On August 1, 2002, I sold my first item online. So I guess today is the 10 year anniversary of me making a living online. In this post, I want to talk about some of the most important lessons that I have learned about business and what I plan to do differently going forward.
Focus on Marketing and Sales
One of the most important lessons is that I need to focus on sales and marketing a lot more. Once you start getting some business and customers, it’s really easy to get caught up in day to day things.
Unfortunately, if you are focused on operations, it is hard to grow your business. Growth allows you to accumulate more resources that you can then invest into your business to help it thrive.
Diversify Marketing Channels
Most of my businesses started and grew on just one marketing channel, mainly Ebay for the first two years and mainly SEO for the rest of the time. Building a stronger and more diversified marketing base will be less risky and ensure the survival of my businesses.
SEO and social media marketing can be applied to all businesses, including local businesses, e-commerce, and lead generation businesses. Email marketing can help you keep in touch with your customer base.
Networking can help you form important connections in person. Paid advertising should also be consider if it produces a positive return. Also, affiliate marketing allows you to generate sales and you only have to pay when a sale is made.
There are many ways to diversify so that if one marketing channel fails, you’ll still be okay. I think to start, picking 3-5 channels to focus on is a good idea for any business.
Execution is the Most Important Thing
Someone did a study once on people who were financially successful and they all had one thing in common – speed of implementation. In other words, once they got an idea, they would execute on it right away.
One of the biggest things that hindered my progress was focusing too much on learning and not enough on execution. However, I’ve found that the most progress was made when I actually took action and tried something different.
Sometimes, in fact, I ended up doing things completely differently than what I learned. You actually learn a lot more by doing and trying things.
While learning is important and can shorten the learning curve, one of the things I plan on doing is restricting the time spent on learning and focusing on execution.
Focus, then Diversify
A very common problem with entrepreneurs is ADD. And as I learn more and see more opportunities, it becomes more of a problem. I have tons of partially finished projects that are just sitting there because I got distracted by other opportunities.
Although diversifying your income sources is a good idea, it’s a better idea to focus on just one until you get it going. In fact, most highly successful people are known for just one thing or one business.
I’ve found that even when it seems easy initially, getting a new income stream going usually turns out a lot harder than originally anticipated, i.e., it usually involves a lot more work. So from now on, I will try to get one good business going before trying out other things.
Embrace Change
Nothing in your life or business will change until you do something different. I’ve found that the easiest thing to do is to keep doing what you’ve been doing. But the best things happen when you try something different.
So going forward, I will make it a point to try something different with my businesses at least once every month. Trying different things should accelerate progress.
About Brian Liang