If you want to build a successful and profitable internet business here’s the fourth part of how to prepare for online business success.
Click here for How To Prepare For Online Business Success – Part 3
Click here for How To Prepare For Online Business Success – Part 2
Click here for How To Prepare For Online Business Success – Part 1
11. INVEST – Invest Your Profits To Keep Growing
If you want to build a profitable online business, it’s absolutely essential to invest in both yourself and your business on a continuing basis. If you stop investing in either, your business will eventual stop growing and begin to decline.
So make a commitment to set aside a proportion of your annual profits to invest in your own knowledge, skills and relationships with people who can help you to continue growing both personally and professionally.
Likewise, it’s equally important to keep investing in the tools of your business and the people who work in it. Your business is either moving forwards or moving backwards. Standing still is not an option.
12. IMPROVE – Always Be Testing
The vast majority of people make two crucial mistakes when creating a new webpage. They either create the page and never touch it again, assuming that it’s perfect, or they spend time agonizing over how to make it perfect before they move on.
So this point coincides with the need for speed that underlies most of these recommendations.
Speed of progress is vital to your chances of success online.
The more effective your pages at achieving their end goal, the more profits your business will generate and the faster it will grow. So throwing pages up and forgetting about them won’t serve your best interests.
Likewise, spending days or weeks agonizing over whether a headline would be better in black or red will also harm your chances of business success. So go with what your experience tells you is most likely to convert best, get it setup quickly, then run a split test using a service such as Google Optimizer.
Free your mind, move on and wait for the test results to develop. It’s impossible to make any meaningful improvements to your webpages of your business unless you have accurate data for the purposes of comparison.
Then, once you find a clear winner, test it against other new alternatives.
If you maintain a situation where you’re constantly testing a different aspect of your site, three powerful changes will happen.
One, your experience of the best way to proceed (i.e the first items to test) will improve. Two, you will be able to implement new ideas much faster without the indecision, and three you will earn much more money as your business process becomes more efficient and grows more rapidly.
All things being equal, doubling your conversion rate will produce just as good results as doubling your traffic. But if you can achieve both, your results will quadruple. Testing is an essential element of speed (both speed of implementation and speed of growth) and therefore an essential element of your online business success. So from now on, make a commitment to always be testing.
13. EDUCATE – Keep Learning
We live in the information age, where knowledge is your greatest asset. The moment you think you know it all, you stop learning and your abilities begin to decline.
You and your business are either moving forward or falling back. Standing still is not an option. And given the rate of change on the internet it doesn’t take long to fall behind your competitors.
So it’s absolutely vital to keep learning about all aspects of your business. Set aside time every week to read, watch training videos and mastermind with others.
14. PERSEVERE – Keep Going
Due to the amount of hype that floats around the internet, it’s easy to suffer from high expectations that quickly turn to dissillusionment at the first little setback.
It’s also easy to suffer from information overload and analysis paralysis due to the vast amount of data available.
So if you want to build a successful online business, you owe it to yourself to justify the expense of your time, effort and money by making a few basis commitments.
First, do your research and make a solid plan. Second, stick to your plan and keep going until you achieve your goals. Too many people quit when they’ve done 90% of the work and still haven’t experienced the rewards of success. And without a doubt, one of the saddest phrases in all known language is “what might have been”.
So work out what you want, then keep going until you achieve it.
What would you say are the most important factors in building a successful online business? Add your thoughts in the comments below.
Click here for How To Prepare For Online Business Success – Part 4
