I haven't touched on marketing at all on this site. I'm trying to touch on everything I enjoy writing about, and that includes entrepreneurship. I'm celebrating finally being able to accept cryptocurrency on my site, so this post is an extension of that! This particular article isn't geared for the eCommerce space, which is the focus of my celebration, but it will help out everyone.

Yes, like many millennials out there, I caught the entrepreneur bug. As much as I love writing, and as much as I hope I get to be a good enough painter to actually sell some of my work, book sales on Amazon as a self-published author can be hit and miss. Especially if your brand of fiction is very, very niche!

I really need to create an author's website, come to think of it...

Anyway, in honor of publishing my first book about marketing, I figured I do a post that highlights what I think the biggest mistakes newbies make when they get the entrepreneur bug and decide that they're going to find their fortune online.

1. This is a Business, Not a Spam Game!

I blame a lot of this on misleading sales pitches that promise that you can replace your J-O-B merely by posting links to Facebook or YouTube comments. It also doesn't help when someone boils affiliate or network marketing down to getting your link and getting others to click on that link. While it may be factually correct, the truth is that there's a real learning curve to making that happen. You'll have to invest in tools and stuff, and you'll need to learn that people need to actually trust you because they aren't impulsive to just start pulling out their credit cards.

Whenever you do anything online, whether that creates your own courses towards publishing your own novel or promoting your favorite course someone else has already created about publishing your own novel (or whatever else niche you're in), it becomes a business. You wouldn't stand on the street with a tray of hot dogs and call it a restaurant, would you?

To treat this as a business, you're going to have to build your own brand, which really isn't as scary as it sounds. You'll need to invest in tools like autoresponders, too. Oh, and setting up a funnel is also important for getting your affiliate link past the Facebook Advertising Overlords!

A funnel is great to have, even if it goes like this: Lead Magnet → Affiliate Link

2. You Will Fail A LOT! You Have to Realize That's Okay

Bruce Lee understood the value of failing. The more you fail, the more of an expert you'll become. This is why I think the grading system in schools is terribly flawed, for your grade is dependent, at least in part, on students getting things right the first time!

This is how it goes in entrepreneurship. You'll have a great idea for a product that doesn't pan out. It doesn't mean you suck or are creatively or logically bankrupt, it means that you had an idea that didn't fly. Maybe several or more of your ideas didn't fly. I hate it when that happens because you put so much heart, energy, and money into your little project, but, as the Three Stooges once put it, “If people don't got ants, they don't got ants!” Just keep trying and pretty soon you'll know what sells and what doesn't better than anyone else!

Or maybe you thought you had a winning funnel and ad campaign. You buy a ton of clicks, maybe even get quite a few sign-ups, but no one ever goes on to buy your main product. Not every ad campaign or funnel is going to be a hit. Split testing is expensive, darn it! We don't want to go through trial and error, but that's really the only way to go forward.

Sure, you'll have people claiming that their solo ads list is full of buyers, US only. You'll have people telling you stories of how marketers built their empire through their solo ads or any number of stories! That doesn't mean the ad you place with them is a sure-fire winner, though.

Don't let your failures be the end of the world, let them be a learning experience instead. If you're too broke to fail, wait until you get enough money to incorporate failing into your budget!

3. Blending in is a BAD Idea!

I did a blog post on an older site of mine about how marketing is like playing the Hunger Games, minus the death and barbarity of it all. This is a huge mistake that newbies overlook, though. In fact, most newbies don't even realize they're making a mistake by not personally standing out when they market.

Building a brand is a must in business. Your product won't sell itself; you'll have to sell it. You must become an authority in your niche and relate to people who flock to that niche in order to sell with confidence.

Stand out by presenting your offer in a unique way (the easiest way to do this is, albeit it costs money just like everything in business, is to build your own funnel) that stands out from other affiliates. As they say in Hunger Games, “Make sure they remember you.” People learn to ignore what's familiar, so people spamming the same landing pages will eventually make those people stop noticing them.

4. Building a Business Takes Time and Money

You can build a business for almost nothing in a small niche, like language learning (my first niche!), but once you move into a huge one, a free business is pretty much a pipe dream. Oh, how I miss the days when all I had to do was blog about my nerdy passion for Japanese! I decided to focus on only one of my languages because I wasn't adept enough in my other language endeavors yet, and it was a good choice. But a bigger, more competitive niche will cost money no matter what.

It also takes more time to do it without a large budget, but building a business will take time anyway. A lot of newbies assume they'll be making sales left and right because they bought “a business in a box”, but that's just not the reality of it. There's a learning curve, a lot of failures, and a lot of work to do before you see a profit.

Profit generally comes much faster than it does a brick-and-mortar business, however, since you'll go much farther into debt to just start one of those!

5. Autopilot Doesn't Mean Hands-Off!

I desperately want to get a pilot's license. I don't know why, but both my grandmother and grandfather hand one, and it sounds like a great deal to me! Flight has always fascinated me, and airplanes now are easier to fly than ever before.

HOWEVER, autopilot has never ever replaced a pilot. Your plane being on autopilot doesn't mean you get to leave the cockpit and go party with your passengers! Autopilot automates certain things, but it doesn't mean hands-free flying.

Newbies have a tendency to hear the word “autopilot” in a sales video and assume that once they buy into the business, there's very little left to do.

Not true! If you leave your business unattended, it will fly right into the ground. I guarantee it. Actually, it'll never leave the runway at all. You'll always be checking your funnels to make sure they're still converting, tweaking your sales pages and your emails so that people get exactly what they're looking for.

It's like an engine. It needs maintenance, but a well-working funnel will do the converting for you on autopilot. However, you have to set it up and you have to craft the ads and run the traffic. It has to be good traffic, too.

Ultimately, the biggest mistake newbies make is in treating Internet marketing and online business like quick, easy money.

Success

The first step to success is to get your head in the right place. Stop thinking of online business or Internet marketing as a way to get rich quickly and free and think of it as you would a real business. Once you think of it as a business, you'll be much, much closer to success.

The second step is to remember that your customers are human beings. They don't want to read your keyword-stuffed blog post or item descriptions, they want you to solve a problem that they have or partake in their passions.

Finally, you need patience. Almost nothing happens overnight, and almost no one who decides to create any kind of online business sees overnight success. You need to be prepared to play the long game.