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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about the final 3 things that are stopping you from succeeding in your online business.
We’ve seen the problem with the current stereotypes of people who make online business work (working 24/7, going it alone until 4 in the morning) and how they consistently hold people back. That’s why in part 2 of this series we’re going to cover three more roadblocks that are probably holding you back from success in your online business.
You will learn
- Why it’s necessary to batch content.
- How the stereotype of an entrepreneur going it alone is wrong.
- The value of finding a community (even if it’s one person).
- Need a mastermind?
- Join our private Flip Your Life Community
- We help our members succeed every day
- Learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife
- Why you need to invest in yourself.
- The issues with “free” tools in your online business.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Subscribe to the Podcast on Itunes
- Flipped Lifestyle on Stitcher
- Shareaholic
- Leadpages
- Podcast with Michael O’Neal
- The Flip Your Life Community
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
I heard about S&J a month ago and started listening to the podcasts two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve listened to every single one. Why? Because Shane and Jocelyn share information in every episode that is essential to running an online business. This is not your typical podcast for online sellers. They tell you how it is and give you all the information you need to do it and keep you motivated in the process. If you are listening to more than one business podcast and S&J at Flipped Lifestyle isn’t one of them or at the top of the list, then you are missing out and wasting time. Flipped Lifestyle has changed my business and my life. Thank you.
“My Uncluttered Life”
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to continue last week’s discussion about the six reasons your online business may not be successful.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are talking about six reasons your online business may not be as successful as you would like and we actually started these back last week in Episode 48. And if you want to catch the first part of this podcast, you can head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast48 and that is where we started talking about three of the reasons that your online business may not be succeeding and those three reasons were:
1. You have not defined your ideal avatar or audience, the person that you are trying to sell to.
2. You are not thinking about your product first; you are doing a lot of other things that may not necessarily be profitable.
3. You are trying to copy someone else’s work instead of being genuine and being yourself.
So those were our first three reasons that your online business may not be successful, and today we are going to talk about reasons four through six. But before we get into that, Shane is going to share an iTunes review.
SHANE: Okay guys, we’ve been sharing a lot of things from Facebook, and Twitter, and a lot of success stories from our Flip Your Life community members in the last couple of podcasts and we looked up and lo and behold, we have like 50-100 more iTunes reviews that have popped up. So we thought we would start sharing a few of those again and get some of you guys on the air who are reaching out, engaging and connecting with us in the iTunes review section. Today’s review comes from the user ‘Myunclutteredlife’ and Myunclutteredlife writes, “Real people sharing real info online sellers should use.” Five stars. “I heard about S&J a month ago and started listening to the podcasts two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve listened to every single one. Why? Because Shane and Jocelyn share information in every episode that is essential to running an online business. This is not your typical podcast for online sellers. They tell you how it is and give you all the information you need to do it and keep you motivated in the process. If you are listening to more than one business podcast and S&J at Flipped Lifestyle isn’t one of them or at the top of the list, then you are missing out and wasting time. Flipped Lifestyle has changed my business and my life. Thank you.” Thank you so much for reaching and leaving that review, to the user at myunclutteredlife; we don’t have the name or the domain for that person but if you go over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast49, we would love to hear from you and leave that in the comments. We love reading these reviews, they are incredibly motivating to us to hear how we are impacting people, and it’s just awesome to see how people respond to our podcasts. If you have not left us an iTunes review yet, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast49 and we will have a link to our iTunes page. We would love for you to go there and leave an honest review of what you think we are doing. And also make sure while you are there, that you hit that subscribe button; that’s going to make it much easier for you to know when we release new podcasts, have new content come out and it really helps us with the rankings in iTunes so more people can discover our show. You can also leave us a review at Stitcher.com, that’s another podcast app that’s mainly for people who are not using Apple products. You can use it just from any browser you want to, to listen to podcast streaming on the go. Our podcast is now live on Stitcher.com and we would love to have some reviews there too. So head over there and take care of that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, our Stitcher account’s a little lonely; I think we have two or three reviews.
SHANE: iTunes is putting the hurt on the old Stitcher account but we have a lot of people listening on Stitcher. I do know that because people share our links to Stitcher quite a bit. So we would love to get some more reviews over there to move up in the rankings on Stitcher.com.
