Focus - Your Key To Online Business Success
Posted by Andy Williamson on June 11, 2007
Filed Under Your Online Business Entrepreneurship Planning Your Business
When I first decided that I’d had more than enough of my job and all that it entailed, I started to look at every possible option and opportunity available from a sandwich bar franchise to unworkable MLM schemes, eventually I decided that the only way to get what I really wanted i.e., a job where I could work from home and a life where I could live anywhere I wanted to, was by using the Internet - and that’s where the decision making process really went into extreme overdrive and the chances of me settling on any one single business idea seemed remote.
If you’re anything like I was when I first started out, in order to move to sustainable profit as quickly as possible you’ll need to be very careful about the incredible amount of noise on the Internet that sets out to capture your attention and consequently takes your focus away from your business. At best you’ll lose a few hours work, at worst the distraction will keep you in a state of perpetual indecisiveness unable to commit long enough to anything for it to work.
One thing that I never really appreciated when I first started working from home was just how much extra discipline it requires - or to put it another way, how much easier it is to allow yourself to be distracted. On top of this new found home based freedom to be distracted, you have the Internet with all its charm and temptation to just click around for a while. It’s so easy to just follow a couple of links on the web and hey, 2 hours have gone and no work has been done! Worse still, you’ve just read about another great way to make money on-line and you’re about to rewrite your business plan for the 4th time this week and it’s only Monday!
Basically you have to start to become immune to the incredible ‘listen to me’ type noise on the Internet - everyone will be telling you that they know the only real way to make money on the Internet - and when you’re starting out this can prove to be a real distraction.
Yet while all this is going on if there ever was a secret to making money on-line it’s this:-
“Don’t allow yourself to get distracted, keep yourself focused on producing one great website focused on a niche or topic that you love and enjoy”
With that single secret firmly in mind your site will start to climb above the others - forget the people who you read about trying to manage 100 sites, don’t feel threatened by them, relax because they can only give their sites 100th of the time that you can give your site.
Another thing to always keep in mind is that website visitors do know quality from junk especially if it’s related to something that they too are very passionate about. If your site is full of junky articles written by someone who was more interested in gaining a back link from an article directory or plugging a product, then you’ll lose your visitor quickly enough. By keeping focused on producing the best sites in your niche and by extending your personality into the site via your own unique content, you’ll keep your visitors - they’ll keep returning as they grow to love your unique take and style. From there you can build a community and with this in place you have the foundations of a very real and sustainable long term business venture.
I actually got a lucky break in terms of gaining focus in that we found a JV partner before we had a website. It was one of those strange occurrences, we had just started a website that we paid a lot of money for - a so called “Turnkey Website” where the ‘n’ is a mistake as it was far more Turkey than Turnkey! Anyway the guy we bought the site from (who had now left the country) told us to get back links so we were writing to anyone and everyone asking for links when along the way we spoke to a really nice guy who said ‘if you build a site for me I’ll split the profit on our product’ - at this point our expensive Turkey was going gaga so we had nothing to loose.
With my back against the wall I worked together with Rhiannon day and night building an on-line publication that had no option other than to make it - I could let myself down but I’d promised our JV partner it would work so work it jolly well had to! That’s when it finally dawned on me that the only reason I hadn’t managed to make it on-line before wasn’t because I was using the wrong method or technique, it was because I never maintained my focus - as soon as I fixed on one single objective things began to happen, and happen very quickly.
After that we both went on to create more publications using the same techniques of maintaining focus and not allowing any distractions to interfere or to force us to move the goal posts.
If you’re starting out you’ll need to buy yourself an A4 planner - in there you need to clearly identify what it is that your doing. Jot down your objectives for each and every day and don’t ever allow yourself to be distracted until you’ve completed those tasks.
Start your planner with your key objective and always keep that single goal in mind.
For example “I’m going to build the best on-line publication about restoring vintage Corvettes” - now keep with that theme, live it, sleep it, dream it. As the site develops so will profit streams - for example you could produce a commercial eBook that gives expert advice on restoration techniques, or maybe using new media technology you could produce a video based workshop. Alternatively you could act as a expert for sourcing specialist parts - the list of potential profit streams will go on and on.
You may never once feel any need to jump onto the latest on-line money making trend because you’ll probably be flat out producing new training manuals and videos, going to shows and promoting your site, books and training courses, setting up long term profitable JVs with a specialist spares and tool suppliers and most importantly, producing a top quality publication that Corvette owners love, while at the same time building up a reputation as a helpful and true expert in your field…
This same highly focused formula works for anything, no matter what the topic people aren’t searching on Google for keywords, they’re searching on Google for quality - they want help, assistance and useful information and if you make it your goal to supply that information in a manner that beats all of the competition you’ll get that all-important reader loyalty. This type of loyalty is exactly what makes an average business into an extraordinary business, the only way you’ll make this happen is by maintaining your focus and not allowing yourself to be pulled in different directions by the millions of screaming sales and marketing voices on the internet.
