Got What It Takes?

An interesting question, I am sure you would agree. And I also hope that the stated question is very much thought-provoking. The reason I ask such a question, is because I personally see people starting dropship businesses, as well as other ecommerce businesses every single hour of the day, and the questions that come from prospective, and future owners of such businesses can be quite disturbing.

You see, we live in an age where everything is done for us. If you live in the UK, then apart from having your bum wiped (unless you have private medical care , then you are pampered hand over foot. We live in a so-called tolerant society, if you listen to the labour government anyway, which really means, ‘do what you can, mate, and if you cannot be bothered, we will take money from the rich and look after you anyway’..

Think about it. Most people are naturally lazy, and if one day they woke up to find half a million, in cold hard cash in their bank accounts, then it would be taken as gospel, that they would never lift an idle finger ever again. Fair enough, you might say.

BUT, what we are talking about here, is running a business – a real business; not some pie-in-the-sky Americanised, nonsensical dream, where you may get ‘lucky’. No, I am talking about the kind of ‘real’ business, where you actually have to get off your backside, and make things happen – otherwise you may find that you wake up one day, and society is making your life-decisions for you – and you don’t really want to be in that place!

Sacrifice..

Another question: Are you really prepared to sacrifice what is required, in order to secure your family’s future? To make sure, that once you reach retirement age, that you and your dependants and not reliant of the dire state our country is in, in order to simply live?

Please allow me to enter your ‘real’ conscious mind for a second, and actually ‘jolt’ your senses of reality.. Listen, we are on this earth ONE TIME ONLY. You do not get a second chance in this game. I call it a game, because that is exactly what it is -  a game of life. There are winners, and there are those that spend their days wondering what the hell just happened to the last 25 years of their life. A truly miserable existence for most.

You might say: “Hey, Steven, not everybody wants to be successful”. And I would say, “well what the hell are you reading this blog for?”

I was watching a documentary recently, about the 1985 snooker final, between Steve Davis, and Dennis Taylor. I actually remember watching that match as a child, but I digress.. During the documentary, the interviewer asked Stephen Hendry, and a few other great snooker players what they thought about the final, and who they were ‘rooting’ for to win. And what was interesting, was the theme of the conversations and general census, that WINNERS, and people who are used to winning on a consistent basis, always vote for other winners; they have no time for people who finish second, because their mentality has been honed, and trained over many years only to fill their subconscious mind with a pure, and winning mentality – Second best does not even enter the equation.

Running a business is no different, and you must make sure that you really are prepared to sacrifice what is necessary to go the full distance. If you are not prepared to sacrifice what is required to win, then I would say “GIVE UP NOW – AND DO IT QUICKLY”.

A bold statement, I am sure you would agree. But, think about it for a second, we are talking here about making hard cash; pure profit from a business-world populated by people who would think nothing of biting your right arm off, just to get a foothold in business; people who are so ruthless, that business is absolutely everything to them. Such people have been trained to seek out and destroy weak, and vulnerable competitors.

So are you saying it is too difficult to actually create a viable business?

NO. It is not ‘too’ difficult, but what must be understood, at least when starting a business in which the aim is to be a success, is that you must absolutely be prepared to sacrifice short-term pain, for long-term gain. That is a given, or just don’t start a business and expect to make any notable gains.

A few fundamentals, and mind-set changes, that must happen:

Very many people talk about price being the only factor that can make a sale. This is folly, and actually a very child-like view they place on business. If all that was required to make a profit, was to seek out the cheapest product, then we would all be millionaires, wouldn’t we? All you would have to do, is go down to your local beach and grab a few handfuls of sand, and sell each grain for 1 pence a pop.

I am being facetious, of course, but think about this for a minute. How many people would buy your grains of sand? Nobody; not even a sand fly would be interested. This must surely lead to the question, then, that you have to be promoting and selling a product, or service that somebody wants, and based on value? Agreed?