JOCELYN: Alright, so next we are gonna jump into our discussion today; the final three reasons that your online business may not be successful. Reason number four is that you are not batching content and you are trying to do everything in real-time. In episode 47, we actually talked a lot about this, about making content, creating it upfront, and then scheduling it out to release in the future and this is something that you have to do to succeed online. You are not going to be able to make it if you are trying to do everything in real time.
SHANE: What’s gonna happen is life’s gonna get in the way; I mean you are probably working full-time, and you are doing this on the side, got kids, got a family, got all these other responsibilities; well sometimes, you know, you take your kid to school and you know, they throw up and you have to go pick them up, or sometimes there’s a ball game after practice that you can’t skip. If you have not created content ahead of time and you are not rolling it out on a schedule, something is gonna get in the way and if you are trying to live day by day, blog post by blog post, sooner or later, your kid, or your job is going to become more important than that blog post and you are going to miss a time when you normally release some kind of content on your website.
JOCELYN: And I think that a lot of this comes from just our mentality that we have to trade time for money, and I think that’s where a lot of times people think that they have to do things in real-time because that’s how we typically work if we work for somebody else. But when you are doing online business, this is not the best way to get it done because just like Shane said, something is gonna get in the way, there’s gonna be some type of interruption and you are not going to be able to get your content out so that people can find your website, or find what it is that you are selling. So doing everything upfront and then scheduling it, frees up your time to do what’s really important and that is to make products that is to sell and make money.
SHANE: And something related to batching content, where you are going to sit down and do all the content upfront is, you have to create some kind of plan. You can’t just come up with this stuff on a whim. You need to have an editorial calendar that’s set up to say, ‘Okay, on Saturday for these two hours, I’m gonna create five blog posts and I’m gonna limit that in that time period to get that done and it’s gonna happen no matter what, regardless if it’s perfect, regardless if it’s quality. Whatever it is, I got to get it out there during that time and I’m gonna make sure that I’m gonna schedule that content.’ So make sure that when you are doing any kind of online business work, whether it’s creating your blog post or your next product, you are batching all of that and getting as much done as possible and you want to say, two or three weeks ahead Jocelyn; something like that?
JOCELYN: At least, yeah.
SHANE: Yeah, that way you always have something in queue and you are ready to launch and roll it out. Everybody knows that they get to the point where they are like, ‘Oh man, I haven’t put a blog post up in three weeks’, ‘Oh, I forgot to record my podcast last week, I didn’t have time to do it.’ Don’t get in that situation. Batch all that content and move ahead and make sure that you’ve got always something rolling out for – even if your audience only has 100 people in it, they need to be getting delivered content regularly and they are not going to understand; if you disappear for three weeks, guess what’s going to happen to your audience? They are going to disappear too.
JOCELYN: And this is going to take a little bit of preparation time and I think that this is where a lot of people say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that because I don’t have time to prepare’. Well, you don’t have time not to prepare. You have to write out your content and plan what you are going to do if you are ever going to get ahead on your online business.
SHANE: All right, so the fourth reason that your business may or may not be succeeding to the level you want it to, is that you may not be batching content, you’re living blog post to blog post. So stop doing that. The fifth reason why your business might be failing, or not living up to the expectations you had for it is that you are trying to go at it all alone. You know, the word ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘solopreneur’ and all those buzzwords that we hear all the time about people trying to make money online, you know, you get this, like idea in your head of this person who you know, works all day, and comes home and does everything they got to do, and they are staying up and burning the midnight oil all by their self in the backroom in their house, with nothing but the glow of their computer screen and the darkness wrapped around them. And they are creating all of their content and trying to make money online. You got this like moonlighting, midnight-on-the-internet kind of fantasy rolling around in your head. That’s not exactly how this actually works. You cannot succeed being an online entrepreneur by yourself. This is not a solo job; even though you are working on this a lot at a computer by yourself, you have to surround yourself with other people who are also trying to do this to make it work. Being alone all the time, late at night, working on your online business with zero interaction is gonna get depressing, it’s gonna make this not very fun and it’s really gonna burn you out and leave you completely unmotivated. That’s a lot of reasons why people will get behind on their content and things like that is because they’re not excited to sit down at their computer because it’s very isolating and it’s not very fun sometimes. You need to have a mastermind group, you need to have a network of friends, you need to just be around other entrepreneurs even if they are not selling what you are selling, even if they are not even in your space, you need to have someone that can shoot a Facebook message to and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea, can I run this by you?’ or you need someone you can pop on Skype for 30 minutes a week and talk to or maybe a group of three or four people. You need to get out and go to live events and meet people; you need to join Facebook groups online and premium communities where you can really get in with people who are dedicated to making their online business work. Jocelyn and I have developed a lot of friendships with different entrepreneurs in vastly different spaces; they are doing all kinds of different things than what we are doing but know that we always, at our fingertips, or at the press of a button on Skype, can talk to one of our friends on our network about online business. We are not just doing this alone. We always have someone else out there. We know that someone else is struggling getting a plugin to work on WordPress. We know that other people are switching companies for who’s collecting their email and it’s just as frustrating for them. So we don’t feel like the weight of the world is on our shoulders. So don’t buy in to that myth that you have to hustle and that everybody is doing this all by their self, and that if you are not a solopreneur, you know, working till four o’clock every day all by yourself, you’re just not doing it right. You need other people to make this entrepreneurship thing work.
