KNOWLEDGE. People go half hearted into projects without know the key parts. Yes traffic is important, but anyone can teach you how to get traffic to anywhere. You need to really know about the niche and all its secrets to be successful.

What really holds people back?

Yourself.

It's all in the head!!!

Too many choices in life makes one distracted to concentrate and work solely on one thing. Imagine if you come to a day where you have no money, no roof over your head and I offer you the necessary equipment to set a store on the Internet to earn your sole living, will you quit?

Most likely not. You will work your ass off trying to make it work. It's a survive or die scenario. If you put your mind into such a scenario, I think one's success rate will be much higher.

personally, what help me back at the beginning, was fear of failure...
As in putting something out there that wasn't 100%
It's not only after you start looking around and see, how people monetize basic sites, basic sales letters, even basic/rough products that you realize 'hey, I can do better!', and that element of fear subsides...

Combination of lack of focus, laziness, a sense of entitlement, and probably being impatient.

"Pick your business model and stick with it." Exactly Kevin.

Most people seem come into IM without an idea or a plan for a business. All they want to do is 'make money online'.

The people who have some kind of business idea, concept or strategy first have an advantage because they are less likely to be distracted by the 100's of tactics that don't apply to their strategy.

So if you don't have any kind of plan or idea, take some time to get inspiration, observe and research what others are doing, and then try to vsualise what your own website/business will become so you can 'start with the end in mind'.


Andrew

What did hold my back before was the fear of failing and I just did not know where to start with my marketing.
I guess I had a case of information overload and also the fear of not making a success of my online marketing.
What I have learned is that starting is important and failure is just part of how we all learn.
You know the saying - You can never fail if you never give up.

Waldo

What REALLY Holds People Back From Making Money Online?

Overwhelm trying to learn EVERYTHING before launching.

They don't look at it like a business, it's just something to do on the side. (That's not how you run a business!)

Direction: They have an overload of information and no they don't know what to do next.

This is the same thing that happened to me. I was overwhelmed and didn't know which way to go. When I started treating this like a business, things started falling into place. Direction and focus naturally came into play and I kept moving forward and haven't stopped since.

That is one of the major reasons why I came up with Internet Marketer Magazine, to help people who are overwhelmed and give them direction. The first issue is "Back to Basics" and is designed to lay the foundation to help end the overload and give you direction for your business. It was something I saw that is needed in this industry. An unbiased source of information for people marketing online. The tagline says it all, "for internet marketers, by internet marketers". It's because we've all been there, held back for some reason or the other and know how to get out of it.

Definitely a combination of information overload, analysis paralysis and fear of failure. The mind is a powerful thing and if it's not in the right place, nothing will be accomplished.

Don

I think it is the overwhelming amount of information available. It is easy to continue to learn the "latest and best" techniques without ever taking action.

Just remember what ever blog you build or product you sell -would you read it and would you buy that product? put yourself in the other viewers eyes-and as i have said on many posts-just be honest and give great content for free-Take care.
PS turn the computer off for at least a day and go hug a tree!My madness-lol

Yeah My main problem is lack of focus. I read hard at what Im learning but when it come time to implement it seemed like I could never get things done. I was spending a butt ton of money too.

Laziness, lack of consistency, lack of self discipline, lack of persistence.

The biggest challenge for most is finding a product or service (niche) that they believe they can make money with. If you 100% believe in what you are selling, getting a site built all of a sudden doesn't seem so hard anymore.

I've been doing this for 13 years and it took me a long time to get it right. I now help out friends getting started so it's interesting to see the "crash courses" when folks try and learn it all in 1 week. It's just not that simple. Be persistent, and continue to learn.

There are many reasons I think.

A big one is lack of work ethic.

In this market it's all about who you choose to use as your mentors. Find someone that is successful in an area you are interested in succeeding online and then become their best apprentice. You can't fail if you choose the right people and stay the distance (i.e. replaced your income or whatever the goal is).

Lack of conviction. If you've come to the point where you've decided to succeed no matter what, then lack of a niche, lack of resources, lack of anything won't matter.

You would create your own..everything..opportunity and then eventually success!

Thanks!

Omar