How do you spell success?

Starting a business on the internet is definitely exciting. Email after email are flooding your inbox with promises of a dream house on a golf course, and most of your time spent with a laptop at a quiet cove on your favorite coastline. The figures they quote to you are so big they border on indecent. $10,000 a month in 90 days, they say. Your mind fills with images of long numbers in your bank book, high rise apartments with your name on them, the car of your dreams, and your children graduating from the most prestigious schools. Best of all, you allow yourself to imagine saying that one thing you’ve always wanted to tell your boss. “I quit!”

The hard cold facts aren’t quite so glamorous. A few lucky people actually do achieve the lifestyle of their dreams, but far more fall by the wayside, muttering about how internet businesses are all scams, and bemoaning the alarming amounts of money they lost trying.

The statistics are bleak. 95% of the people who start with such glowing hopes don’t ever see a profit at all, let alone change their lifestyle. Of the few who remain, only a small percentage achieves what we would call financial freedom or success.

The amazing thing is that these statistics haven’t stopped you from getting started. You are sure that if you study hard and proceed carefully, you will be one of the lucky few.

You know what? You’re probably right! The fact that you are reading this article already shows that you have advanced beyond at least 50% of home business starters, and the formula for success you will learn in the next few lines will equip you to make it through all the obstacles and pitfalls along the way to success. Notice I said “equip,” not “guarantee.” I can’t know what you will do with this information, but I do know that if you understand it, put this spelling for success up on your wall near your computer, and ask yourself which area you are weakest in each day, you will succeed. That’s a promise.

So how do you spell success? Simple. Here’s the answer.

S - Specific Goals

U - Unquenchable Enthusiasm

C - Clear Vision

C - Consistent Effort

E - Enduring Discipline

S - Specific Knowledge

S - Steady Action


Specific Goals

This is the single most important factor in your new business. Where do you want to be 5 years from now? How about one year, six months, or 90 days? How much money do you want to be making? What kind of daily routine do you want to have? Where will your business be? The more specific your goals are, the more attainable they will be.

This is so important, that there are courses and seminars all over the world on goals training. Good goals result in success. No goals results in failure. The very first step in your home business should be to take time to study and implement some goals training courses such as Simpleology or Jim Rohn’s goals training course.

Unquenchable Enthusiasm

You will be working at home in front of a computer screen. Who will know whether you drag yourself despondently to the computer and bang away at the keyboard with tears streaming down your face, or whether you happily hop to your desk and bubble happy songs as you type? The results will be the same, right? Wrong. Whether you see the glass as half empty or half full will make all the difference in the actions you take.

There will be many disappointments along the way. Plan to spend at least ten minutes a day reading something that inspires you. Start with “As a Man Thinketh.” It’s easy to find on the internet. Download it for free, print it out, and set it by your bed.

Clear Vision

What will your life be like a few years from now? Can you see it in your mind’s eye? Why did you decide to start working from home? Did you want to buy something? Get a picture of it, and put it up where you will see it often. Did you want to spend time with your family? Put up a picture of them. Did you want to have more money for charity? Get some world vision pictures up there. If you can actually see what you are working for, the bumps and bruises just won’t seem so important.

Does this seem silly? Do some research. Almost all of the successful people have done some variation of this exercise before they actually achieved their goals.

Consistent Effort

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s surprisingly easy to think you are growing your business, when in reality you are just checking your email, chatting in forums, and organizing your desk. Make sure you take positive action to grow your business every day. It doesn’t have to be a big job. Small things add up, but if your business isn’t growing, then it’s losing ground, because like it or not, there will be a lot of competition out there.

Enduring Discipline

How are you going to spend your days? What level of exhausted is going to stop you from carrying out your plans? Most people who succeed have gone through some tough times.

Obviously, you can’t quit your day job until your home job bypasses it in profits. That means that the hardest part of your internet business will be done on weekends, and in the evening after work when you’re already tired out, used up, and otherwise unmotivated. And, contrary to the glowing testimonials you read on the sales pages and emails you seem to be bombarded with lately, it’s going to take at least a year or two before you begin to see a significant profit.

You’re going to need some serious commitment in order to get over the hard times. Just remember that the results are really very, very worth it. Not one person who decided to just try an internet business to see if it would work for them has made a profit. The ones who succeed tell themselves, “I’m going to make a success of this no matter how long it takes, or how hard it turns out to be. This business is going to succeed, or I am going to know the reason why.”

Sound extreme? Ask yourself the big “what if” question. “What if I don’t put in the effort and discipline required to succeed? What if I fail? Where will I be 10 years from now? What will my life be like?

Specific Knowledge

Believe me, you will learn more in your online business that you ever did or would have in college. Each aspect of the business is a separate science, and in order to succeed you will need to know them all.

Don’t try to learn it all at once. You will be a victim of information overload and find yourself unable to proceed. Don’t let a day go by without learning at least one new thing, though. Plan your study systematically, and tackle one thing at a time.