JOCELYN: When Shane and I started out in online business, you know, we were really blessed to have each other because we could really run ideas by each other and we are very different as you have probably realized by listening to this podcast. So, you know, things that he’s really strong in are weak points for me and vice versa so that is really helpful for us. A lot of people may not have that. If your spouse or partner, if they are not interested in online business, or maybe they are not 100% supportive yet because you have not been able to show them any kind of proof, this makes it even more important for you to be able to get in with somebody, whether it be online or preferably in person and really start to share ideas together, and grow a relationship that way. It’s going to help you just immensely; I can’t even express how important our connections have been as we’ve moved forward in our online business.
SHANE: A lot of times when we hear people that are really frustrated, they’ll call us or they’ll write us emails like, I’m really frustrated, I’m sick of doing this, when we probe a little deeper, we almost always find that the people who are failing, or who are really close to giving up are lonely. They are just isolated, and they want to quit because they feel like they are the only person doing it. They feel like they are the only person trying to make this work and well, I can’t make this work and so it must not be true but when you surround yourself by 20, 50, 10, 1 other entrepreneur that is making it happen, then you always have that confirmation that yes, this is real, yes, I can move forward, I’ve got some proof here, I’ve got someone to motivate me, and encourage me and keep me going. That’s going to make it so much easier in those times when things aren’t working to get through, push to the next level, and make your online business succeed. So really evaluate your workflow, look at yourself in the mirror honestly and say, ‘Am I trying to do this alone? Am I sitting here for four hours a night, and I don’t say a word to anybody; my wife goes to sleep, my kids to go sleep, I have nobody to talk to, I’ve got all these questions that I’m constantly just looking through Google?’ you need to seek out a community of entrepreneurs, or at least a couple other people that you meet somewhere where you can run some ideas by, talk to them, and even just complain a little bit. Share your struggles and say, ‘Hey man, this is just not working for me, what’s going on’ and they can encourage you, motivate you and help you get straightened out where you can take your business to the next level. So reason number five, stop trying to do this alone. You can’t succeed by yourself. Find a network of entrepreneurs that you can work with to help you take your business to the next level.
JOCELYN: Alright, so we talked about reason number four that your business may be not succeeding is that you are not batching content; reason number five, you are trying to do everything by yourself and that leads us to reason number six, our final reason why your online business may not be successful and that is that you are trying to do everything for free.
SHANE: Bootstrap. Gotta pull myself up by the bootstraps. I can do this all by myself, no money.
JOCELYN: We hear this all the time, and we have been where you are. It’s not like we are sitting here and we’ve been so far removed from all this that we don’t remember what it was like when we were first starting out. We do. We remember when we had a full-time job, and we didn’t have a ton of extra income coming in and we were trying to make all this online business happen. We do understand, we have been there before but, and that’s a big but –
SHANE: The tough love stick is being pulled out right now basically.
JOCELYN: If you want to get ahead and you want to get ahead quickly, it is absolutely essential that you invest in yourself, and that means spending some money. There are free tools out there, but they’re limited and if you are going to rely on those tools, then your success online is probably going to be limited too. Not to mention, it’s very time consuming. You have to search around, find these free tools, you agree to their 68 pages of terms and conditions but what you didn’t realize is that you agreed to let them put links to ads on your free website theme or something like that.
