If you are embarking on a journey to build an income or business online, you could be wondering what are some of the myths on this subject. In this blog, I will share with you the 3 biggest myths about building an online business.
MYTH 1: YOU CAN GET RICH QUICK ONLINE
I am very sure many of you seen sales pages and hear all the time about claims that if you do this and you do that, you’ll make $100,000 next month. You’ll make $10,000 tomorrow. You can do a $1 million launch in two weeks. We’ve all seen something along those lines, whether it’s more or less, but we’ve all seen something like that online.
While anyone can make money online and many do make regular income online, these practices have become the norm and the Federal Trade Commission has issued a guide governing endorsements and testimonials.
I think that it makes it real easy for us to get frustrated when we set up a web page or we set up a squeeze page and we get 15 subscribers and we maybe make one sale. Then we go a few days and nothing happens.
We get frustrated and sometimes we’re even following this plan that’s supposed to make us rich tomorrow.
The bottom line is that doesn’t happen. That’s hype. Perhaps you’ve been bitten by that hype before and that’s ok. This is a brand new year. Recognize that the hype doesn’t work and you have to build something solid.
The online business is no different from offline. It’s no different than opening up a cafe. If you open up a brand new cafe in your town, you’re not going to sell a million lattes in your second week, no matter how much publicity you get, no matter how good the lattes are.
Even if you were to do a huge number of coffee sales, you probably wouldn’t even be able to keep up with the business, so the natural way that you grow an offline business is you start by advertising some. People would come to the shop and some of them would like the coffee or cakes and they’d tell other people.
You’d run some specials and month after month you’d do more and more business. Frankly, the first few months with your cafe business you wouldn’t even break even. You wouldn’t sell enough coffee and cakes to pay all the bills.
Hopefully by the end of the year you’re in profit. Then the next year you make a nice profit.And that’s kind of how online business is.
You’re not going to get rich quick. There may be a 1 in a million shot that you’re going to just stumble on the perfect product with the perfect sales page at the perfect time and something big’s going to happen.
Unfortunately, even for those people, the 1 in a million shot that something like that possibly might happen, they tend to be one-shot wonders because they never learn the foundations of making something happen.
They never learned how to build a website, write a blog or drive traffic. They never learned how to create back-end products. They never learned how to build that business. So what happens is they have this one shot, they make $20,000 – $30,000 maybe the first month, and they’re never ever able to duplicate it.
MYTH 2: FREE TRAFFIC
You will get plenty of e books and training on this idea of FREE traffic. In fact, I fell for it and attended a seminar a couple months ago, several thousand dollars worth of a coaching program to teach you how to generate free traffic.
When I go through each one of those sources of ‘free traffic,’ none of them are really free. They all have a cost involved but the accountant was not present. Whether it is time and/or effort, it was not costed, regardless of whether there’s direct money involved on every kind of free traffic.
Article marketing – of course that’s what we do with blogging and writing – Let's never call it free traffic. It takes effort, time, creativity and skills to produce articles. I think everyone who puts in effort writing a blog will agree their time is effort is “sweat” and maybe not “blood,” but lots of love. Just because we do it out of love and passion. It may not cost you dollars to write the article, but it will definitely cost you time.
If it takes you half an hour to write the article and you’re worth $30/hour or $40/hour at we ever work you do, that article really cost you $15-20 to write. If you pay somebody $10-15 to write an article, if you pay somebody to submit it – whether you do it yourself or somebody else does it, it’s not free.
Sometimes you’ll hear that affiliate marketing is free traffic. Affiliate marketing is not free traffic. You’ve got to pay out ½ or 2/3 commissions. Sometimes on higher ticket items maybe you’re only going to pay out 1/3 of the product price. That’s not free traffic. You do not pay upfront but the cost is on the back end or success basis.
Back to the idea that it’s not free traffic. You’ve got to pay for it. Blog traffic is not free. You have to take the time to get in there and work the blog.
Web 2.0 is not free. You have to take the time or you have to pay somebody to do it. And time really is worth something. If you’re not full-time online and you’re working this thing part-time, maybe you’re spending 30 hours a week working it, there’s two ways you can do it.
You can work it for 30 hours a week and that’s your time you’re putting into it, or you can go to work somewhere at $20/hour, 30 hours a week, make $600/week on the side and then put that money into web traffic. It’s the same difference.
Whether it’s time or money, it’s not free traffic. I’m not going to beat a dead horse here, but there’s no such thing as a free ride or free traffic online.
Even myself, you might look at some of my traffic. You might say that some of my search engine traffic – and maybe 5% of all my traffic comes from just organic search – you might say that’s free traffic.
Well, actually it’s not free traffic because I wouldn’t get it if I hadn’t spent time and money having links posted and creating inbound links and writing articles to create that link traffic, so once again, even organic search engine traffic is not free traffic.
MYTH 3: ONLINE MARKETING IS EASY TO LEARN
While internet or online marketing is not rocket science, it is also not easy to learn. I know many who got into this gave up trying. It is important to recognize that this is a skill just like anything else. It’s a skill just like plumbing or electrical work or physics. It’s a skill. It’s not something you’re going to learn in 30 days.
Sure, I can teach you some specific skills in 30 days. I can teach you a number of specific skills in six months. There’s plenty of other people out there who can teach you how to do something specific.
But realistically you need to spend probably several hundred hours on any one thing online before you’re going to get good at it. If you’re working on this 30 hours a week and let’s just say the average is 200 hours to learn to get good at one thing, that’s an average of seven weeks for each thing you need to get good at.
Maybe your sticking point is your website. You need to learn how to publish a web page. For you to get to where you’re efficient, you’re going to need to spend some time.
Same thing with traffic. To get efficient at one thing you’re going to need to spend some time. It’s not going to happen overnight. Sure, you’re going to have some light bulbs that come on, but none of it’s going to happen over night.
Building a business is a journey and if you want to start an online business or just join a community of online business builders, read my blog review on Wealthy Affiliates.