Ok, so then what we are really trying to say, is that we need to be promoting our ‘wares’ based on what potential customers want, and need? Understood, so then the difference between the people selling these ‘wares’ must be what separates the people who make profit, and people who don’t? And more importantly, what these people DO, is what separates them for the dreamers in society.

THAT is the basis of a successful business.

I would advise you to read that last paragraph again before going further, or even considering starting a business. As only then, will you begin to understand what is required to be a successful business owner.

You see, and going back to what was mentioned earlier, we live in an age where everything is handed to us on a plate – easy come, easy go – and the same can be said for all the online opportunities that are presented around the various avenues, and facets of the internet. Let’s be honest, there are very many sharks on the internet, offering what can only be described as rubbish, and for the very same reason I just explained – it is EASY to create such a business, and this on it’s own creates problems – and it could be a problem for you, too..

The point being made, is that due to the fact that it is all too easy to create a business; buy a website, start selling on eBay, and all the rest of the ‘businesses’ being offered, then it is all too easy, to start thinking that: “if everybody else is doing it, surely all I have to do is follow x,y and z, and I will be making money, too”

WRONG!!

And this is where the problems begin. You need to forget what everybody else is doing, and get down to raw, and hard facts. No matter how commerce is represented to you, the basics remain the same, you HAVE to generate value, and unique selling points in order to devise a viable, and sustainable business. You have to seek out ways, often using very many, painful man hours, just to keep your nose ahead of your competition.  Devise ways to increase revenue. Spend at least 2/3/4 hours per day researching new ways to attract business.

Important Question: If you spent 6 hours per day, in a white-hot burning desire, to find 100 new ways to attract business, then how far ahead of the competition do you think you would be at the end of the first week? the first month? the first year? How many of your possible competitors do you seriously think, spend endless hours looking for ways to generate extra profit; researching customer’s needs, wants, designing new marketing strategies, testing variables, and results, and implementing new ideas on pure instinct? Very few, I sure you would agree.

Therefore, do you now see, what I am trying to achieve here? I am trying to prick your consciousness to actually understand that you CAN achieve outstanding success, if you will only focus on what really matters, and forget most of the nonsense that is branded about, about what is the ‘best way to start a business’..

You must decide, that you really are prepared to sacrifice what is required to create the business you desire. Do that, and there is no reason why you will not be the very next internet millionaire – it is there for the taking – it really is – and the crazy thing about this situation, ladies and gentleman, is that your competition are making it easy for you – if only YOU decide that the sacrifice is worth the desired result. That is all it takes. The rest is just time.

It is a big sacrifice, when you look at the harsh reality of it. Endless hours of work, testing, working late into the evenings, or early mornings. Your spouse and loved ones must also be on your side, and share your ambitions and financial dreams, or you will not have the harmony required to get to second base. All these factors add up to just the start. THEN, once you have organised your priorities, and decided the sacrifice is worthwhile, does the hard work begin.

It is an enjoyable journey, and absolutely worthwhile; but it must be worthwhile to you, too. Only you, will be able to decide if you are prepared to give, what the business world, and natural progression, demands..

There is only one way – the right way, and with the right understanding of what is required.

Best of luck in whatever business you decide to start – and make sure you have enough reasons to want to make it happen. Without enough reasons, you will not develop the stamina, will power and sheer ruthlessness to make your financial dreams a reality.

My advice would be, to take a serious measure of time, to deciding on your commitment to the cause.

Make the right decisions, and for the right reasons, and you will know what is possible.

Take Care, and take positive action.

A very easy thing to do is make excuses, we all do it, “I’m not going to go for my jog today because it’s raining!” or “I missed revenue targets this month because my internet was down for half a day”. But not making excuses means you get more done and you become a more disciplined individual.

So when you have a list of jobs to do when working on your business, make no excuses. And always take the blame where appropriate, if something goes wrong – you miss your sales targets for example – take the blame yourself and make sure next month you hit the targets.