SHANE: Which happens all the time. Shareaholic, the very popular service for putting share buttons on your website, if you are not careful, one of their terms and conditions is, when you use the related post feature, let’s say you show six blog posts, four of them will be your but two of them will be links away from your site and you don’t get barely any of that money if anyone clicks them. And sometimes you have to agree to those things to use free tools; so you are basically agreeing to drive traffic away from your site. You have to be really careful when you are picking these free tools up because nothing is really free. People aren’t just making tools out of the kindness of their heart; they always have their best interest in mind when they are putting these free tools out there.
JOCELYN: So not only is it time consuming, you could have trouble, you could – you know, these kind of issues that we are talking about with these free tools, you could run into stuff like that, and sometimes it’s going to take you two, three more tools to kind of, try to work together and they are not even intended to work together. But you could have bought maybe, say a 50-dollar plugin that you could have found in about five minutes that would have accomplished the same two or three tasks.
SHANE: So whatever you make at work, let’s just say you make 20 dollars an hour at work, okay, so if you spend ten hours trying to find three plugins that will do what one plugin will do for 50 bucks, well, 10 hours times 20 is what, 200 dollars? So you’ve spent 200 dollars of what you have valued your time at if you make 20 dollars an hour at work when you could have just spent 50 dollars and not wasted all that time. Now you get those ten hours back and in ten hours, you can create four blog posts and probably a six-video e-course. So I mean, you could be selling something that would cost more than 50 dollars and make all of your money back. So all of these tools are just an investment that you are going to turn around; you are not spending money, you are investing money to create things that will make you more money down the road and if you can save time, you should always do that.
JOCELYN: And even if you value your time and say 20 dollars an hour is worth so much more than that. In that ten hours that you spend trying to figure everything out by yourself, you could have spent a few dollars to somebody else help you do it and that way, you could work on an actual product that you could sell.
SHANE: Another thing about these plugins, like it really hurts – I remember the first time I ever spent 97 dollars on a plugin. I remember Jocelyn looking at me like she wanted to kill me and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, did I really just spend 100 dollars on a plugin?’ I don’t even remember what it did. What was that thing? I don’t remember. But I remember it was 97 dollars and it was the first time that I had ever spent that much but I still own that plugin and it’s still – probably still installed somewhere today. It’s not like you are just getting it for that one-time thing. This is a tool that’s going to constantly work for you in the future and pay for itself over time. Now, I understand you may not have money in your budget for that, but you know what, to get 97 dollars, I may have to go sell you know, my old Xbox. I got 97 dollars, I’m gonna invest the 97 dollars into a plugin, that plugin eventually makes me 500-600 dollars, so I’ll go buy me two more plugins and a new Xbox down the road. Everything is an investment. Every sacrifice you make now is so that you can live a better life later. So don’t waste your life away trying to get everything for free; just get what you need, make the sacrifice now to get the tool you need and let it push your online business to the future.
JOCELYN: And it’s going to be a lot better in the long run. It’s going to save you time, it’s going to save you a ton of headaches that you are going to have to deal with and we – you know, now for us buying things that are going to get us ahead, that’s no big deal. I mean, just yesterday I spent 200 dollars on seven email templates for something I needed to do.
SHANE: But now Jocelyn doesn’t have to sit there for three days and write her own. So she’s got it in her –
JOCELYN: But I was wracking my brain trying to think of what I want to do in this particular email sequence and I was like you know what, let me if somebody out there has created this and lo and behold, they had. So, that’s the thing, is that you have to change the way that your mind works. Don’t think of it as you are giving money up; think of it as you are investing money into your future, and into making money and that is when you turn the corner and really start becoming successful.
SHANE: And here’s one more thing about free tools; in almost every instance when I look back, and I’m like ‘Oh, I found a free tool to do this’ and about three minutes later, I had to buy the paid one ‘because I ran into a wall. ‘Oh, I’ve found a free tool to do this’, yeah, I ended up having to buy it anyway. ‘Oh, I’ll just create my own sales pages.’ Yeah, four months later, I still bought Leadpages, it didn’t matter. It’s like we said earlier, you are eventually going to have to buy the tool anyway, so you might as well just bite the bullet and get what you need now. You don’t have to buy the best, you know, most expensive tool, there’s different ways to do things. Some plugins are cheaper than others; you might find one that meets your needs for a good solid value but go out there and find something that works, something that is not littered with ads, something that doesn’t take over your website and just make everything so bloated that it won’t even load. Get what you need and you will be much farther ahead and have a chance to succeed.
