18 Tips: Get Started in Making Money Online

1. Avoid Get Rich Quick Program

Get rich quick program are scam and unethical, they are unavoidable. Like pyramid and MLM program, most of their programs include product that is clearly seen to just disguise the money game. Usually these program does not have a true value in it to help you move forward in achieving your life goal. They sell high ticket programs ranges from $1-5k or even more, and if you are unable to uncover their business model, you might end up building their business instead.

My advice: Goggle online and check about the company review beforehand. The only way to make money online is to start an online business. First, you identify your passion, think about the idea and then execute it. 

2. Learn From Successful People
Success leaves clue. Learn from success people and expert who has the powerful knowledge and experience. Subscribe to their newsletter, read their blogs, books, podcast or follow them on their social media.

Connect with hardworking people who have the same goal as you, make friends with them and hang out with them because this group of people are likeminded people like you. They are the group of positive people you want to be with, because they will inspire you to take action and influence your behaviours.

Tips: When you start alone with no connection, you can try joining Facebook group, niche forum, attend seminars and talk (FREE) to meet these new people.

3. Be around with Positive People
When I told my friends I am doing internet marketing, they usually give me skeptical look and negative comments. It really affects me a lot because none of them share the same goals and it left me learning and fighting independently initially.

At times, I pause and pondered over my decision but on the other hand, the positive like minded people I get to know during the years has given me the willpower and motivation to fight on. Because they have the same goals and courage as me and partly the inspirational quotes from successful people keeps me motivate and going.

Remember don’t be too affected by how people think of you. It is your life and only yourself can change it.

Brian Tracy, Anthony Robbins, Dave Ramsey and Michael Hyatt are people I have been following on Facebook and they have very nice inspiration quotes; fuel that keep my engine going.

4. Build Your Website and Blog
Having your own website or blog is an essential need for all types of online business. I said “ONLINE”, so it makes sense to have a website (store) to promote your own product/services/brand. Building a website is also the first obstacle many beginners are facing, thus I have created a tutorial to help you with this.

5. Learn Internet Marketing
If you want to make money online, you need to sell something and you need to promote it. Understand what is internet marketing will help you greatly, remember I said Internet + Marketing…. you can put your product/service on the eStore (Your site) but you must learn to market it because you don’t have a salesperson promoting your product/service like those brick and mortar business. What many entrepreneur failed to realized is that they put their product/service on their eStore, but they don’t know how how to market for their business. No one visits their eStore, no traffic=no customer… no one patronize their eStore, no sales will be made.

Note: There will be no perfection to master internet marketing because the technology is improving and changing rapidly every year and you will find yourself constantly updating and educating yourself. As for now, start learning the fundamental of internet marketing because this is the first step to your success.

6. Be Honest About Your Business
Don’t hide anything from your customer. There should be no secret for all online businesses. Be open and honest about your business and you will find success coming after you. Don’t forget, your customer might be smarter than you, eventually you want to leave a good impression and service so they can leave you a good review online or in your Facebook page and word of mouth (WOM) is the best form of marketing and they are free.

7. Invest in Lifelong Education
What you know you know.
What you know you don’t know.
What you don’t know you don’t know.

A varieties of knowledge will help you route out a mind map in your brain. It helps you see the helicopter view; the big picture of one event, allowing you to have a better understanding in the thinking process, which enable you to unlock the brain creativity power when you analyse and evaluate things, thus helping you in better decision making.

“If you want to be an entrepreneur and succeed, you’re going to have to crack open books about things you never thought you’d read” – Allen Walton

He also said: “Be a sponge for the sort of knowledge that will make you wealthy. whether that has meant reading a book on writing product descriptions or studying master salesmen in action, he’s willing, because he knows it will help him grow his business”

Source: Forbes

8. Don’t Think of Cost, Think of Value
I have heard many new entrepreneur who are not willing to make investment such as buying a hosting, domain name or books that can help them build their knowledge. I don’t know why they are so bother by the small investment. Running an online business is a lot cheaper as compared to traditional brick and mortar business. Furthermore, if you want to have an online business, it make sense to have a website running rather than sticking to just Facebook page for your business. If you want to make money online, spend it.

The other thing I realized is there are some new entrepreneurs who become a one man show when they start their online business. They want to cut down on almost all expenses and rather DIY themselves even they don’t have a skill to do it. From designing logo, website, creating their products, marketing etc… Sometimes it is better to hire someone else who can do the job better than you. Their experience not only allows you to have better results but also may save you tons of time.

9. Invest When You Are Making Money 
Yes, it is not easy for new entrepreneur to start an online business and often you have to spend all the time and energy building your first online business. However, the internet enables individual entrepreneurs to plunge into doing online business cheaply and quickly; low risk. That is why I encourage new entrepreneur to start with a small investment. The idea behind here is it is safer to risk wasting your time and energy rather than losing all your money (if you made big investment) when your business failed. Ultimately, you gain an experience and learn from it…

Borrowing money from a bank to start a business is a bad idea if you are inexperience, try to avoid any liability. Think of investing only when your business is making money for you. When I say investing, I mean scaling up and freeing up your time so you can truly enjoy life. Example: Invest in system that allow you to make your business automated, recruiting someone else if a skill is needed or anything that allows to you to become financial freedom.

On a side note: When your business is making money for you, don’t think of only scaling up; expanding your business. Scaling a business is one way but you can also re-look in your business model and see if you can eliminate or outsource those activities that is not making you money.

10. Set Goals
Without setting a clear goals in mind, you will not be able to move forward and achieve anything, as simple as that. It is such a powerful process that many people have neglected.

