Many new marketers tend to make the same mistakes and not prioritize what is most important in their business, which is making sales. The whole point of your business is to produce income, not just look pretty or be a fun hobby. You have to get past the grind first before anything else.
When people get started in marketing, home-based businesses, etc., they have trouble with having the right mindset to actually produce results. Like me, when I started out, many people tend to get too caught up in perfecting websites, blogs, learning everything, setting up capture pages, etc.
Instead what they should be doing is ONLY income producing activities all day long to produce sales. What if your life was on the line and you had to make one sale today?
What would you do? Would you go start a blog and write a post? Would you go make a video and put it on Youtube? Would you go customize a capture page all day? No, you wouldn't do any of those because they don't get sales on a short term basis.
Blogs take at least 90 days to start actually producing income. Videos don't tend to get enough traffic and rank for days, unless you just happen to be a master at making videos go viral.
Posting on social media is okay if you already have a big following. Otherwise, it won't get you quick sales and large followings take a while to develop.
The point here, is that people get too caught up wasting their time on doing nothing but long term strategies, instead of doing what gets results TODAY. If your life depended on it, you would be conducting business a much different way that gave you a fighting chance to produce income that same day.
Some Ways To Produce Income Very Quickly
Basically I can narrow this down to 2 main ways of getting quick results:
1. Paid Advertising
2. Talking To People
Paid advertising is the life blood of businesses. Do you think big companies like McDonald's or Geico make their money off of blogging, Youtube, videos, setting up team websites, social media, etc.? No not even close.
Paid advertising is by far the best way to get quick results overnight.
“The skill of turning paid advertising into profits, is one of the most important skills in the entrepreneurship world, especially for online businesses.”
Things like Facebook PPC, Bing PPC, Google Adwords, Solo Ads, Banner Ads, etc. are what get you those fast results. All you need is a way of collecting leads, like a capture page, and you need to go through a course or two on how to efficiently use paid advertising.
Then, start on a small scale running paid ad campaigns and when you start figuring out how to make it profitable, scale it up to make even more money.
But, what do you do if you don't have a budget for paid advertising yet? You talk to people.
I've seen countless millionaires made online just by going on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, finding people they think would be interested and striking up a conversation. If the people are interested in what you do, you close them and give them a chance to use what you offer or join your company.
Sure you can pose attractive things on social media like inspiring quotes, funny pictures, business tips, etc. and some people may ask you about what you do out of curiosity, but most of the time, you should be the one breaking the ice.
You need to figure out what your perfect prospect would be that would be looking for a business like yours, and then go on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to find them and strike up a conversation with them.
When people become interested, you need to have some other source of more information for them that would attract a sale like a live webinar, a video, a blog post or some kind of presentation that is informative, yet excites people in a way that motivates them to buy what you offer right away.
Once you figure out how many people it usually takes for you to talk to and get one sale, I recommend you start talking to that many people everyday. It's just part of the grind phase that you must go through until you've made your first $10,000 a month or so online.
Paid advertising and talking to the right people on social media should be your main focus, while blogging, videos, etc. should come secondary as a more long term solution to get free traffic.
Getting Past The Grind Phase
In many marketers' eyes, the grind phase is when new entrepreneurs have to work their butts off day and night to get to $10,000 per month and then the approach changes and scaling up becomes easy.
Making more money is easier than having no money and trying to make your first sales. That is why they call it the grind because you have to really put in the work to gain momentum in your business when you have nothing established yet.
Once you've hit your first $10,000, you can start really using paid advertising to your advantage. A general rule for business owners that want to keep their businesses growing, is to reinvest 20% of earnings back into their business to avoid hitting any plateaus.
In other words, you want to avoid being stuck at an income level. The point is to keep growing your income every month. Once you have gotten past that $10,000 per month phase you are able to start leveraging your income and time better.
You can outsource certain tasks you don't want to do. You can focus more on advertising and email followup instead of always trying to find interested people to talk to. You get to even leverage the story and your success, to attract people to want to join you because they see you as a leader.
Conclusion
It all gets easier after the grind phase and when you're past it, the life you were dreaming of when you started online really comes into play and you have more money and more time than ever.
The problem is…Most people aren't willing to work hard and get past the grinding that is part of starting out as an entrepreneur.
Even though having an internet business and grinding it out with that is much cheaper and easier than it would be owning a franchise, restaurant, etc., people just tend to not be motivated to work that hard.
It's either that, or they are motivated and do work very hard, just on the wrong things. You have to focus on what makes money NOW and build the long term solutions on the side.
Don't make the same mistakes I did when I started out online. I worked my butt off, learned the business, but didn't make much money because I spent all my time building websites, blog, capture pages, etc., instead of focusing on the short term income producing strategies.
You should be spending most of your work time throughout the day on income producing activities and not worry about the rest until you're past the grinding phase.
One question you should always be asking yourself when working on your business:
“Is what I'm doing going to give me a chance to make sales today?”
That question and approach to building your online business is what will get you past the grind phase in the next 90 days or less.