JOCELYN: It kind of reminds me of the free, iPad apps. Our little kids, they have iPads and they –
SHANE: Oh my gosh, free.
JOCELYN: They always want us to buy apps which – you know, that’s fine so we always look to see what they want. Well, a lot of times, the apps are free but it always has some type of paid up-sell. So for me, I would much rather pay the two or three dollars, whatever it is, so we don’t have to listen to all these crazy commercials all the time and you know, the ones that I hate the most are the ones that have the up-sells in the game. Like those are really –
SHANE: Yeah, in-app purchases. I got a great example of this. Our kids have started – we’ve taught them how to play Uno Attack, in Uno, ‘cause I love Uno, and Jocelyn – we just love playing Uno so we taught them how to play. Well, they wanted it on their tablets. Well, there was two versions of Uno; the first version of Uno was free and the family edition and you get it and everything is just fine. Well, what they don’t tell you is, they give you like 25 tokens and you have these, like to get wild cards and they get superpowers and they get all these things, you have to keep buying new tokens. You have to either keep spending money or watching ads; and of course they are showing them kids ads for things that they can buy at the store like Disney toys and we go to Wal-Mart and like, ‘I want that, I saw a commercial’. So, it’s actually this constant money-pit of, you know, chaos and frustration, and the kids are always wanting things. Well, I went and deleted that, I bought the five-dollar Uno game and now we can just play Uno. No ads, no up-sells, no nothing. We spent more money on the free version of Uno. If we had bought just the five-dollar version of Uno upfront, we never would have saw a commercial, we wouldn’t have 15 toys in the room they saw commercials for, and we wouldn’t have spent all of our money on virtual, superpower Uno cards. So it’s the same thing with plugins. Buy the plugin that works and forget about the one that’s littered with all that other stuff.
JOCELYN: Exactly and this goes back to something we talk about on the show all the time that money is replaceable even though it feels like sometimes it might not be. It really is if you can really dig into you know, what you have or sell something. But time is not replaceable. Money is replaceable, time is not. So always go on the side of time when you can.
SHANE: Alright guys, so that wraps up our discussion of six things that you might be doing that are keeping you from becoming successful online, or going to the next level.
1. You don’t know exactly who your audience is, you have to find you avatar.
2. You are not thinking product-first. If you don’t have anything for sale, you don’t have a business. So start creating that product if you’ve not done that yet.
3. You are trying to copy someone else instead of being yourself. Remember, you were the only unique prop – you are what sells you. You got to be out there. Don’t try to be like somebody else. Be yourself and your brand is going to flourish because of it.
4. You are not batching content. You are living blog post to blog post and you’re trying to stay up on that and constantly get behind on your content and it’s probably frustrating you. Stop doing that, get ahead, get a schedule, and make that happen.
5. You are trying to do this all alone, this is not – just because you are a solopreneur does not mean you want to have no network of people around you that’s helping you take your business to the next level. You need a mastermind group, you need a community of entrepreneurs that you can lean on in those tough times to get you through and on to the next level.
6. You are trying to do everything for free; you’re trying to bootstrap it, you are trying to make it all happen for as cheap as possible when you could save hours upon hours of your life and get farther ahead in your business and beat the learning curve if you would just pick up a couple of tools and go ahead and buy the ones that do what you need to do instead of spending all your time trying to bootstrap everything in your business.
JOCELYN: All right, hope that was helpful for you guys and I hope that it gets you past some of the sticking points that you are finding yourself faced with; and if so, come on over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast49 and let us know which one of these tips was helpful for you and which one you are going to take action on. The next part of our show we are going to get into is our ‘Can’t-miss moments’ and these are things that we share in our lives that may not have been possible before we started our online business. Mostly things about our family or our kids, just special moments that we have in our lives that are possible because of what we do. Shane, what was your can’t-miss moment?
