One Stop Web Support Newsletter #72

September 7, 2008

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One Stop Web Support Newsletter #72

Jeff Baas - One Stop Web Support

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/

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Unrealistic expectations are one of the biggest killers of online businesses.

So we'll continue this week with our four-part series on the realities of starting an online business and what to expect. This third installment is about investing in your business in a way that causes your profits to grow.

The Reality of Starting a Business Online -- Part III -- expect to invest money

Last week we talked about planning a business being like planning a trip. I compared embarking on a business without adequate planning is like taking a trip by just randomly turning in the general direction you want to end up and expecting that whatever route you meander through will take you there.

Today, we'll look at another way in which starting a business is like taking a trip: putting gas in the car.

Do you want to make money or not spend money?

I've known plenty of people who went into business with the idea of not spending any money on it. They fantasized that their business would cost them nothing, yet reward them richly.

I have seen very few people who have even come close to succeeding with this approach.

The vast majority of these business owners put so much effort into finding ways to avoid spending money that it consumed them. It left them giving almost no attention to how they could make money.

Granted, I have seen some of them who started out with a firm resolve not to spend any money succeed to a small degree, but I'll discuss a little later what made them different.

Overall, if you want your business to take you somewhere, you need to be ready to put a little gas in the tank. That means focusing on how you're going to make money instead of on how you're going to avoid spending it.

Avoid the trap of going too far in the other direction, though

Having said that you need to invest money into your business to get it going and keep it moving forward effectively, I want to add a caveat: SPEND WISELY.

Probably more people go into their online business by approaching it in the exact opposite way as do those who don't want to spend a penny on anything for their business.

They quickly get seduced by the many sales pitches they encounter. It's a mistake I've been guilty of making more times than I'd like to admit.

Product X presents itself as a great new tool that could help my business. It would require me to get into an area of promotion that I hadn't even thought of, much less planned to do. But it will only be available for two more days. So I run out and scoop it up to use "somewhere down the road."

So it sits on my computer, untouched and eventually forgotten. Meanwhile, I continue with the strategies I had planned to do all along.

The money I spent on these impulse items is wasted money, pure and simple. It's like buying gas and storing it in a 500 gallon tank that leaves you stuck where you are.

Succeed by planning carefully how you spend

Don't feel you have to spend on every marketing tool and every marketing course that COULD CONCEIVEABLY help you make money. Spend on what you need right now, and only on what you need right now.

Don't spend on things that don't fit into your plans right now. Don't spend on things with the idea of setting them aside for sometime in the future. Don't spend on things that will take you away from the path you have planned.

Spend only on what will help move you forward from where you are right now to where you plan to be. In other words, it's OK to pay a little to get into the express lane to your destination, but you never want to pay to get off on a detour.

Succeed by reinvesting your profits

Granted, you need to put a little gas into the tank when you start your trip. You need to invest a little seed money into starting your business. It doesn't stop there, though. The key to building a stable business is to keep filling your tank as you go along.

Many new business owners make the mistake of taking all the money they make and spending it on bills or on little extras for themselves rather than reinvesting it back into their business.

Doing that, they eventually find themselves in a position where their business becomes just another fixed-wage, hourly job with no growth in revenue. Except that fixed wage isn't really fixed at all. It shrinks.

When all revenues go immediately to pay personal bills, the business inevitably runs out of gas. The business owner, so to speak, keeps working the same small plot of ground, until he or she has exhausted it and it stops producing the way it did at first.

A business is like a living organism. If you don't feed it, it eventually dies.

Reinvesting at least some of the early profits in it feeds it. Reinvesting lets you incorporate aids into your business that enable you to work more effectively and accomplish more. Reinvesting enables you to expand your reach with new forms of promotion that help you reach new customers.

If you want your business to support you like a business, you have to support it so it can grow.

What about the people who succeeded without spending any money?

That's right, I told you earlier that I knew of some people who started out with a firm resolve not to spend any money and still succeeded. You notice, I said that they STARTED OUT determined not to spend money, not that they never did spend.

Every single one whose business developed despite their initial determination not to spend, eventually broke down and made some expenditures. Each one of them received very small return for years as they built their business on sweat alone, spending nothing while they learned the ins and outs of running a business.

They got to know everything about their business intimately from their years of experience running a business that they put no money into and got little money out of. Then, once they had three or four years of experience with almost nothing to show for it, they finally were savvy enough to find those little things they could upgrade from all their free services they had used for years that would let them reach more people more effectively.

Once they started to invest a little bit of money to supplement their years of hard-won experience, they started to build momentum. That's when they started to succeed.

Final thoughts

Your business will grow only if you feed it. To get where you're going, you have to keep filling the tank.

Yes, that means exercising self-discipline. It means that not every penny that comes in can go for personal use. That's why it's a bad idea to quit your day job before your business is firmly established.

But with careful reinvestment, you can build a business into something that not only supports its own needs, but provides you comfortably with yours as well.

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Q and A with Jeff

In this section, Jeff answers your questions about starting a business online. Here's this week's question.

Can I make money with a blog?

Let's get one thing straight from the start. A blog, like with any business tool, will not make you money just because you have one. What can make you money is what you do with it.

If you set up a meandering, stream-of-consciousness exploration into your own personal likes and dislikes, you probably won't make any money from it. If you set up a bash-em-over-the-head, hypey blog where every post screams for readers to go to Amazon to buy something, you won't make any money.

But if you set up a BUSINESS and use a blog to form relationships with people who have an interest in the solutions your business has found for them, you've got a good chance of making money with it.

The whole subject of how to build a business is a little broad to cover in this short Q&A, but you'll find a lot on my site about the key elements of starting a business:

• Changing your mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset
• Finding a niche where people are looking for solutions
• Choosing a business model for your business
• Organizing your business to be profitable
• Building relationships with people who are looking for your solutions
• Promoting your business
• Testing and tracking your business to increase your profits

Like I say, that's a lot to cover in a short Q&A. If you're interested in how all this applies to creating a profitable blog, though, one of the most successful bloggers I know has just put all his knowledge into a free, 134-page book entitled "Building a Business, NOT a Blog."

It takes you step by step through the whole business building process, and applies the process to building a profitable blog.

Again, this is not merely about the technical steps involved in building a blog. It's about building a BUSINESS that operates through a blog. Because a blog won't make you money; a business will.

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HOTTEST OFFERS

Each issue, I feature what I consider the best offers available each week on worthwhile business-building tools. Check here to see what's hot this week.

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/hot-offers.htm

Or check to see my growing selection of ebooks and training tools that you can use for free to build your Internet business.

Free Ebooks:

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/dir-ebooks.htm

Free Training tools:

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/ongoing-bargains.htm

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Success quote

'Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.'

Mark Victor Hansen

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This newsletter is published by One Stop Web Support, where our business is helping your business succeed.

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/

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