Archive for November, 2007

Do you have a business model?

What, you just jumped into the internet business without a business model? Then what happened? Running all types of internet business but still struggling?

I think I know the answer… you had wasted a lot of your time online and the bad part is most of your 9 to 5 income goes down the drain with the so called ‘internet business’.

You’re not making the money you had expected. You are frustrated and feel betrayed by all the good promises you read about earning a lots of money online. Oh boy… what when wrong?

At this juncture there will be two types of personality. The first is the person who will lost all hope in making money online and gave up. The second is the person who is not easily deterred to go forward and take another try and…

…which type of person do you belong to? I just hope that you’re of the second type who never ever give up.

Yes never give up, but first you must put everything it is perspective. You must have the passion on what you’re doing. You must make it clear and be truthful to yourself – are you’re doing online business for fun or profit? Going for both? Really.?? But can you have fun if you failed? So it’s fun only if you’re making a lot of profits but it’s HELL and no fun altogether if you’re slapped with credit card debt from your online business.

Again, if only you’re the kind of person that never gives up easily sooner or later you’ll be making the money you has been dreaming all the while. It’s not difficult to make money online – just copy any proven method that has been used by other succesesful marketers, it’ will work. But, first you must decide which business model you want adopt.

There are a lot of online business models, all you need is to choose one or two which is of your passion and you feel that you will be really enjoy working on it. As an example, doing business on ebay.com is totally different a model if compared to running a membership site, and running a one time firesale promotion is different from making money from adsense sites.

You must know the differences among these business models that are available and choose one or two which you love most. I bet that you cannot do all at once. It’s better to concentrate on one business model and make a lot of money from it rather than trying to go all round but not making enough profit to pay your bills…(LOL… that’s me.. ha ha ha…).

Ok, now let’s see the types of model that you can adopt to make money online. The models that I can think of right now,

  1. Selling digital product on your own site ( can be your own products or other people products).
  2. Selling digital products or tangible products on auction sites such as ebay.com.
  3. Affiliate marketing – promotes other people products and earn commission
  4. Run sites/blogs with paid advertisement such as adsense, adbrites, textads, etc.
  5. Run directories and charge listing fees.
  6. Run classified ads sites (check my site)
  7. Create paid membership sites (check my site – free to join)
  8. Offer your service – writing articles, creating graphics or websites
  9. Selling leads from your sites.

You get the idea? Ok, for now why not sit back and think it over. You must ‘study and calculate’ the pro and cons – the time, money and effort that you’ll be putting in – including the learning curve which is time consuming.

Hey, it’s better to study the model now rather than to be jumping in and out of different models later and waste a lot of you hard earned money and time (this is my bad experience… anyway it’s a good living example for you).

It doesn’t matter if the model you chose is not the same with someone who is successful that you had just read. Go and find success stories on the model that you chose to keep you exited and moving… with passion.

I hope you got my message, choose your business model wisely and read materials which are related to the model that you chose. Avoid reading too much about other models at the same time since this will distract your concentration and thinking on the model that you had adopted or plan to adopt. Remember the first posting of information overload?

Ok for now, and my next article for newbies will be on setting your objectives and in the mean time choose your business model that you love to do.

Do you have the right mindset?

Often I took this advice lightly until the ignorance became a habit not to get the right mindset in place before performing any task or assignment. By right mindset here I mean that I just do things simply to get it done quickly before moving to another task.

I don’t know what you think about this, but after going through years getting things done like this I finally found out that the results of my job performance is just above average or 60% to 75% if I put it in numbers.

Not only my yearly job performance is just above average it’s even worst with my part-time online business. Although I got a lot of resources at hand and do a lot of reading on IM but my sales still couldn’t pay my internet bills.

More than a year back I got 5 websites running and selling different items and packages but sadly the traffic just passed with only a few conversions. When the hosting period expired I have to abandoned 4 of these sites. The sales was not enough to cover the hosting fees. I failed to make any profit online.

This makes me feel like a ‘fool’. I said to myself, ‘how come other people are making money online everyday but I’m not? Hey something is not right here. If other people are laughing to the bank while I’m still struggling to make a few sales then something is definately wrong somewhere’.

I decided to take a break from this so called part-time business. But, as you know it’s difficult to dissociate myself with my PC. Somehow or rather I’ve been ‘addicted’ to my PC and internet.

Luckily during this time my internet connection has to be disconnected since I have to move to my new house that I’ve just bought. My house is located in a new housing area which has no physical access to the internet.

Do you know how I feel without internet connection? Yeah… its a lot of BLUES kind of feeling, so much blues. But after much thought I think this is a blessing in disguise.

During those blue period I kept sifting through my harddisk finding some magic formula. God must have granted my prayer. I accidentally click to an old folder which was embedded beneath another 2 folders.

Huh… and old pdf report … date?… no date but I think it was published before year 2003. I glanced the report quickly but then my eyes spotted this sentence, “Thought (or lack of thought) leads to action (or inaction) which always leads to results.” Something just strike my mind, “ahaa… lack of thought leads to bad results”.

Oh my God, I had been putting up websites in hope of generating extra income too quickly without giving a thorough thinking and good planning. Thats why the sites were not getting the sales as expected.

Now I realised that without the right mindset at that time I failed to give a good thought for the project without realising the consequences. I just went forward and built those sites ‘just to get things done‘. Sighh…now I realised that just to get things done without a clear thought and plan is a suicide!

Hey, I’ve to start all over again and yes I’m back to a newbie on IM (but an old newbie, LOL!).

For you newbies out there, before getting on IM it’s always a good to start to have the right mindset first then followed by your action planning and objectives.

Guaranteed Success Thinking

To understand further on how you can get into the right mindset, please feel free to download and read the free report by clicking here

Thanks to Jim Edwards for the nice and inspiring report.

Note: Jim Edwards is a very successful IM and he has put a complete step-by-step guide on how to make a living online. You can read the FREE 5-page guide by clicking here.