Why You Aren’t Making Money Online
December 1st, 2006 | by Scott Weaver |It’s not because you’re stupid, stop thinking that right now. You’re good enough, you’re smart enough and, well, you know the rest. Despite the hype, not a lot of people are making a significant amount of money on the internet. When I say significant, I mean more than $25/mo (something that could pay one of your bills each month). What’s stopping them? It could be a lack of technical knowledge, a fear of failure, a fear of success (believe it or not), lack of personal discipline and focus, doing a lot of what doesn’t work or not doing enough of what does work and finally, a lack of ideas.
I’ve had my fair share of successes and failures when it comes to making money from my internet ventures, so I know what it’s like to experience each of the above difficulties.
A Lack of Technical Knowledge
You can have all the ambition in the world to make money from the internet, but unless you possess the right technical knowledge or at least know how to employ someone who does, you aren’t going to get far.
Would you go to war without some kind of military training? Would you venture out into the ocean alone without knowing how to sail a ship? Would you jump out of an airplane without a parachute?
If you answered no to all of the above questions, then we’re onto something. If you don’t have the tools necessary to succeed, how will you ever be successful? The point is, if you don’t know about something, either hire someone to do it for you or learn about it. Whenever there’s something I don’t know about, I either ask someone who’s an expert or I find a great source of information on the subject and figure it out.
For instance, when I wanted to learn about programming PHP, the first thing I did was a Google search on the subject. Guess what I found? PHP.net! It’s a whole online library of functions, tutorials and a whole bunch of other neat stuff that would bore anyone who wasn’t interested but I was learning.
Then there was the time when I wanted to learn about this whole blogging thing. Sure, I’d created a small community of bloggers before (though I didn’t realize it then) when I created Sitdiary back in 2000. So what did I do? I Googled it! Up came the article on Wikipedia and I kept researching until I could create my own blog using Blogger, and later on, WordPress.
The point is that I needed to know, so I submersed myself. If there were other things I needed to learn about in order to figure out the objective, I would learn about those too. Usually, learning happens that way– it’s a tree. In order to climb to the top, you have to use the branches. The only reason I wouldn’t submerse myself would be a fear of something. If I’m afraid to do my best to learn about a subject, I’m most likely either lazy or afraid to fail, which brings me to my next topic.
Fear of Failure
How many times would we be successful if we weren’t afraid of failure? How many times have you not done something because you were afraid to fail? In both cases, probably more than you can remember. This happens to even the best of us and it’s sad because it keeps us from what we want in life.
It happens in anything, from public speaking to not starting your own business. You don’t want to speak in front of people because you’re afraid you might mess up or make an idiot of yourself or you don’t want to start a business because most businesses fail within the first six years. These aren’t uncommon fears and you shouldn’t feel ashamed if you have them. In fact, fear is a wonderful tool in the right environment. Yet when it comes to being successful and making money, being afraid should not be a factor.
The deciding factor in success is knowledge and acting upon it. You remember what GI Joe says, right? “Knowing is half the battle!” Well, the toy soldier is wiser than you think. Typically, we fear what we do not understand. Solution? Go read the first section again and get back to me! Just kidding. But really, the lack of knowledge is what keeps us in the dark about making those crispy greens on the web.
In order to get rid your fear, you must drench it in research and trial. I say trial because you should never be afraid of failure; you should always be willing to try. No great successes ever came without failure. Benjamin Franklin was quoted saying “Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.” No matter what, keep trying and keep reaching out. That which you do not understand, research abundantly. If you do not understand blogging, go research it or find an expert and barrage him/her with questions. The same goes for anything related– how Google Adsense works, what an RPC service can do for your blog, what RSS feeds are and how they can help, how to invest in stocks online, how to sell stuff on eBay or even how to get more traffic to your website. Research, research, research!
Anything you do not know, most likely someone else will and that will help you to conquer your fear of failure. Now, if you have a fear of success blocking your path, that’s another story.
Fear of Success
This fear comes from not knowing how to handle success. It could be something like your new web service actually getting a lot of users and you think you didn’t build the product to handle enough users so you never launch it or you don’t advertise it enough, so your money never rolls in. Or perhaps you’re afraid to launch your business into the real world because you don’t want to take all the responsibility on that comes with succeeding.
