Last year (2020) was not what we thought at all. With the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, many were forced to work remotely from home and many lost their jobs & businesses as a result. These events changed our lives altogether. This year, a lot more people joined the online money makers community, and many who lost their jobs started doing something on the internet to make a living.
This year (2021), freelancers' marketplaces are flooded with demands, online shoppers are looking for new products to buy, and YouTube audiences are digging for new content to watch. It is undeniable that 2021 is going to be a lot more different for all of us. If you haven't started to make money online, then I recommend taking a look at my Definition of Making Money Online to understand what all the fusses are about.
If you know what you are going to do, then it's time to make an important choice. That is choosing among the hundreds of ways to make money online. Luckily, I have an Ultimate Guide to Make Money Online where I've talked about the logical ways to make money on the internet and provided step-by-step instructions on how to start each of them. Check my profile for the guide.
But I'm not here to talk about these. You can find a way to make money anyway. Everyone can do something to make money online. What I'm going to talk about here, as I mentioned in the title, is to tell you about the mistakes we should avoid when we are making money online. I have to learn most of them the hard way, but you don't have to. You can read about them and avoid them one way or another.
Make Money Online Mistakes to Avoid
Every freelancer and basically everyone who is working on the internet to make money had made some mistakes along the way. If you happened to see someone saying they've never made mistakes, they are liars. Trust me on this one in particular because I have a lot of experience myself and worked with many clients who made such mistakes in their online businesses.
I personally have had many unsuccessful online businesses and seen entrepreneurs and startups fail numerous times. The majority of my clients were those who were trying to make money online the simple way but failed due to some mysterious reason. I learned from all these failures to avoid such mistakes and prevent them from happening in the future. The following list includes the top 11 mistakes (often common) that we all have to look for and avoid when we are making money online.
1. Lack of Necessary Skills
The very first and obvious mistake is the lack of skills. If you want to make money online, you have to know certain skills. You can't expect to earn anything when all you know is how to open a web browser and search Google, but you can learn a lot of useful skills by searching on Google! Hopefully, I've written another Ultimate Guide to Freelancer Skills that can help you start making money on the internet.
There are certainly a lot of skills to learn and use to get some online jobs. My recommendation is to learn as much as you can, meaning learns all the skills but masters a few that could be your cornerstone skills. This way you will have a few Main Skills and many other Secondary Skills that will come in handy when you have a project to complete. For example, If you master SEO & WordPress, knowing the basics of marketing can land you more job offers and projects, leading to more money.
2. Not Being Patient Enough
One of the common mistakes people make is thinking that an online business will pay out the next day. They think, especially young entrepreneurs, that they will become a millionaire overnight. When you start an Online Business, you have to be patient. You have to wait and try as hard as you can. Being impatient is more of a mistake you make when you start an online business. Making money online using already-established platforms usually pay off much sooner, but starting and operating an online business can be a bit harsh.
Many of the successful online businesses you see today were the result of winning a competition I like to call "The Waiting Game", where many businesses compete with each other and the winners are those who were patient enough to see some results. The rest is usually quiet after a few months when they don't see the results they were expecting. Starting an online business isn't easy. Many are advertising it as easy but it really isn't. It's hard, really hard. But if you keep up, you're in for a big treat.
3. Not Being Focused or Focused On Many Things
A problem with working online is that we are not certain if the job we chose is going to work and pays off. Because of this issue, we start doing multiple things at once to see which one is working better so you can go with that, or we do multiple things to make more money. Let me tell you the result of such decisions: It's not going to work! Focusing on many things and trying to do everything perfectly won't work. To do something as best as you can, only focus on one thing.
A client came to me asking me why he couldn't make money on Fiverr. I asked him what did he offer on the website and what gigs he had published. He listed 25 completely different gigs. I told him to go and focus on one or two things that you are the best at and see if it helps. It was the shortest meeting I've had. He is now a successful freelancer with only 3 gigs on Fiverr offering a series of Amazon FBA research services.