SHANE: My can’t-miss moment this week is – one day I just looked up and I was like man, we are so lucky that we get to work together every day. Like I’m just really glad that I get to work with Jocelyn and that – I just remember back when we were teaching, and I was coaching football, man, there were times when we never saw each other. And we were telling someone, we were talking on a podcast the other day, with Michael O’Neil, and we were talking about when I coached football and Jocelyn was a marketing coordinator for like a manufacturing company. So she was always travelling, I was always travelling, I was working 24 hours a day, all year long and there was like weeks, we would go not even see each other. So there’s been times in our lives, in our marriage where we were like out of our lives, gone, and we would only see each other for maybe a couple of hours a day. And it’s just really cool now that like everywhere we go, we just hang out and be together. So, that’s my can’t-miss moment is that I get to work with you darling, I love you –
JOCELYN: Thank you, dear.
SHANE: – so much.
JOCELYN: Okay yeah, I totally agree with that and this week has been a little bit crazy. We have a really big trip coming up, and we have been just trying to get all of these things into our schedule to try to finish before we leave. It has been a little bit stressful and I’m just thankful to be with somebody who understands my stress, and even the little things that I worry about all the time; you know, Shane doesn’t worry about them but he at least like, pretends to understand when I worry about them.
SHANE: It’s also pretty awesome too that we are always together because – I mean, it’s just like any other marriage; we don’t ever want to portray ourselves as having like the perfect, pristine life in the little snow-globe or anything like that because we have conflicts on a daily basis. We have kids, we have stress, we have all the problems that everybody else has in their marriage but when you are together, all the time, like you just have to deal with everything as it’s coming up. So nothing really gets to sit in and fester, nothing gets put off until later, we just deal with it and move on and it’s just an awesome power to be able to do that and be able to leverage that time together when you work together so all that stuff doesn’t build up over time. I can remember, when we wouldn’t see each other for a long time, like over a week or two, something would happen and maybe something would blow up, or there would be a good confusion and we’d mess something up. But now it’s like everything get’s dealt with, we just keep moving forward and that is just a huge blessing about having an online business and being able to work together every day that you can just always sort out those problems as they come up and they never become anything big deal.
JOCELYN: Alright guys, we hope that that is inspiring for you, we hope that hopefully one day you will be at this place too, and maybe even because of something you heard here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and that’s really our goal for what we do. We love what we do, we love online business but more importantly, we love helping you succeed through online business.
SHANE: Alright guys, that’s all we have for this week; until next time, get out there, take action and go flip your life. We’ll see you next week.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Joey says
Thanks for the follow-up episode! I guess your 6 reasons are those who have already found a right niche. The biggest reason for failure may be being in a wrong niche, a niche that has little demand, too competitive, or hard to monetize by nature. Working hard in a wrong niche may not even get you to the stage that your 6 reasons are applicable, I suppose.
And, one more. Not putting hard enough efforts? I feel it’s similar to study in school. Some kids simply can’t develop good study habits.
So, I guess “being in a right niche plus putting hard efforts” is prerequisite to get started?
Shane Sams says
Those are two reasons for sure. Our list was not all inclusive, just 6 we have noticed through seeing people make mistakes. You are right for sure. Not working hard will always crush you, not working smart even faster. I’d say for the niche thing…never give up too fast on a well researched niche. But eventually…you gotta pull the plug if it’s not working. Great comment Joey
Joey says
Thanks Shane for your feedback! “Never give up too fast on a well researched niche.” Ooh, this is very quotable!!
Will be nice if you talk a bit more about “when to pull the plug” in an upcoming episode for those who are struggling in a seemingly wrong niche. Thanks!!!
Alison McArthy says
How exciting it was to listen to Episode 49 tonight and hear my iTunes review being read! Thank you.
Both FL48 & FL49 were solid reminders that even though I have run my current online business for 2 years now, I am missing the mark at making it past hobby income by not treating it like a true business. I need to solidly focus my attention on my avatar when creating my products.
As a creative, shiny object syndrome is an illness that I combat almost hourly when working. I have wonderful customers who give me amazing information and I am going to take some time to focus on what they are asking for rather than wasting more time looking for inspiration in the products of my competitors. It’s important to know what is selling well, but it is more important for my business that I provide what my customers want to buy.
Focus is a constant struggle, working from home amidst 2 kids and running a house, so I am going to have to step back for a few days to regroup, redirect and make decisions concerning my time management skills going forward.
Stealing your quote: “Money is replaceable, Time is NOT.”
Words to live by!
Thanks,
Ali