This is easier said then done of course! What I have done is made it part of my set of rules I keep in one of my business folders.

If you ever feel like this (image below), remind yourself why you are doing what you are doing, and get back working.

This is the first post of a series on protecting your website.

It is all very well building your business up, but if you don’t protect it you could end up losing it all, or taking a hit. At the moment one of the things I am focusing on is protecting my business, I’m happy with what I have and don’t want others taking advantage of it, or trying to hurt me. One problem is people stealing your content, that you own the copyright to, and unfortunately it goes on quite a bit.

Content Stealers
This has been a real problem with this blog. People copy my articles and publish them on their own website as their own work. Google then thinks it is duplicate content and hits the rankings. Other people are also able to profit from my hard work. I created the work so I own it and no one can copy it.

The same goes for an an ecommerce store or any type of website. If you research a product you are selling and create a brilliant point of sale that will draw in visitors from search engines and increase sales, don’t let people copy it, it will harm your business!

How To Try And Protect Yourself From The Start
In the footer of this website I have a notice saying “all content may NOT be used without permission”. Will that deter these sort of people? Probably not, but I recommend you put one in your footer anyway. The notice is there on every single page so if you have to take action against someone you made it clear they can’t copy anything.

Also date your work. EG “This article was published on January 1st 2000 by Mr Biggles on mrbiggles.com”. Or if you don’t want to explicitly put that on a page try and keep some kind of proof when a page was published (server records maybe?). This then proves you were the original creator of the work.

How To Find The Thieves
The simplest way is to use copyscape.com. Put the URL of your page you want to find copies of, and it will draw up results from the web of copies it finds. You can then click on them and at the top of the page it shows you how words are duplicate. There are other tools around, search in google for things like ‘duplicate content checker’ to find ones that suit you.

Then What To Do – First Action
First thing is to contact the offending website. Give them the evidence you have found – your page URL, and where they have copied it on their website. Tell them to remove the content immediately as they have no right to use the content because you own it and it explicitly says on your website content may not be copied. If they don’t remove the material tell the person you will inform their web host their client is acting illegally, and you are going to take legal action against them and submit a DMCA infringement. You could also threaten them with a smear campaign on public forums proving how their company behaves and that they are not to be trusted.

Second Action
From here how you act depends on how the other webmaster responds. They may apologise and remove the content immediately, in which case it’s a result, job done. They may blank you altogether thinking you are not serious. They may not even get your email. In these instances send another email stating you contacted them on ‘X date’ and are following up. You should also ‘request a read receipt’ and make the message ‘high priority’.

In a few cases I have found the offender removes the content, but doesn’t email you back. They obviously know they have done wrong but won’t email you to apologise for being a thief. So check the copied content before emailing for a second time as they may have removed it. If they think you aren’t serious contact the host and tell them what you are doing, who knows they may even suspend the website!

Third Action
If they still don’t respond after the second email, or are not cooperating, then you have to decide what to do. If you don’t believe the offending content is having much of a harmful effect (it may be copied on a crappy website with virtually no rankings or visitors) you are best to forget about it – better of spending your time on other issues that can help your business. But if the content is on a major website, or has been copied a lot then you want to go through the effort of a DMCA infringement request, or/and a public smear campaign. A positive result may really help your website getting better rankings thanks to no duplicate content.

Is This A Real Problem?
This is a genuine problem which you should be aware of, because people are behind a computer screen a lof of them think they can get away with it. One of the main articles on this blog was copied by an Indian freelance writer (about 365 words duplicate) who sold it to someone who then distributed it all over the web on article sites, blogs and other publications. It has completely killed the rankings of my article and I’ve made no money from it. So I’m taking action. Many of my articles have been copied many times, harming my rankings. There are also ’scraper sites’ which automatically scrape the content from your website and publish it on their own. So don’t think this doesn’t go on much as their are a lot of people out there copying content.

