I knew a guy who started one business after another only to have them fail. This guy wasn’t stupid, either. In fact, he was probably smarter than 95% of people, but there was one thing he had all wrong: His mindset.
While he had several flaws in his thinking – none of which I dared point out because of his hot temper – his most devasting problem was his expectation that a brand new fledgling business should be earning him 6 or 7 figures within the first couple of months.
This guy would do everything right, start a business with a real product targeted to a niche that wanted it and still fail because he would give up and pack it all in at the first obstacle.
“Crap! I sent out 3 emails and no one on my brand new list of 25 people bought the $300 product. This doesn’t work! Time to try something totally different…”
Every couple of months I would check in with him to see what his latest business was and what happened to it. And while it was entertaining for me, it was an unsolvable problem for him because until he got his thinking straight, he was never going to succeed.
Contrast him with a gal I met the other day name Kathy. She is indeed earning over $100,000 a month now precisely because she never expected to do it overnight.
Instead, she started out with the simple goal of earning just $1 per day, every day.
She began by building micro streams of income online. Her first month she wanted to earn that $1 per day, and at month’s end she’d surpassed that goal with an income of $52.
“Just $52 for a month’s effort? Obviously, her business wasn’t working, right?”
We’re fed a load of hype that says we’re going to earn a million dollars in no time at all. But the fact is, even those newly minted billionaires who sold their companies for 10 figures had to work day and night for years to build the companies into something someone wanted to buy.
If you’re not yet earning money online, I suggest you follow in Kathy’s footsteps:
Start with small income streams and build them one at a time.
Set small, attainable goals and then do everything in your power to reach those goals, such as $1 a day your first month.
Know that building an online stream of income can at first seem overwhelming. Take it one step at a time and be prepared to work at it because anything worth achieving is worth working towards.
Bring lots of value to the table. Kathy started out by creating great content that she monetized with Google Adsense. No, it won’t make you rich, but it’s a start.
Set a new goal every month for an amount higher than the previous month. Did you earn $50 this month? You might shoot for $100 next month and $300 the month after that.
Automate as much as possible. When you only have a limited amount of time and stamina, automation is your best friend.
Look for ways to expand your income on top of what you’re currently doing. For example, if you’re blogging, think about turning your posts into a published book and writing blogposts that promote affiliate products.
Celebrate the milestones. It’s too easy to continually focus on what you haven’t achieved yet and miss the fact that you’ve already come a long way. Write down your successes, big and small, and read over your success list often to give you confidence to keep going.
Know that you are enough. Right here and right now, you are everything you already need to be to achieve success online. You just have to get started and then keep moving forward.
There will come a time when you have the option to do absolutely nothing for a day, a week or even month and still earn a great deal of money because you’ve built the income streams. Picture this time and know this is why you’re working so hard now to make it come true.
A few more tips:
- Take breaks. Take a day off each week to do something completely different.
- Expect there will be setbacks. When they happen, learn from them and move on.
- Exercise each morning. Get outside. Change your environment.
- Get plenty of sleep. You are at your sharpest when well rested.
- Enjoy the process. Take notes of what you do so that one day you can write your book about how you went from broke to multi-millionaire status.
And my favorite tip for doing anything: Find ways to turn ‘work’ into ‘play’ and you’ll never work again.