Make Money Online- the baby steps part 11

By now you may have a decent website up and running, and you might even be in the process of filling it with content. You are likely to have reached a point where som strategic issues have started to arise. You start asking yourself what road to take, and at the same time you are aware of the fact that any choices you make today, early in the process, will effect you bigtime later on. This only adds to your headache. There are so many choices to be made, and so many strategic questions to be answered you don´t even know where to begin. But you must begin, otherwise you are just another schmuck with a great idea up their sleeve. So you start the painstaking work of trying to look far into the future and foresee where the different paths would lead you. You feel anxious. You´re fears of choosing the wrong road or taking a wrong turn hold you back. It is difficult to charge ahead, when you are not sure of where you are going. This problem needs adressing. Fast. We wrote this section of our guide “Make Money Online- baby steps part 11″ just for you.

First of all, let us just clearly state that we all have had the very same issues. There is so much information to take in initially when you are trying to grasp a new area of expertise it is often overwhelming. There are so many choices that you find yourself doing very little at all. After all how can you get anything meaningful done, when you´re not sure which tasks will turn out to be meaningful in the long run. Let us provide you with some advice. Based on our experience, the advice below is what we would tell our friends or relatives if they were starting out as internet entrepreneurs, and if they were attempting to create their first content-rich internet website.

1. Don´t sweat it. You need to understand that what you are doing is not a do-or-die situation. Building a decent-performing and good-looking website using WordPress is not that difficult. Really.Even if it doesn´t fly, the skills you have learned and the knowledge base you have built will serve you well. We know plenty of interpreurs and entrepreneurs who have failed miserably only to go on to their next venture and succeed in a big way. An attempt to make money online that fails is still win. It may not feel like it at the time, but the lessons you have learned and the skills you have aquired are likely to prove invaluable further down the road. Also, your risk is contained. You are after all not risking that much money. Setting up a WordPress website is dirt cheap. Your donside is limited, your upside is potentially huge. All you are risking is your time, and your pride. We promise you this; you will never find a better trade-off than that.

2. Dig where you stand. Basically there are two ways to approach a new venture. You either open up shop in an area of expertise that you are quite familiar with and passionate about, or you try to find a need that isn´t being met in an area of expertise that you know nothing about and you try to adress that need. An example of the former would be that someone who has worked all of his life as a bartender might eventually want to start up his own bar. And why shouldn´t he, he has enough experience to pull it off. There is very little he doesn´t know about the game. His chances of success ought to be pretty good. The latter situation, where you try to solve a need in just about any market, is trickier. The opportunities may be bigger if you go down this road, but so will the challenges be. It is our opinion that when you choose to try out your luck online you should go with an area that you already know very well. Preferably you should be an expert in your field. In other words, our advice is to dig where you stand. There will be plenty of new stuff to learn anyway, trust us. Trying to master a new area of expertise, while at the same time aquiring the skills needed to build, manage and uphold a website is a tall order. Do yourself a favour. In your first online venture, deal with a subject you know well.

3. Build a niche website. When starting out online many interpreneurs immediately want to go for world domination. World domination is ok, providing you have a very narrow niche. Try to be the best resource, the go-to website, on a particular topic. Do this either locally, or globally. Do not try to be all things to all people. Stick with what you know. Build the best possible website in your niche. Fill it with the best possible content. Make it stand out. What you are aiming for is a monopoly, or at the very least, an oligopoly in your particular niche of the market. Out-gun the others. Do more and better content. Do quality. Become the authority on the subject. Do your SEO homework. Reach out to your competitors. In short, claim that tiny slice of the internet and make it your personal kingdom. Defend that position. It is you niche market, and you will not let it go.

4. Don´t overdo it. While a good portion of enthusiasm and optimism are healthy personality traits in any budding entrepreneur, it is important to be realistic. In the beginning, you should focus purely on getting your hands dirty. Any action is good, as long as you are acting. You need to make sure you are always moving forward, improving on your site. You can always plan to take over the world later on. But for now, just do a plan of what needs to be done on a daily basis and make sure you do it. We know many interpreneurs (including ourselves) who tried to do large-scale websites of the bat. While we got remarkably far, and learned a lot from the experience, this was clearly not the best way to start out. You can always try to build the next Facebook further down the road. As for now, just stick with the program, and focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

5. Focus on one thing. In the beginning you should focus on one, or a small number of websites. Trying to build and operate too many sites will not only be exhausting, it will dilute your focus. In the beginning there will be plenty of new things to learn and apply. Working on several websites simultaneously is likely to prove a lot more difficult than you initially expected. The main reasons for building a large number of sites straight of the bat can usually be divided into two categories. One group of people want to establish some serious internet presence straight away. The other group of people have a hard time deciding which idea to pursue, so eventually decide to pursue them all. We respect the drive and enthusiasm that these people possess, we only ask them not to extend themselves too much. If you want to operate several websites straight away, by all means do it. Just try to keep the number down, and if possible try to make some of the websites in such a fashion that they do not need that much extra attention once they have been built to begin with.

6. Do most of it yourself, but not all. Nowadays, anything under the sun can be outsourced to others. Grab your credit card, fill out a form and click on a mouse. That´s really all there is to it. You can outsource each and every part of your website to someone else. Very often you can do it for considerably less than you initially figured it would cost. Whether, you want some technical features built, some nice design or simply want to buy content, the new borderless economy has you covered. If you live in a fairly rich western country and outsource some of your tasks to an indian company, you will be surprised at the amount of work that money will get you. But outsourcing has its downsides as well. Chief among them, is that you do not learn what you need to learn. Since this is your first internet project we urge you to learn as much as you can. The best way to learn is by doing. Try to do as much work as you possibly can yourself. If you are not satisfied with your work when you are done, you can always outsource it, but use outsourcing as your last resort. You will have plenty of opportunities to outsource your work later on. In fact we know internet entrepreneurs that don´t do any of the work themselves. These individuals are highly skilled experts, and yet they choose to let someone else do the work for the. But the mere fact that they are so good at what they do allows them to consistently pick the best providers, and also to extract the highest level of work from these providers. The logic of it is easy: a good programmer will know what to look for in another programmer. If you are knew to this game, you want to spend as much time as possible learning. Everything you learn will come in handy later on. Do some moderate outsourcing if you like, but keep it to a minimum. A nice-looking web logo will set you back less than $300 but often provides great satisfaction and pride. This might be a good investment once traffic starts to pick up. But try to do as much as possible by yourself first. It will be time well spent. We promise.

We hope our advice has been helpful to you. It is difficult to give general advice, since every individual has strengths and weaknesses and what works for some may not work for others. The strategic advice we have outlined above is what we feel will work for most. Should this be your first website, but you are an experienced programmer for example, our advice doesn´t apply to you. But if this is your first attempt to make money online, you are moderately technically skilled yet you are highly motivated then you might want to pay attention. We know what we are talking about. Between us, we have made most of these mistakes ourselves. Let´s move on to the next part of our guide “Make Money Online- the baby steps part 12″, we still have more topics to cover together.