The Hard Way To Build A Business

This page is about the significant percentage of those 5 million websites that were started by hopeful entrepreneurs - most of whom failed to even make back their investment of money from the venture, let alone their investment of time. It is about how, where, and why they lost their way and did not wind up at success.

Since I'm proposing that you build a future for you and your family based on that same basic idea, you may find it strange that I'm being so honest and so morbid about the failure rate for online businesses. Well, I'm nothing if not honest, but that's not the only reason I'm letting you in on this aspect of the online business world.

You see, in order for you to really "get" what I'm going to show you on this site, you really need to understand what you are up against, and understand the advantage you gain with the tools I'll recommend.

They say that failure is the best teacher. If that is true then I'm the equivalent of a tenured professor on the subject of online businesses. You see, I haven't failed just once - I've done it twice. I learned a lot the first time I failed, and that led me to learn even more before trying again. When I failed the second time, the biggest lesson I learned (which turned out to be incorrect) is that online businesses are a waste of time and money. I was frustrated and went looking for other ways to make extra money. You can see hints of some of those other escapades elsewhere on this site, so I won't go into it here.

A few years went by, and I continued to hear stories about both successful and unsuccessful online business efforts, and eventually got curious again. This time I was determined to learn the secrets to success in this brutally frustrating world of online business. I spent untold sums of money on different eBooks and different kinds of software and newsletters about online business.

There is an old saying that if you hear or read something you will quickly forget it. If you see it happening in real life to somebody else you are more likely to remember it. If it happens to you and you experience it directly, that's when you really understand it in the truest sense of the word. That is certainly true of both the upside and the downside of online business ventures.

This self guided graduate course in online business that I put myself through made me familiar with a whole host of things I never even thought of during my two failures. So, armed with much new "book smarts", I undertook to build yet another online business. This time I have succeeded, though definitely not in a perfect 10 point landing. In fact, I've circled the airport several times and scared the heck out of the folks in the tower when I had to yank back on the stick at the last moment in a failed landing attempt.

The simple truth at the bottom of this whole sordid affair is that there is a very simple (not easy, just non-complex) and nearly foolproof way to go from idea to successful online business. The problem is that to the uninitiated, this simple way is nearly invisible. It looks like just another online business service provider among a very well advertised and dizzying array of such services.

It takes someone with some battle scars and some hard fought transition from book smarts to actual understanding to recognize it for what it is. Let me try to give you an analogy that may make the special attributes of this particular "online business methodology" a little more clear. If I can make it clear to you how this method is different, it will make all the difference in how much frustration you would have to go through to "get to the cheese".

Imagine if you will, a laboratory with a large table. On the table there are two big rat mazes. A brief look at the two mazes might yield no apparent difference in their complexity. They are the same size, and are both fraught with innumerable twists and turns. Upon closer inspection though, one maze has many "dead end" corridors that hook to the main path through the maze. The other one winds and twists this way and that, but there are no distracting exits from the main tunnel. It's just one long winding path with no place to go off in the wrong direction. The rat in this second maze gets plenty of exercise working his way from one end of the maze to the other, but he always winds up with cheese on his whiskers.

That analogy is a pretty good description of the most important difference between failure and success in online business. There are so many "side tunnels" you can go down and each one is so cleverly marketed, that even an experienced rat wastes huge amounts of money and time in these dead ends. To make this analogy very clear to you in real world terms, I'm going to show you an abbreviated (you won't think it's abbreviated, but it truly is) description of my "path" from having an idea for an online business, through several near crashes, and on to ultimate success. This is just a smattering of what I went through in my third (and ultimately successful) trip through the maze.

• tons of reading from expensive eBooks and newsletters
• killer idea number #1
• several days of elation and planning
• realization that idea number #1 won't work
• several days of morose pouting
• find a new eBook and buy it and read it
• killer idea number #2 is born
• a shorter period of elation and planning
• another realization
• lots of online searching and pondering
• another eBook or two
• repeat all of the above several times
• run across THE RIGHT WAY, and not recognize it for what it is, ignore it
• killer idea number #14 (or 32 or 67)
• stop thinking so much and avoid realizations
• come up with a domain name (not knowing that this step should come much later)
• accidentally run into a "program" on the web that will solve all of my problems
• throw caution to the wind and pay for said program
• find out other people who used said program are now in "google jail" and won't be getting out any time soon.
• stop for a moment to catch breath and be thankful that I found out before I got “caught”
• commiserate about the lost money, vow to never be that stupid again
• fall back and regroup – start building website
• buy a book about php (or some other unnecessary type of online programming)
• spend three weeks building website around said programming language
• run across a brief mention in a newsletter that said programming language confuses search engines
• several more days of morose pouting
• buy and read a few more eBooks and newsletters
• repeat random portions of the above several more times
• start to wise up
• start to “get it”
• buy another expensive piece of software that is good, but not THE RIGHT WAY
• spend some more time messing around in various non-profitable ways
• read some more, this time with the benefit of hard earned wisdom
• run across THE RIGHT WAY again, and this time almost “get it”, not completely ignored
• waste another couple of weeks
• go looking for THE RIGHT WAY again, find it, read everything I can find on it
• start using THE RIGHT WAY and finally find success!

OK, you’re still here. You survived that list. Can you imagine how frustrating it was living that list? Remember, this is just a description of the THIRD time I tried my hand at online business. Maybe you have gone through some of that yourself before you came here. Brother, I feel your pain.

You probably noticed, however, that things got a lot better right there at the end. Perhaps you’re thinking “show me the way!” right now. Well, I will pretty soon, but first you have to suffer through another list. This one is a lot shorter…and a lot happier.