Day 7.3: Lessons Learned from An Entrepreneur

I meant to get this post up some time ago, but I've been busy seeing if I could find the best way to put my plan into action. I think I've found it now, and I'll let you in on all the juicy little secrets tomorrow. Mind: it will only work if you're determined to work at it yourself. There's no such thing as "easy money" but there is such a thing as making a fortune from home. Whichever route you take will require patience and perseverance, along with the willingness to work for practically nothing at all.

It's now been one week since I first set out on this entrepreneurial mission, and so I figured that tonight would be a good time to review my progress--successes, mistakes, and lessons learned.

Successes: There are some things that have gone way better than I had thought they would. The biggest of these is publicity. In my old blogs, I was lucky to get five or ten views a day. Seriously. And that was after telling everyone about them and posting on Facebook and everything. I've been shocked every day now to check my views and see that it's been over 100 per day almost since I started up! How did I do this? Pinging, article submissions, and key word optimizations were the best things I did that I know of. Stumbleupon continues to be a good source of traffic, and so did Reddit before I left it. Another success so far has been my regularity in writing. My initial goal was to write three posts a day, and so far I've done it! It's kept me busy, but the publicity and everything I've been learning about working online has been well worth it, and I'm far from running out of content.

Failures: There have also been areas where I've completely blown it, unfortunately, or where I've yet to have any success whatsoever. The first of these is in actually generating an income through this blog. Yes, I've been making money online at sites like Clixsense and Protypers.com, but the blog has gotten me nowhere financially. I take that to be a mistake on my part, and something I should work on. You know I'm not a salesman. I've been terrible making sales since I was a kid doing fundraisers, and it's no better now. I check every now and then to see if there's been any progress, any clicks. Nothing. It's disappointing, but I can only hope something happens in the next three weeks.

Lessons Learned: As I said earlier, I've learned that there's no such thing as "easy money." Simple money, sure, and I'll tell you about that tomorrow. But easy? Far from it. I've learned that making money online is a slow and drawn out effort that can take years before you even break even. I've learned to expect the worst from things but also to be open to new ideas. I've also learned that I'm a total rookie in many areas, that my "learning" has really just started. Another thing I learned though is that there is hope, and there is good reason to invest in online marketing, as hard as it may be to keep working for pennies. I've learned that success stories are real and do happen, and that it is possible to be one of those people making serious money online.

I'm excited about this venture, and I hope you are too. I've learned a ton in my first week, and who knows what the future will hold? Please follow me on Twitter for updates and join me on Clixsense, Swagbucks, and Protypers.com (code 611M). You might be making pennies now, but they will be dollars! I'll tell you how to make that happen tomorrow, and I'm stoked to get started on it myself.

Day 4.3: Using Social Media for Business

When I first started my work as an editor for ComicBooked.com, I was told of the vital importance of social media. In today's world, that's one of the best ways to get across to people. Use Facebook, use Twitter, use StumbleUpon and Reddit--in fact, most of you reading this probably discovered this blog from one of those sites. It's vital to have accounts and share your work as much as possible. But like everything else, there are ways to abuse it as well as use it.

There are two ways to go about social media if you want it to benefit your business--either use your own personal account or open a new one. If you use your personal account, you already have many contacts who are personally interested in what you invest in. Your family and friends are interested in you, and it's easy to share with them to help get the word out. But there's also a problem: people tune out if they get bored. If you're too enthusiastic, if you post about your business or site constantly, people will ignore you or (even worse) get annoyed with you. This can be avoided easily if most of your posts remain fun and personal, but it's easy to forget that. When I was starting out at my editing job, I started focusing largely on Twitter I posted every article I wrote, and almost every article I edited, onto Twitter. I tried to put on some regular posts as well, but I didn't have enough interesting things to say to keep up. Before long, almost every post I made was just advertising articles. I began to lose followers. When I went to look up which ones had left, I found the names of some of my own friends among them. I was heartbroken. Why were my friends abandoning me? Why didn't they like me any more? I was horrified as I realized what had happened. I was spamming them. I was sending unwanted notes to people over and over again, and my personal life had all but disappeared. They had no reason to follow me, and now I was harming my own work.

I was thinking earlier about new ways to publicize this blog. Twitter came to mind easily, but I didn't want to make the same mistake. I decided to take a different path. I got a new account for this blog, under the name of @onlineincome19. I have to start building a following from scratch, but this time I'm going to look for people who are interested in saving and earning online. I'm not going to post only links to articles, but also share bite-sized tips and links to sites I find helpful. I don't know how hard it will be for me to find a good balance for Tweet content, but I think that at any rate it should be better than my last attempt. I'm also considering starting up a Facebook page, but one thing at a time.