Small Internet Business

Advice On Starting A Business From The eWomenNetwork Radio Show

We heard some great advice while driving home one Sunday from a weekend road trip for anyone who wants to start a business. It’s easily adaptable to people who want to start an internet business so I thought it was worth sharing here. One of the guests on the eWomenNetwork weekly radio show built her business around teaching entrepreneurship. She encourages people to start a business part-time and said two interesting things.

Start By Thinking Small

The first thing she tells people is to start doing something to make $500 per month. Why should I worry about making $500 per month when I want $4000 per month? As she said, if you can’t make $500 then you can’t make $1000. If you can’t make $1000 then you can’t make $4000. Do something to make some money, leverage what you earn and what you learn, and use that to make even more money. Keep doing that and eventually you’ll reach your goals.

I see people forget this when they talk about a small internet business all of the time. It’s pretty common to see a member of a webmaster forum who joined six months ago talk about wanting to make a full-time income online and make 200+ posts, but not have a single website yet.

Forget about quitting your day job for a minute. Think of 10 ways you could make money with an internet business, take action on the best 2 or 3 of them, and start making a $1 per day. Just a measly $1. Once you do that you’ll see that it’s possible, learn more about how things work online, and have an income producing asset. Then you can make $2 per day and $10 per day and more. It’s overwhelming if you start with an unreasonable amount out of the gate.

Use Your Existing Skills

The second thing she said was don’t start by trying to learn an entirely new set of skills. If you’ve got a job then you’ve got some skills that people will pay money for now. Adapt those to making money from a business. When you do that you’ll need to learn additional business skills, like sales and marketing, but you won’t need to learn the whole kit and kaboodle. Even if you don’t like your job there are probably aspects of it or skills you’ve mastered that you enjoy somewhat. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t be doing that kind of work in the first place.

How often do new webmasters ask about finding the hottest niches? Anyone interested in an area (or paid to work in an area) understands it in ways the outsiders just don’t. You already know some of the problems people in certain industries face and their concerns. What you should figure out is where there’s already a market need in your circle of competence. How you can apply your current skill set and interests to making money online?

Mystery Guru

Unfortunately, the archive for that particular show isn’t available online. I don’t remember the guest’s name so I can’t give you her website either. I’ll edit this post if I find out the name of that mystery small business guru but hopefully you got the gist of it.

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Loves listening to helpful podcasts and radio shows.