To sum up, just focus on one thing at a time and put all your time and resource into that to see results. Working on multiple projects at the same time will just make you exhausted and tired and you will never achieve the results you are expecting.
4. Choosing the Wrong Niche or Job
A mistake many people usually make when they want to make money online is choosing the wrong job or niche. There are certain things you should never do when it comes to making money online. Jobs like clicking ads or searching the web for money are some of the examples I know, but there are a lot of them advertising with big shiny titles saying "Get Rich NOW!" or "Make $500 Everyday by clicking ads". You should never choose the Wrong Way of Making Money Online. The general rule of thumb is if you work too much for a very small amount of money, then it's the wrong job!
About the wrong niche, you have to research in advance before starting to work on a specific niche. You should find out if the niche you are choosing has high demands and low competition. If so, then you can start working. For example, if you are a logo designer, you have to narrow down the logo design category to, for example, app logo design, company logo design, fashion brand logo design, etc. When done, you have to see which ones have more demands but there aren't many people to fulfill them.
5. The Timing is Not Right
Timing is a factor that determines if your business falls within the current trends and demands. It is actually something you can't control easily. I like to describe timing by asking a simple question: Is the world ready for your business? I can explain with a simple example. Facebook came around during a time when many other social networks, like MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut, were already there. Why did Facebook become what we know today? Because of timing. Facebook came around at exactly the right time, and that is one of the huge factors why it is so successful today. On the other hand, we had Google+ which came around to replace Facebook (somehow) but failed. Why? Because of the wrong timing. If Google+ started operating a few years before or after, it could be a big social network like Google, but they rushed into starting Google+ and they had to close it down a few years later.
Timing, as I mentioned, is something you can't control. Also, timing is applicable more to businesses than simple online gigs and jobs to make money online. But unlike what the image above says, it's not everything, although it is about 30% of the work. If you are going to start the business, and you want the timing to be on your side, you have to do a lot of research, even before having any idea what to do or what business to run. However, even after extensive research and employing correct marketing strategies, your business may still fall into the pit of wrong timing. But it's Ok! You can keep trying and waiting for the moment to push your business forward at the right time. You have to wait for a new trend related to your business and relaunch it once more. This is somehow another game of being patient, and if you win this challenge by choosing the right time, you'll be in business.
6. There is no Business Plan or Strategy
You never see a successful business owner without a plan or strategy to start and manage his/her businesses. Business plans are a vital part of every startup and company, showing the path they should follow and providing insight into the future of the company. The business plan is a really important part of online businesses too, especially in the early stages when you might not know what to do or how to do it.
Creating a business plan requires research into different areas and gathering as much information as possible to build a better path for the startup. There is no fixed template for business plans, nor there is a formula that can work for all kinds of businesses. In general, business plans should include the following items:
Business Proposal (the general purpose and pipeline of the business)
Business Model (the way a business makes money)
Cost Estimation
Market Research
Startup Budget
Requirements (workforce, resources, and tools)
Customer Support
Business Maintenance
Business Optimization
It seems a little hard at first, but if you know the Basics of Business Development, it going to be easier. If you're not going to do it yourself, then you can hire a professional business developer to create a comprehensive business plan according to your needs and ideas. But remember to hire the right kind of business developer. Each business developer has a specific area of expertise, and usually, works only on related businesses. For example, I'm an expert in eCommerce & online business and don't accept projects in other areas like SaaS or online service platforms.
7. Copying Others
One of the worst mistakes people make when they want to start making money online is copying others. It is mostly seen among YouTubers who copy others down to every little detail. This is totally wrong and it won't work. If something works for someone, it doesn't necessarily mean it will work for you too. If you are going to copy someone or a business, make sure you add something that is specific to you and your business.