How To Manage Your Time
This isn’t something I recommend you go mad over and start spending days hunting down content stealers. But it is worth spending an hour or two at the start of each month to check their are no duplicates of your most important work. If you spent a long time on amazing product descriptions don’t let all your good work be wiped out by some illegal acting rat who thinks he can get away with just copying your content because he is behind a computer screen. And often a simple email can get the offending material removed, and an improvement in your pages ranking, definitely worth the effort!

I regularly scan various resources for new possible ecommerce and other online businesses to buy, such as Flippa, a selection of webmaster forums, Sitepoint and other classifieds. But one of my least favourite places is eBay.

The reason I don’t like eBay is because of the amount of ridiculous listings. People trying to sell terrible domains, they will register something such as michael-jackson-family-forever.net and then make a listing saying it is incredibly value because of the words contained within it and it could be yours for just £25,000! I don’t even want to begin to describe the sort of people who do this and significantly reduce the quality of the ‘Businesses For Sale’ category on eBay.

But having said that I do scan the site every now and then as it does also have genuine listings, whether they be online or offline (you often see mobile businesses such as vans which sell sandwiches etc). And ironically, the site I like least for finding opportunities, turned up one of the best ones I’ve seen.

It was an ecommerce site selling electrical goods such as wireless speakers and surround sound systems. It is receiving 14,000 unique highly targetted visitors per month thanks to some brilliant rankings in Google for some competitive terms, and has been doing so for 3 years! That is where all the value is as the actual website is not very good and is has traffic from no other sources. The words ‘huge opportunity’ were soon swirling around constantly in my brain as he didn’t want a great deal of money for it. I contacted the seller direct, and by the end of the next day we had done a deal as he wanted a quick sale to invest in another business of his. 2 weeks down the line and I’m incredibly happy with the acquisition, especially as we approach christmas sales time!

There is definitely a lesson here, although the eBay category gets filled with rubbish, there are some gems. So be careful about dismissing certain methods and resources you use for finding new opportunities for your business.

No doubt you’ve heard it before ‘test, test, test’. I use the simple phrase quite often myself. No matter what you do it is good to test things. And over time a major benefit of testing I have noticed is the power of memory, you remember much more easily what works and what doesn’t.

Reading Is Important, Doing Is Critical

You can read all the webmaster blogs, SEO guides and ecommerce tips in the world, but doing is what brings results. In the past I have read tips online and for one reason or another not put them into practice. Then when I stumble across the tip again I think “oh yes I know about that, but yet I haven’t put it into action!”. And this is more common then I would like.

The Power Of Doing

When actually doing something you remember a hell of a lot easier about it. I’ve recently been doing some tests in SEO. In the process remembering techniques not yet deployed on certain websites I own (extra benefit!). Some of the tests have given me some surprising results. One of them my website was in #5 for its target term in Google, made the change and after a couple of weeks it had been dropped back to #40! Needless to say I reverted to the old way, and the test certainly showed me what is best in one aspect of SEO on that particular site.

Doing Means You Learn Even More, As Well As Remembering

You always appreciate things a lot more once you have done them. It is all very well seeing that gorgeous new Jag on Top Gear, but until you’ve driven one you can’t even begin to fully appreciate how good it is. And the same goes for pretty much everything. Once you put ‘SEO tips’ into practice you understand them more, you have seen and experienced for yourself that they work. From this you memorise the process more easily and you can discover and learn even more in the process.

Conclusion

Testing is very powerful and every business that exists should be doing it. So if you aren’t then get cracking!

There was an interesting thread started in the DropshipHelp.co.uk members area recently which asks about the “best money making internet business”.

Diversifying From Ecommerce

It is good to diversify your business, it can make it stronger in terms of both profitability and stability. You don’t want to completely stray away from your core – abuse that and you may end up with nothing – but diversifying properly stands a good chance of being worthwhile (as will all business though of course their is still risk).

What Is Best?