Goal setting involves the development of an action plan, which enables you to have a “Clear Direction” and “Timeframe”, thus allowing you to determine the type of strategies and tactics you need to use to turn your goal into reality.

For instance: If you want to make a million dollar sales in 1 year time, you will need to make $2,739.73 per day or $83,333.33 per month.
Suppose your selling price is $100 per product, this means that you will need to sell 28 product per day or 833 product per month. If the product you are selling is a seasonal product, you may need to factor in that you may need to stock up more product during a holiday season like Christmas etc. But in non-season time, you may need to come up with other strategy to increase the sale like increase on the advertising and marketing part.

“People are not lazy. They simply have unimportant goals – that is, goals that do not inspire them – Tony Robbins

11. Time Management
Please don’t say that you don’t have the time to learn or build your online business. Everyone has the same equal of time each day. How you make use of your time required some time management together with your goal set.

As an entrepreneur, you need to tell yourself how much time you need to spend on each activity thinking and doing it. While you cannot eliminate all distractions, you can bring down activities that you should not focus on; activities that doesn’t help in your success. Understand which activity is important to your success should have most of the time assign and focus on.

“People are not lazy. They simply have unimportant goals – that is, goals that do not inspire them.” – Tony Robbins.

12. Never Give Up, Be Persistant
Your attitude “Never give up” plays a role on your success. Even if two people have the same internet marketing (IM) knowledge but if one give up trying after failing for the first time would just means nothing will be achieved; failure. If the other person keeps on trying, he or she would have a higher chance of succeeding in life.

The best age to become successful is between 25 and 40 and once you are above 50, your chances of success will be slimmer. However, age is less of a driver to a person’s entrepreneurship success; it is their belief and persistent spirit that makes them who they are.

To prove you that, just look at a few successful entrepreneurs I cherry picked below:
Facebook, Mark  Zuckerberg (20)
Goggle, Larry Page (25)
Amazon, Jeff Bezos (30)
McDonald, Ray Kroc (53)
KFC, Colonel Sanders (62)

“Never never never give up”- Winston Churchill

13. Take Action
I have been reading a great deal of business and success books and there is something in common the authors said: “Take Action”. I didn’t take that to heart in the first few books I read but when I start seeing the word again and again. I started to pondered over it and take it to heart.

Without any doubt, it is obvious to me that even if I have a very good business idea and if I don’t take any action, my idea will just be hanging in the thin air which I may have left the million dollar idea behind.

Everyone can come up with a few ideas easily but the execution part it the tougher and not many people can do it or want to do it… so take action before somebody else do it.

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.” – Anthony Robbins

14. Stop Procrastinating
We have so many things to do involving around our daily life, from unimportant to important task on hand. Nevertheless, I feel that there is no better way to overcome procrastination other than identifying the important goal/task on hand and detailed it down in a written action plan so you can work within the timeframe in a clear direction manner. Next, allocating an hour or two per day to clear those unimportant tasks during your most unproductive time; you can discover that about yourself. For myself, I am most unproductive after lunch time.

Certainly, you could identify and eliminate distractions that are impacting on your work productivity but I have to tell you that they are not the significant factor that is causing you to procrastinate.

Sometime, you can also identify the push factor; factor that leave you with no choice which make your goal become the first priority in your life. This mean you become very focus and driven toward your vision.  For instance, I have an acquaintance that is not very well-off and has a very sick father to take care of, her optimistic and positive attitude towards life in conjunction with the fear of not able to support for the family made her very hardworking… and now she has achieve success in life which allows her to support the family. My daughter is my motivation key.

15. Create New Habits
Most of the time, people failed to realized that it is their old habits that has shape them to who they are, life in general.

If you found yourself stagnate in life; without any progress, it probably would mean that you are sticking to your old habits or you like to live in a comfort zone of yours. Nothing will change your life if you stick to your old habits. Your happiness or unhappiness is a result of your habit. Your spiritual, health, success and life in general are all created by your habits.

Old habits are hard to quit so creating new habits are advice if you want to improve your life and see a change moving forward.

“We become what we repeatedly do” – Sean Covey

16. Profitable and Sustainable Business
A successful business, be it offline or online must be profitable and sustainable. Otherwise don’t even think of starting it even if you have the passion. Passion alone is not enough and this is something many new entrepreneurs have misguided about. Because more often than not, they end up become the one doing the work which involved around their passion rather than thinking of how to create a system, running a business and leading a team.

17. Chase Your Goal, Not The Money. Because The Money Will End Up Following You.
If you are the kind of person that chases every new shiny business opportunity to get rich quickly, you will not be successful in what you are doing. Trust me! Many people fail this miserably as they lost patience and quit it when they are closer to success than they think!

They chase after making money activities instead of putting effort to build a good business pillar when they first started.
For instance, they might not have a good website design or content written. They kept on promoting their product to gain traffic and when no profits are earn, they blame that their business didn’t work because they focusing on the wrong thing.

18. A Business is Like a Laboratory Experiment.
If you have a great business idea, test and implement it. You will never know if it works unless you execute it.

At times, you don’t have to follow and believe everything the book has taught. You can follow your heart if you think your judgment is rational or logically right.

Sometime, the only way to find out if the idea works is through trial and error.
If the idea fails… Stop, think, tweak, test and implement again. People learn from mistake after they make the necessary adjustment instead of ignoring it.

Failure is inevitable. People failed because they don’t take action. You have to take action to get failure, and then you have to remain persevere and keep it going.