Today I wanted to take a moment and talk about entrepreneurial traps, or reasons why your business will fail. The majority of these reasons are fairly obvious, yet we still find ourselves getting sucked into them with ease.
Mediocrity
When we start a business online, we almost always have ideas of grandeur. Our business will be the best one out there. "Ours will be better than everyone else's!" But then we quickly realize that we are in over our heads for many reasons. We didn't think it would cost this much. We didn't think we would need to invest this much time. The list goes on, but you should understand my point. At some point, we essentially "give up trying to be the best". We settle. Our business quickly becomes middle or bottom of the barrel and down the line, we don't understand what went wrong and why we aren't as successful as we think we should be.
Shiny Object Syndrome
I have seen this time and time again with affiliate marketing and online based businesses. We start our business and less than 90 days later (sometimes sooner), we get that "shiny object syndrome". We see a product or solution that will make us rich in no time at all! So we hop on board for as long as we "buy into" that solution. Eventually however, we realize that the solution isn't going to give us everything we had hoped for and we move on to the next "solution". This is a never ending cycle and is nearly impossible to break, until we realize we need to FOCUS and build our own business first.
Lack of Focus
All the time you see someone that owns a site but spends all of their time talking about or pitching someone else's products everywhere. This is because they refuse to focus on their own product because they don't think it will ever become what they thought it would be in the beginning. People are more interested in earning millions overnight, but what people do not see is the 10+ years of work, most of the time, that someone put into THEIR business before making that million dollars overnight. If you want to be an online business owner or an entrepreneur, you must FOCUS on your business and keep building it no matter how much it sucks.
Stretched too Thin
This is another common pitfall to being an entrepreneur. We all know and understand that starting an internet based business is multitudes cheaper than starting a brick and mortar business. But we think that if we do everything ourselves we can save even more money. The end result is almost always a shit product that looks like it was designed in 2003. We quickly get overwhelmed because of everything that needs to get done so we half-ass everything until it is "acceptable" in our minds. We need to learn to outsource and delegate the work that needs to get done. Yes, this costs money, but in the end you have less headaches and a much more quality product.
Bad Domains
A lot of times, we think of a great name for a product or service that we want to build, but when we look that domain name is taken, so we end up settling for what I consider a bad domain. We have all seen the myawesomesite.xyz or mygreatbusiness.info or thebestproductever.tk. When choosing a domain we need to always stick with .com unless certain and specific criteria are met. The domain extension if not .com should directly relate to the product. If you have a blockchain based product, .io would be perfectly acceptable. Another example is a website that Jon and I made called startearning.today. That domain extension is part of the name of the website, so it fits. If you have a bad domain, get a good one ASAP!
Market Saturation
This goes along with mediocrity. Unless you have a 100% unique idea or product you want to bring to market, there are probably hundreds to thousands of other sites out there that perform the same function as your site. How is yours better? Why will people choose your site over the hundreds of others? If you cannot answer these simple questions, you are not going to see a lot of success in your business. If your site does the exact same thing as hundreds of others, nobody will care.
The Mountain of Meh
This goes along with the previous trap. "There are a lot of businesses talking about the same things in the same way. Sameness will never break through all the clutter." Content Inc.
This has been deemed as the Mountain of Meh. Your crap is just like everyone else's crap. Meh.
I am sure that there are plenty more traps out there. I just wanted to take a bit to list the more common ones that I see consistently online.
Hopefully this list has helped you a little bit to build a better business online. Please let me know of your thoughts and comments!