When I'm asked why copying doesn't work, I'll bring up a good example of YouTube gaming channels. There are a lot of them on YouTube, and they are actually a large part of the platform content creators. Those like PewDiePie & Markiplier both have the same content (playing games) but they don't copy each other, because each has their own personality, interests, and behaviors. The problem arises when someone copies what they do down to these levels. There are a lot of people acting like Markiplier and talking like PieDiePie, and they're not successful YouTubers. But when you start a gaming channel and have a specific personality, a unique way of presenting the game, and a personal way of talking, you're going places.
8. Setting up Unrealistic Expectations
I've talked about such matters a lot. When you start making money online, you shouldn't expect to become rich after a week or month, or even a year. Earning a stable income from YouTube can take up to a year, or making a living off Amazon FBA can take up to 3 years. It's hard to say how long it takes to reach a point where you won't need your 9-5 anymore, but certainly, you shouldn't expect it to happen overnight. If you really understand the Meaning of "Make Money Online" it would be easier for you to set goals for your business or online job.
9. Thinking Too Much About Doing it
Overthinking how to start making money online is actually both good and bad, and it depends on what you are going to do to make a living online. First, let's talk about the good one. If you're starting a business, thinking about the very details and implementing them in your business plan is a great thing, although it shouldn't become a barrier to starting the business in the first place. A healthy amount of overthinking prior to a business startup is ok, but if it's going to prevent you from starting it, then you should seek help.
The bad side of overthinking about making money online is a mistake we should avoid. I am a victim of this very mistake. I lost count of how many ideas I didn't execute because I thought too much about them. I wanted everything to be as perfect as possible and kept thinking about a "powerful start" to the point where I stopped even thinking about it and quit. This is not good. If you have an idea that can help you make money online, if you are going to start a YouTube channel, or create a website or blog, I like to refer you to the Nike motto: JUST DO IT!
If you fell victim to overthinking, seek help from a friend or consult a business developer to help you out of it. For me, it was my wife who helped me get out of the overthinking phase when I wanted to do something.
10. Forgetting to Optimize
Optimization is a vital part of every online business. It is also applicable to traditional physical businesses too, but I'm going to talk about online business optimization here. Optimization comes in different forms. If you are an Amazon seller, you want to optimize your business process to make everything faster and automated and cut costs. You also want to optimize your product listings for better search result rankings.
If you are running a YouTube channel, then you want to optimize your videos to get more views and subscribers. You also want to SEO optimize your video titles and descriptions to get a better search result ranking too. For websites and blogs, optimization comes in the form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is a process of keyword integration, increasing content quality, and improving site speed so search engines show your articles and contest more to those who searched for related subjects. Optimization in marketing is also a thing that requires data analysis and A/B testing when it comes to advertisement campaigns. You want your ads to provide the best ROI (Return on Investment) and bring you more clients & users.
Most of the optimization for online businesses goes to the SEO category, and SEO is actually one of the most important Skills for Freelancers with a lot of promising jobs and offers. I really recommend learning the basics of SEO and practicing them in your businesses. You will defiantly see results with even a small optimization on your business workflow.
11. Thinking It’s Easy
The last mistake is somehow related to unrealistic expectations about making money online. This one is actually not our fault if we fell victim to it, but it is the fault of massive advertisement and marketing campaigns categorized as the Get-Rich-Quick scheme. Many online personalities and businesses are trying to tell you how easy it is to make money online or how hard it is but if you buy our "Online Course" everything will get easy for you. This is a way to make money online, of course, but not for you. The person selling you those suspicious online courses is the one who makes good money in the end by selling something that you can probably find on YouTube.
I started working when I was 14 years old, and have worked in many different jobs and businesses since then. A summary of all I've learned about online businesses or working, in general, is that it's not easy at all, but you can do it if you try hard. There will be a lot of failures, but there will also be success that washes all the losses away. I've never purchased one of those "Success Manuals" or "Get Rich Instructions", but I've seen a lot of people who did and they are still where they started many years ago. Don't go with thinking making money online is easy, and don't buy overpriced online courses on how to be successful or rich. Instead, try to work hard and learn as much as you can, so that even the hardest ways to make money online seem a piece of cake to you.
So helpful
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