Steady Action

Did I mention that you needed to take action to grow your business each day? It’s so important it needs repeating. Don’t let a day go by without doing something, no matter how small to make your business grow. Just one phone call, one more ad or one more blog written will add up, and before you know it, you won’t be able to stop the forward motion.

This is something I can say with assurance. If you will write down your specific goals, fill your mind with enthusiasm, see clearly what you want to achieve, discipline yourself to work at it consistently, keep increasing your knowledge of the business and make sure you take action on a daily basis, you most definitely will see results. It will take some people a little longer than others, but you will definitely become one of the lucky few who achieve their dreams.

Can Ordinary People Really Make Money Online?

If you’ve been trying to make money on the internet for more than a few weeks, you’ve no doubt researched or tried a number of methods and schemes to make it happen. Each one claims that they have secrets no-one else on the internet has discovered, and if you join their program or buy their e-book, you will have the one single key to making millions online.

Many of these people are completely sincere. They really do believe there is one single key to success. Let me save you a world of trouble and grief up front. None of the methods you read about will work by itself, and if you try them all one by one, you’ll either go crazy or burn yourself out and end up blinded from staring at your computer screen with a permanent kink in your neck that the doctor claims is self-imposed whiplash. And you’ll only have made enough for your lunch money at best.

Are most of the courses and programs out there libelous scams, simply out to make a fortune off of your naiveté? No, most of them really did make a fortune for the person who made them, and for the happy smiling people you see with the glowing testimonials underneath. They won’t work for you, though, and here’s why.

Making money online is like a jigsaw puzzle, and once you find all the pieces and get them firmly in place, the money will literally roll in. The trouble is, it’s terribly hard to get anyone to tell you what those pieces are, and how they should fit together. Ask “guru” Richie Rich how to succeed and he will most likely tell you about the final piece of the puzzle that brought his business to a profit level. Richie is assuming that you already have the pieces that were easy for him to achieve, and you are simply missing the one that was a challenge for him.

Most people who make money online will tell you that the first few months or even years were essentially fruitless. That’s because it took them that long to figure out what all the puzzle pieces were and get them in place. Want to know what they are? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I think this may be the most accurate list of the puzzle pieces to internet wealth you will find. If you will simply work on each of these pieces in turn, you will save yourself a lot of grief and disappointment, and will eventually be sitting back and watching the money flow in just like the happy testimonial people.

1. A Positive Mindset

That’s right. How you see yourself living a year from now, and how much you believe that it can really happen has a huge impact on your chances for success. If you have specific goals, a solid plan to make them happen and the faith that you can do it, you are more than halfway there. There is a lot of literature on this subject, but the single all time classic is “Think and Grow Rich.” Do a Google search, and download it for free.

2. A Product that is In Demand.

Deciding what to promote or which company to join is the hardest job you will do online. Many programs teach you to promote digital products to the internet marketing world. There is a lot of money flowing in this market, but there is also an enormous amount of competition. An e-book on how to make a salt water aquarium may be a lot easier to sell. Whatever you do, research both the claims of the company and any complaints against them as well.

3. A Webpage to Sell the Product and Capture Leads.

Yes, regardless of what some companies tell you, eventually you will need your own webpage. There are two basic reasons for this.

First, you need the names and e-mail addresses of a large group of people who trust you and are willing to buy from you. You can get this list by having a form on your page for people to sign up.

Second, it is a proven fact that people hardly ever buy something the first time they find out about it. If they read about a product or service on your page, and then click on a link to the actual product sales page, they will have been “pre-sold” on the product, and will be much more likely to buy.

If you don’t have experience making a webpage, there are a lot of companies out there that will give you a pre-made webpage that you can change little by little as you figure out how.

4. A List to E-Mail To

Imagine having a list of 3000 people who you know are interested in your product or service. All you have to do when you want to make some sales is send out one e-mail, and you’ll get 100 sales or so within the first few hours. This is how most of the really successful people continue to make money year after year.

5. A Backend Product to Sell to your Established Customers.

You need a second product to offer the people who have purchased something from you. Think about how much McDonalds makes every year simply by training their staff to say, “Would you like fries with that?”

6. An E-Mail Series Loaded Onto an Auto responder

A good auto responder will cost you between $10 and $20 a month. It will send your list a series of e-mails over a period of time. This way you can stay in personal contact with hundreds or even thousands of people at one time. They will hear about your product and gain useful information on a regular basis, and will be thinking about you when they are ready to buy.

7. Multiple Sources of Traffic.

Traffic is people who visit your webpage. If your webpage is set up with a form for people to join your list, a sales section to pre-sell people on your product, and a link to go buy the product, then the more people who visit your page, the more money you will make. You can get people to visit your page in a number of ways. Some of them cost money for advertising, and some of them are free.

Pay per click advertising, Traffic exchanges, classified ads, news releases, and article marketing and just a few methods to get traffic to your site.

There you have it. There are other puzzle pieces. Lots of them. But I think that if you have these seven pieces well established, you will start to make money, and will be able to incorporate other things at your leisure. Don’t let anyone tell you that any one of them is the key. You have to have all the pieces in place if you want to enjoy the whole picture.