In the post on the DropshipHelp.co.uk website I said about what is “best” is not necessarily the most profitable, for example a porn website may be highly profitable but would you get enjoyment and pride out of running it every day? I expect not. I think “best” depends on what you are into and where you can utilise your strongest skills.

Money Making Schemes

I would generally recommend you stay away from these ‘make money online’ schemes and ‘get rich quick’ programs. Coming up with a unique idea to fill a niche, creating a business plan and seeing it through is what business is about. Not paying someone $100 to be told how to write a crappy ebook and sell it for $10 a pop to make millions!

Types Of Websites

If you are struggling as to the types of websites you can run take a look at this Wikipedia article, it lists 26 varieties of websites. The nature of the web means the limits are almost endless, and you can create a vast amount of different types and styles websites providing a variety of services.

Conclusion

So if you current business is stable and on the right track and you want to diversify then research properly and put together a good plan. But remember don’t abuse your core business, otherwise you may end up with nothing.

“Always go for double what you actually want to achieve”
I once heard someone say that the guys who want to be billionaires eventually become millionaires. Those who want to be millionaires do very well for themselves and live a lavish lifestyle. And those who dream of earning 50K a year end up earning more like 25K. As a general rule go for double and even if you don’t reach it you may still do well!

“Existing customers always come first”
Forget chasing after new customers if you aren’t prepared to look after your existing ones properly. Abuse your existing customers and you may just end up with nothing! Look after your existing ones and who knows where it may lead.

“Always look through the eyes of a customer, not your own”
That is who you are providing your service for so that is the angle you should look at it from. Sounds incredibly obvious but it can never be done enough. What exactly does the customer want, and are you delivering that 100% to them?

And remember that all you can ever do in life is make the best decision based on the information you have available to you, knowing the future is not possible. Go by that rule and your reasons for nearly everything will be clear and you will have far fewer regrets.

Image: seo_gun

Often in business, and life, it is good to quit and let things go.

I quite like it when people say “winners never quit”, and I always reply with “yes they do!”. But it is when that matters, they know the right time and they are able to let go. A bit like when big businesses expand into new regions. We have seen companies lose millions from it, but instead of pushing on they realise it isn’t working and quit to focus on their home land.

A Few Examples
Yesterday I decided to cut a revenue stream from my online business which has been battered by the credit crunch. It has dived from generating over $400 per month to around $40 per month now (falling horribly over the last 6-12 months). So I’ve called it quits on it, I am very disappointed as over the next year it is thousands of pounds less in revenue that I had forecast!

In the past I’ve also lost money on shares (via spread betting). I set-up a football website hoping to dropship football memorabilia which didn’t work so I quit it. I set-up a debt books site but couldn’t make that work so I quit it. And I spent months on an ecommerce site where the dropshipper then ceased trading just as I had got going making sales, I couldn’t find another dropshipper to fill in so I just killed of the website.

The Lesson
I’m trying to show that I run my online business full-time and love it, yet I’ve had plenty of situations where I had to quit, and I’m really happy I did instead of plodding on with those ideas!

Know Why You Are Doing It
I recently finished reading a book about sharedealing. It spoke about when shares move against you and you lose money. If you researched and everything suggested it was going to rise, then it was the “right” trade, it may not have been successful but it was still in theory “right” (IE long-term you will profit). As long as you know why you are doing the trade you should not be downbeat about the trade.

The same is true for business. Know why you are doing what you are doing. If your market research shows there is a gap in the market for your product, and your costs/profit margins and other factors add up then you have a viable business on your hands. If it doesn’t work then nevermind, the research suggested it would so it was still the “right” decision to set-up the business.

If Things Aren’t Going Great, It Doesn’t Mean Quit
This relates to what I’ve just said above. If your figures add up nicely and your plans are good then you should carry on, going back to the “know why you are doing what you are doing”, if your reasons still stand true then carry on. Quitting as I’ve said is fine, but it has to be done at the right time.

