I suspect that 99.9% of people who star out on an online career haven’t created a business plan. Ask yourself if you want a hobby or a business, if the answer is a business then it’s time to get serious. Include your personal strengths in your business plan and aim to focus on these initially. If you find you lack certain basic skills then use the first few months as an apprenticeship and learn the skills you need.

2. Don’t the believe the hype

It’s a successful Internet marketer’s job to make you believe what you read in their sales letters. Having read the sales letters or email you’ll be certain that you need whatever product they are promoting this week to be successful. STOP! You don’t. There is no replacement for hard work. Learning how to do things yourself without relying on some tool will be the best long term investment you can make.

3. You fail to control your spending

I’ve met lots of people who have spent thousands of dollars on tools and e-books and have yet to make any money. It’s simple economics if you spend $1 you need to make $1 to break even. Before you invest in anything visit forums and see whats working for the members. Ask questions and test their methods yourself, if they make you a profit then consider investing the profit into tools that will help increase your income.

4. Lack of Focus

Earning money online takes time, if it was easy everyone would be doing it and then who would deliver your mail and work in your local stores? Most people tend to forget this and if they don’t earn money in a few weeks they convince themselves that the methods don’t work and try something else. The methods do work but they take time and you need to learn all the skills required before you can master them.

5. You know it all already

Technology and the Internet are changing at an ever increasing pace. 18 months ago Blog and Ping was the best way to get your site indexed and ranking in the search engines then almost overnight social bookmarking and RSS feeds took over. You need to keep an eye on upcoming trends and ways of marketing. I’ve had well known marketers email me recently telling me that Hubpages or Twitter was the next big think in marketing…sorry guys I’ve been using them and writing about them for the last 9 months.

If you feel that you are making a few of these mistakes then take time out to look at what you are doing wrong and what you can do to change things. A few hours spend on analyzing your plans or you current business now can result in a much larger income later on.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under Make Money Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.