The Profitable Online Business

profitable online business

Building a Profitable Online Business Rather Than an Expensive Hobby

profitable online business

Running a profitable online business isn’t that different to running an offline business.  If you take the online part out of running an online business you are left with – running a business. I know this is staggeringly obvious when you see it written down but you’d be surprised how many people don’t see it that way. They don’t treat it as a business – it’s somehow not real to them in the same way that a traditional business is. Why?

For starters when running an online business you don’t have a lot of the trappings (in every sense of the word) of a bricks and mortar one. You typically don’t have expensive premises, tons of equipment or staff. You don’t have to travel far to get there and you don’t have set working hours – unless you choose to. The secret to a profitable online business though is to treat it like one.

In fact in many cases you don’t even have products, at least not physical ones that you need to store, ship or maintain. But you do still have a business. You need to make sales and profits just like the bricks and mortar version. So in a nutshell, you need to turn up and do stuff. If you don’t then what you have is a hobby. I don’t know about you but my hobbies don’t pay me – quite the opposite in fact.

This was the subject of our regular hangout last night. It was officially titled “The effects of not taking consistent action on your online business”. We talked about the meaning of consistent action as a starting point. In an online business it has a different meaning than an offline one in so far as the tasks are very different but not doing them has the same effect. Its the difference between a profitable online business and a money pit.

Building a Profitable Online Business – Keeping the Plates Spinning 

With your trad business, a shop say, you need to turn up and open it every day. You need to keep it stocked and make the stock look enticing and you need to attract customers. An E-commerce style online business is much the same – Amazon for example. But when you are dealing with electronic information or training products it’s very different.

Your shop window is your website, your blogs, landing pages, banners and adverts. With this “weightless” type of online business these are all out there working for you 24/7/365 all over the world. But they work in different ways and at different speeds. Consistency in this scenario is all about making sure you are keeping all those plates spinning and adding new plates er… consistently.

When people come into this industry it can be hard for them to get this mindset in place. When your commute consists of opening the laptop it can seem unreal – hard to think of as a business. It’s also usually the case that you start running an online business in your spare time. Once again this can cause inertia to set in. There’s always the day job to fall back on if things get tough. If you have a profitable online business though, the last thing you’d want to do is go back to the day job. Escaping from that is probably the reason you started it.

There is a certain novelty in your first little success when you start running an online business. When the first leads and then sales come in. At that point what you should be doing is moving things up a gear. A lot of people however don’t do that and the hobby mentality sets in. To build a profitable online business you need to rinse and repeat constantly when you start to see the sales coming in.

They blow the money on a holiday or a present for themselves. What they should be doing is reinvesting some of or all of the profits and repeating the process that brought the leads/sales in. Presuming of course it is actually a business they want and not just some extra beer money.

Inevitably with any business there will be lean times. Times where the lead flow slows and the sales dwindle. You can react to this in two ways: You can keep being consistent – getting your stuff out there – good move, or you can sit back and stop; take a break till things pick up again. Bad move.

When you run a business either online or offline you are in effect a commission only sales person. Fortunately when running an online business this doesn’t involve cold calling, commuting or door knocking in the normal sense. It does mean producing content, placing and managing ads and looking for new ways to market your wares. That’s the type of consistency you need in a profitable online business.

Being consistent when running an online business means that you start to build sustainable, regular income. That’s what sees you through the lean times and creates a real, profitable online business not just a hobby. Get you free List Building For profit Ebook on the link below.

profitable online business

 The Profitable Online Business 

By Dave Menzies

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