Internet Entrepreneurship – The Upsides and the Downsides

So, you want to be an Internet Entrepreneur, but you don’t know where to start? Well, over the next few posts, I’ll give you a detailed incite to the steps that you need to take to set yourself up as the digital industrialist that you aim to be! We’ll start with the Up’s and the main reasons why becoming an Internet Businessperson is an excellent idea.

Open 24 Hours a day

Your place of business is a website. It has no closing hours, therefore leaving you open for business all day, everyday. Now that doesn’t mean YOU work all day, everyday, No – you choose the hours you work, when you want to work! Not only that, but you needn’t even be there the majority of the time, if your running a blog stlye site, which has user fed content, all you need do is verify user’s posts and back to relaxing you go!

Less Stress

You are self-employed and you do things how you want, when you want. You are your own boss, why should you set yourself stressful time limits, which you will struggle to meet? Why shouldn’t you stay up and watch another episode? Running your own online business gives you more free time to enjoy yourself, rather than ripping your hair out for your under-working, overpaid boss!

You’re running an online business – Not a shop

Free yourself! I myself run my main income generating business through the web. I get very bored, very quickly if I’m in the same place for too long. I get up late in the morning, pack my laptop into my bag and go off to my girlfriend’s café for a fry-up. I’ll usually spend until dinner in there. Whilst I’m in the cafe, I’ll reply to all my emails, check up on my clients and make updates on my sites. Then I tend to move on to the park, or to the local Starbucks. If I’ve had enough, I pack up, go home and put on the PS3. Now, that beats any day locked down in the office, right?

Fixed costs = Super low

Your running a website that’s generating you £3000 per month. Not bad, you supply all the content yourself, you have no staff and you currently manage without a problem. You don’t own a shop, therefore no rent. No staff equals no wages and finally you don’t need to travel around, so you have no transportation costs. The only costs you do have are a server and domain name charge, and that’s providing you use a paid server. You can decrease costs further by using free servers like www.110mb.com - it’s advert free and super fast!

It’s all good dreaming of an Internet business portfolio that’s self auto-mated, fetching hundreds of thousands of people and earning you thousands of pounds (or dollars) every month, but it does not happen over night. You don’t suddenly power up a money making machine and let it loose. It takes work and lots of it. I spent the best part of four years, working my ass off for nothing before I eventually started gaining worthwhile revenue. Once I’d hit the mark, every month I needed to input less and less work to each of my sites, while they earned more and more money. It didn’t come easy, and I had many weeks sleep deprived – but I put the effort in, and now I reap the rewards. Now for the Down’s, but the first piece of advice is– take it in your stride!

Starting from scratch

You have your idea, you have built your site and your ready to launch, but how does your potential market even know you exist? They don’t, you basically have two choices. You can either start from scratch and launch your own promotions; freebie downloads and links in forums for example, and gradually build your business’s image up through word of mouth. Your other choice is advertising. Advertising on the Internet is expensive and may not bring the potential users you want. For your first online business, dropping yourself in £1000 debt is not the brightest of ideas.

Round the clock work

Lets again presume your running a blog style site. Now, you want the site to be user content fed, but you cant’ just expect users to turn up and turn your site around for you! For the first six months of your site being up, you need to have a constant stream of posts to give users a reason to come back, without customers having something to do/look at/read, they are not going to stay and they are definitely not going to return. You want your site to stick in their mind so they come back and return with your word spread. Eventually your word will spread and you’re off an running.

Speed

If you spot a gap in the market, the chances are your not the only one to have spotted it. Working on your own with little money for staff, you have to do everything yourself. In the shortest period possible, you have to build a reliable, user friendly site, feed its content and launch a successful advertising campaign without someone doing the same, but better. This is a very heavy workload and is the main killer in people scrapping their ideas and going back to the day job. Browse WordPress and you will find many, many incomplete business ventures that have been given up on.

Qualifications

You have a brilliant idea, if it goes ahead it is sure to bring you certain wealth! It’s a website…you don’t know how to build a website? So you tell your idea to a freelancing web designer, who you met by posting an job advertisement online. You tell him/her your idea so they can design it, you give them every little working detail and then you never hear from him again. Suddenly, two months later, your idea is on the world wide web making a hell of a lot of money, but not for you, for the freelancer you blabbed to. This is a very popular scenario, mainly because people are too impatient and they won’t spend the time to take a two week long course on the basics of HTML at night school. If you don’t know coding, don’t get a freelancer, take a course and set up yourself. It will be much more beneficial.

Determination

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again”. You might of spent the past month or two of your life, slaving away at your computer to build yourself the ultimate website which you will use as the start of your business empire. You launch and it doesn’t succeed. Don’t give up! Do you think Sir Richard Branson gave up when he was in £10,000 debt? Or when every magazine he was supposed to sell as his first business venture was stolen, after getting the magazines on loan from the printer? No. He took it on the chin and carried on, kept fighting and it looks as though it paid off. The harder you work, the luckier you get.

It’s a very mixed playing board, but all-in-all its worth it, believe me. If I told you there were no initial downsides, I’d be lying, but now at least you can prepare yourself. Now you know the basic ups and downs of Internet entrepreneurship. Next time we will look at starting up your business and I’ll give you a basic guide to follow to help ensure success.

Example sites:

Examples of a site still being developed, having all the content and development done by one person (round the clock work, hardship and effort):

I would love to hear your thoughts. Anything you tried and failed? Have you started a great, money making site? Let us know!

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