There is no worse feeling then ‘What was that idea?’. I remember when I was at school, I used to daydream my way through most lessons. I think the daydreaming has done me a lot of good, had I paid more attention no doubt I would have done better in exams, but I don’t care, the daydreams helped feed my business desire and ‘idea & creation ability’ (that sounds good!).

However, the one big thing that I regret is I never wrote any of my ideas down, nothing, not a sausage. No matter how big or small, crazy or stupid I wish I had made a note of them. Not because I could have embraced the ideas now and created real businesses (most ideas were probably outright rubbish). But they could have fed other ideas, and parts of business ideas could have been used on other ideas.

It’s Incredibly Simple – Write Them Down!
And the massive shame is that all I had to do, was write them down, it’s incredibly simple! Even after I left school I never started writing ideas down. Now, over the past couple of years I have kept, what I like to call an Ideas Journal to write ideas in. And I highly recommend you keep one to.

Recording Ideas
On my laptop I have an excel document (shortcut on desktop so always there) which I write all my ideas in. The vast majority are related to my current business, many thoughts/ideas/ways to improve and expand my business. But I also note any kind of ideas for new businesses.

Obviously you aren’t at your PC all the time, in fact many of your good ideas will come when you are not at your computer. What I do is make a note of ideas in my phone. I have a Blackberry Pearl, which has a ‘MemoPad’ on it, this is where I record all ideas when I’m not online. Then later on I put them into the excel document. Even if you don’t have a similar function on your phone you could just write a text message and save it as a ‘template’.

Conclusion
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you will just remember ideas, there is a good chance you will forget them. No matter how small an idea or insignificant it may seem – write it down. It costs nothing and can be done very quickly, a spur of the moment idea may be what helps you realise your business dreams.

Not got an ideas journal? Create one right now on your computer!

I’ve posted a couple of times on this blog about why now is a good time to invest. I personally am reinvesting most of my profits until we are out of the recession, the idea being I will be in a good position when the economy picks up. A strategy I highly recommend if you have the money right now.

Daily I read business forums, newspapers etc and generally try to keep track of financials that affect me. But one that completely bypassed me was the AIA, or Annual Investment Allowance. I’m not great at accounting but I know the basics that I need to at this moment in my business life.

What Is The AIA
Previously in your capital allowances you could claim 40% or 50% off the cost of major investments (computer equipment, machinery etc). Now, upto a limit of £50,000, you can claim 100% of investments! After that the rate is 25%, so for big businesses reinvesting a lot more than this it will harm them, but for small businesses it is brilliant. You can read more on accountingweb.co.uk.

The Maths
Here is a breakdown comparing how much taxe you would have paid previously (based on claiming 50% of investments) with the new AIA.

I’ve kept the figures nice and simple so it should be easy and clear to understand.

Previous Scheme:
Business Revenue – £100,000
Cost Of Sales – £60,000
Profit – £40,000
Reinvested £20,000 of that profit in new assets
Capital Allowance – 50% of the £20,000 (so £10,000 tax deductible)

Meaning you will be taxed on a figure of £30,000 – you would pay £7495.15 in tax deductions*.

New Scheme:
Business Revenue – £100,000
Cost Of Sales – £60,000
Profit – £40,000
Reinvested £20,000 of that profit in new assets
Capital Allowance – 100% of the £20,000 (so £20,000 tax deductible)

Meaning you will be taxed on £20,000 – you would pay £4395.15 in tax deductions*.

The difference in the amount of tax you would have to pay is £3,100!

Personally this tax doesn’t make any difference in terms of my decision to reinvest, because my strategy is based on the state of the economy, not the taxman. But this is a major bonus and means this year I have to pay a couple of thousands of pounds less tax then I expected!

So if you are in a position to then I highly recommend you get investing in new websites/domains etc for when we come out of the recession. The AIA makes it even more worthwhile. Of course, you should still make good decisions and not just invest to lower your tax bill!

*I used listentotaxman.com to get the tax deductions figures, based on 08/09 rates.