55 Lessons Re. Online Business

        Written by Professional Marketing Coach

             David Risley       

1. The most valuable asset of your business is your customer list. Do everything you can to build and nurture it.

2. Complexity is a sign of failure: Power is found in simplicity.

3. All business should be systematic. – Reducing all operations down to a repeatable procedure is the only way you will EVER be able to move on to a new game.

4. Deadlines are important even when there is no threat attached to them. Any task will expand to meet the amount of time allotted to it.

5. The best way to get a lot done is to cut your available time to get it done in half.

6. The most important skill any entrepreneur can have is the skill of selling.

7. The No.1 most important goal of a brand new entrepreneur is to make the first sale. Everything else is secondary.

8. Blogs/websites are a great marketing platform. But, they’re not a business. And they never have been.

9. “Blog/website monetisation” is the old-school way of thinking. The workable way is to build a real business which happens to incorporate a blog/website.

10. Never get so entrenched in being the worker in your business that you forget to be the CEO.

11. When you’ve found out that a certain action is productive and successful, don’t stop doing it.

12. The only way to stay relevant in the world of business is to constantly be expanding. Zero growth is actually the same as negative growth, because the world is moving without you.

13. Money is not a valid reason not to outsource. You won’t make money if you don’t outsource.

14. Never get caught in the trap of comparing yourself to others. Only compare your present self to your past self.

15. While others are treating people like a number, you can surpass them by treating people like Human Beings and acknowledging them.

16. Don’t try to sound smart: Make sure what you do say is fully understood by the other party.

17. When money changes hands, that’s not when the work stops. That’s when the work begins.

18. You will never grow your business by trying to make everybody happy. You have to know who YOU are, and allow those who resonate to connect with you.

19. Building a cohesive team is one of the more difficult things for an entrepreneur to do as he/she grows, but it is also the most valuable.

20. Never assume you know what your audience wants. Ask them.

21. The best way to complete a product you want to make is to pre-sell it. If nobody buys, it was a bad idea anyway and you just saved yourself a lot of work. If they do buy, they just lit a fire under your arse, and you’ll get it done.

22. For anything to grow or expand, you must assign a statistic to it at a given point in time, then manage its growth by the numbers.

23. Never fail to fire somebody out of discomfort.

24. Blogging every day is a waste of time.

25. Success is not determined by how hard you work, or by how long you’ve been working – It is determined by your ingenuity combined with speed of implementation.

26. Once you’ve made a personal connection, never fail to maintain it.

27. The most important asset you have as an entrepreneur is your confidence. Protect it at all costs.

28. You won’t succeed alone. Join a mastermind group.

29. If inbox zero is a lost cause for you, then it is time to re-organise your incoming lines of communication.

30. 20% of your time should be spent on content and song/music creation. The other 80% should be spent on promotion/marketing and business expansion.

31. Businesses which don’t use content marketing will find it harder and harder to get noticed.

32. Continuity income is important for every business. For any one-off product you may sell, always find a way to build on continuity as an option.

33. The first step to making money online is to stop searching the internet for how to make money online.

34. Money is a result of delivering value to the world and delivering a solution to people who have a problem.

35. If you have to ask how long it will take before you will make money online, you’ve already failed.

36. Passive income only exists for people who busted their arse for awhile to build it.

37. Business cards can be as good as a bin liner in many cases.

38. When you stop working, really stop working. The internet lifestyle means nothing if you don’t know how to shut it off.

39. Working doesn’t mean going on Facebook.

40. Never put up shields to stop you from communicating directly with your readers and customers.

41. Just because you have been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it.

42. The pride of doing it all by yourself is reserved for idiots.

43. We all tend to be blind to our own constraints. Hiring a business coach or mentor is a great idea not just to learn something, but also to provide a different perspective which is grounded in experience.

44. Even while your business is small, structure it as if it were larger. Create different divisions for different areas. And create the systems for them. Even if you’re the one doing all the jobs simultaneously, you’ll never grow unless you build something which can be occupied by another.

45. In order to get the sale, you have to ask for it.

46. Don’t sell from your heels. If you feel back-off at the idea of selling your product, then you need to re-visit your product so that you can make it so important to your prospect that you’d be doing them a disservice not to get them to buy it.

47. Creating systems for your business isn’t just about future outsourcing. It is also to provide YOU with a sense of order about what you’re doing. Without systems, your business will seem like a huge effort.

48. If you think and act small, you will stay small.

49. Not offering a high-end product or service is just leaving money on the table. The 80/20 curve shows that there will be a percentage of people who will take the higher-priced option.

50. Marketing automation is an important component to growing and scaling a business.

51. Don’t read other people’s income reports. You don’t need the motivation. – You need to get to work.

52. As you make money, convert some of it into hard assets. – Online businesses come and go. Currency is only as good as the confidence in it. Hard assets of lasting value are a way to make the earnings of your business ever-lasting.

53. Turn contributions to savings or reserves into a budget item. If you don’t make it part of your monthly budget – like any other bill – then it is all too easy to ignore it.

54. Real businesses do real accounting, budgeting, and income/outgoings tracking. It is small-time thinking to make spending decisions based on your bank balance.

55. Communication with your audience and customers should be two-way. Don’t get stuck talking AT them. Do everything you can to keep them talking back to you.