Nonsense! Anything worthwhile comes with some kind of responsibility. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to learn to deal with responsibilities, big or small. So what if your company gets big and you have to start hiring people? Haven’t you learned anything yet? Go talk to someone who has run a company. Most likely, they’ll have some suggested reading for you.
“What’s that you say? Reading?” Yes- you don’t know how to do something, someone has written a book on it. Use your local bookstore to your advantage or if it’s not there, try amazon.com. If you want to learn about how to be a boss, there’s a book for that. Perhaps you want to start trading stock online? There’s a book for that. You want to start a blogger that rakes in ad revenue? Guess what! Anything you can think of, unless it’s something spectacular and new, someone has done it and wanted to share their advice on the subject. And if it’s spectacular and new, find out how to do it and do it. Then you can be the one to write a book and make a grip of money from it. Hell, write an e-book and sell it on clickbank!
Fear of success should never hold you back, as you can always overcome it with knowledge, just like your fear of failure.
Lack of Discipline & Focus
Now this is a big killer of success. It is usually the result of too many ideas taking up the valuable time you could be spending on the ideas that actually work. If you’re like me, you’re always thinking and scheming. You think “oh, I could do this and that” and “wow, I could do that.” Without the proper discipline, you will probably try most things you think about and that leads to what I like to call an idea coma. Essentially, you’ve created so many projects for yourself that nothing ever gets completed or sees an end.
For some people, this is no big deal and they can handle multiple projects at once, but for most people this is just sheer stupidity. At one point, my brother-in-law noticed I had a lot of projects going on and I would dedicate time to each in spurts, never finishing any particular one and he said something subtle but I will never forget it:
“Focus, grasshopper.”
Suddenly, something clicked inside me and I knew I had been failing to focus my attention on one thing at a time. If you find yourself in the same predicament, the key is to prioritize. You should ask yourself “what is most crucial at this point in time and what can be put on the back burner?” Then, you create a list ordered from most important to least important and you work in that order, finishing everything from the top to the bottom. Trust me, this will give you a sense of accomplishment that you have never experienced and things will actually get done.
It’s also helped me to build out a task list for each priority. If I need to finish a website and it’s my number one priority, I will write out a list of tasks I need to complete in order to finish the project. Now you can establish your own method for completing yours, but my most successful method is placing the most difficult tasks at the top of the list and the least difficult at the bottom. This way, your work becomes a downhill slope and all of your precious energy will be most spent on the most difficult problems.
Doing a lot of What Doesn’t Work or Not Doing Enough of What Does Work
If you’ve never just sat down and thought about everything you’re doing to generate income, you should. I recommend that you figure out what is making you money and what is costing you money. You will be surprised at how this really puts things into perspective for you. Once you actually figure out what costs you money, the solution is to stop doing that. Conversely, once you’ve figured out what generates you income, do more of whatever generates it! It’s really a no-brainer, but I bet it hasn’t even crossed most people’s minds. This can apply to anything you’re doing with your life, of course, but we’re talking about making money online.
An example of how this worked for me had to do directly with my websites. Once I sat down and wrote out how much each one was making me or costing me, and I realistically figured out the direction each one was going, I was able to figure out which websites to completely delete and which websites I should continue to focus income generating strategies on. It was sheer genius!
Now each of these websites is generating a significant income, mostly from ad revenue generated from Google Adsense.
Lack of Ideas
This is actually a very legitimate reason as to why some of you might not be making any money on the internet, so to help you out, I’ve come up with a list of ways you can do just that:
- Blogging for Profit - Start up a weblog, put ads on it and generate quality content for your readers.
- Write An E-Book - Do you have information you could sell to other people? Sell your e-book using ClickBank.
- Sell Stuff on eBay - Have a bunch of stuff laying around you want to get rid of? Got a great connection to a cheap supplier of products? Start auctioning your stuff off!
- INGDirect & HSBC & PayPal - Start up an online savings account and earn high interest on your money. (PayPal pays the most, currently.)
- Read Emails for cash - There’s a plethora of websites that will pay you to read e-mails they send you.
- Browse websites for cash - Much like reading e-mails, there are tons of ’surf for cash’ websites out there.
- myLot - This website pays you to start discussions and comment on other people’s discussions.
- Sell Pixels - Learn from the guy who made milliondollarhomepage.com, and sell 100 pixels at a time!
I will post more ideas as they come to me, or as you give me more, but for now..
Research that which you do not know. Remove your fear of making mistakes. Focus. Monetize.
