The Internet offers you a world of opportunities to take on. The opportunities are so abundant, in such a way that it’s difficult to grab one and focus on it long enough to profit from.
I know a little about a lot of things on online business, make money online and web asset (sites and domain names) ownership. What I know help me grabbing opportunities when they arise, allowing me to profit from them while they are hot.
I own hundreds of domain names and nearly a hundred of sites. I’m not making plenty of money, but I can support my family entirely from my online business.
Despite it’s quite nice in where I am right now, I clearly can do more in term of web asset ownership and profits. I understand what’s needed to do, but I can’t seem to do more – it’s as if my head hits the rooftop and can’t jump beyond it.
The main culprits
Contemplating and observing on what I am doing, I found out that one of the major reasons I can’t grow my business and assets well is because I try to do many things at once. This results in wasted resources (read: time and money) to do trial-and-errors, trying to explore new things and find “the next best things.”
I end up doing so-so, with much of my web business profits goes to discovering and working on new projects.
We need to implement Pareto’s 80/20 Rules
Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 rules is often underestimated. It’s probably the most practical principles to help you increase your productivity and discover what works – it helps you discover the 20% things you do to make 80% revenue/profits, and eliminate 80% things that only making you 20% revenue/profits.
I discover that most of the cases, I spend 80% of my time to try new things. While exploration is one of the key success factors in web business, doing it too much is just a waste of resources. I ended up owning “zombies” – many of my web assets are not performing well; they are like a living dead – they barely survive, but don’t drive much value to me.
I need to change – I need to allocate my resources better.
A real life case study: Lessons well learned
I learn a lot from a client of mine. Let’s say his name is Lou.
Lou mainly runs 2 type of web business: Debt lead generation business and web directory business. He is making 6-figure income – that’s in US$ – annually from those 2 businesses. He owns a handful of quality sites – some are making money by generating debt lead and some other are making money from directory listing review fee.
The first lesson I learn from my client is that he laser-targets these two type of business, and allocate significant resources to both. The results are only logical: both businesses run like well-oiled engines, semi-passive income style of business.
The second lesson I learn is that I don’t need to “reinvent the wheel” or try to discovering “the next big thing” to make a significant amount of money. All I need to do is to focus on one or two type of web business I know the best, and allocate my effort and resources on them.
And yes, I forgot to mention – Lou works at home, making money online. He is now exploring a third type of business – affiliate marketing. Not much hype, but his strategy is very effective and efficient.
Final words: Laser-target your efforts in building your online business to what works and what’s proven, and never fall for the hot trends and such. Let the others explore the hot trends for you, and when the trends are proven to be “hot,” then it’s time for you to join the bandwagon. Observe, copy, modify.
Ivan Widjaya
Focus, focus, focus