Million Dollar Portfolio

Treat your blog like a business.

That’s the headline I’ve seen countless times on other successful blogs and I hate to regurgitate but if you are serious at all about being a successful blogger, entrepreneur, online marketer or internet guru you need to consider that what you are doing is a business.

It’s not the traditional “brick and mortar” business like you see at your local strip-mall but it is nonetheless a business.

You’re going to have expenses, revenue, advertising budgets, possibly employees, perhaps even office space, equpment purchases and other overhead. These won’t amount to the same as traditional business but you will still have them.

At some point, assuming your blogging business becomes very successful you will add to this mix an accountant, a lawyer and a financial advisor which also means a few added expenses.

These last three are extremely important because without them your business is likely to fail. In fact, 9 out of 10 new businesses fail within the first year for various reasons. Either the owner loses interest, realizes he has nothing to say or runs out of capital. The latter should be the easiest problem to solve. The first two things are huge problems.

Failure Isn’t A Bad Thing

First of all, if you lose interest then you’ve started this whole venture with the wrong idea. I’m not talking about your actual idea, I’m talking about the fact that you are doing things for the wrong reasons. If I were to ask you why you do what you do, be it blogging, making cakes, selling widgets, whatever…If I asked why you did it and your answer is “to make money” I can tell you right now, you are going to fail. If your only passion is to make money, you are going to quit within the first year when you realize the thousands of dollars in cash you dreamed of isn’t flowing through your mailbox like water.

In order to be really successful at ANYTHING, not just blogging, you have to have a real passion for it. Think about what motivates you to get up in the morning. If you have a crappy job that only just barely pays your bills and you hate going to it every day, why do you keep doing it? Because you have bills to pay, mouths to feed, car payments, food, etc.

I don’t care. We all have that going on. We all have reasons to give up. Do you listen to those reasons or do you accept there are going to be obstacles and challenges along the way. Ask any successful person how they got to where they are and they will tell you they failed until they got it right. The truth is nobody can tell you definititively that what they did is going to work for you. You’ll have to find that out on your own.

That being said, there are steps you can take to limit the number of failures you are going to experience in your journey to success. If you treat the whole process as a business and understand the choices you make and the strategies you employ are meant to be long lasting business decisions you will likely find success before too many failures. Each failure should be treated as a learning experience and then move on, move forward.

I guarantee you there isn’t one person who is successful in their niche that can tell you they woke up one morning, had an epiphany, got some money and put it into action and instantly it worked. Not even the so-called “overnight millionaire” has that kind of luck. There’s always an enormous amount of work behind each successful venture even though it may appear as though they sprung up overnight. These people had failed first ideas, growing pains and other problems along the way but had a good support system in place to keep them going.

Spending Money To Make Money

It seems counter-intuitive but when it comes to marketing, you need to spend a little money in order to make money in the long run. A simple text link on an appropriate site that has thousands of readers may be all you need. That link may end up costing you some good money up front but if your content is worth anything to anybody that small investment could pay off big time in the long run.

I have several online businesses at varying degrees of success, at least what I consider success. The commonality in them all is the support system I have in place to keep me going. I know from month to month what is and isn’t working which allows me to know where to “trim the fat” so to speak. If an advertising program isn’t working and I’m spending more than I’m bringing in, changes have to be made. You don’t get rich by writing checks all the time, but you also don’t get rich if nobody knows who you are or what you do or sell.

Advertising has to be part of your spending budget. Organic traffic will drive a certain amount of revenue if people are finding what they are interested in on your site but there’s a reason companies like Coke and Pepsi are still in business after all these decades. Like it or not, advertising does work. Not all advertising is paid either. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful (and free) advertising methods around. These days it is called viral-marketing. In other words, “word of mouth” that spreads like a virus, nearly out of control. It can also shut down an improperly prepared web server.

So if you treat your blog or website like a business your chances of success are much higher than they would be otherwise. Take the time to research your niche and decide if it’s what you are really passionate about.  Understand that 90% of all new businesses fail in the first year and focus on not being one of those statistics. Lastly, expect to spend some money getting your name known and realize that you aren’t going to be successful if a) you quit and b) if you don’t accept that all good things take time.

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