Being a digital marketer for over 8 years, I have seen it all. I have seen people doing massive numbers from literally nothing and I have also seen people who tried for years and couldn’t make a dime.
Why this difference though?
How come some people can easily make money online where a bunch of others never do?
What’s missing?
I decided to do some digging and here’s what I think. As I have personally taught more than 1000 internet marketers how to make money online, I know one or two things about why people give up and why some succeed.
Before I go through the reasons, please note that I am not talking about making small numbers (say $500/month online). You can do that virtually doing any freelance work, working in an offline job or even as an Uber driver. This will not change your life or lifestyle.
I am talking about creating an actual business and making life changing living with that…
Short Term Hunger
The biggest reason behind why I think most people don’t end up making real money online is short term hunger. Let me explain what this is.
You are hungry and you want to eat, however, if you end up cooking, that would take an hour (unless of course, you are into boiled eggs like me). What’s the easier route? Either ordering a takeaway or starving for the day.
Why are we suddenly talking about food?
Let me give you another real life example.
One of my course is about internet marketing in Bangla (my native language). I have around 1200 students in that course and some of my students make $2000-$5000/month quite easily.
The course teaches you keyword research, SEO and a few other key elements that you need to know to do well in the world of internet marketing.
Now, pretty much everything that I teach requires you having a website which requires investment (domain, hosting, content etc).
What some students do is, they end up offering freelance services with the skills they learnt in the course.
Instead of becoming an internet marketer, they end up becoming a keyword research guy, a web dev guy or a writer.
Now, there’s nothing wrong in offering services. However, that’s just ordering a takeaway instead of cooking the whole meal.
If they had patience to build a site and monetize with proper strategies, they could easily 10x (a Grant Cardone term) their monthly income and they would have a profitable and real BUSINESS instead of a one man show.
However, offering freelance service is easy money and it offers a quicker return than having a website and managing a real business.
That’s where the trap is.
Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone
I will give you an interesting example.
I have a VA who works with me. I have been working with this guy closely for years. I pay him a decent salary but I know he can do way better for himself.
I even give him ideas about starting a business which I think are profitable and doesn’t require much to get started.
He never does!
That’s because, he is comfortable receiving a monthly salary and doing the absolute minimum number of hours it require to keep that job.
If that’s you, then you would never be able to make real money online.
You have to step out of your comfort zone if you want change in your life. You can’t expect something great to happen if nothing around you changes. That just doesn’t make sense.
There’s a saying that if you are too comfortable with your current position, you will never reach the next stage of your financial life.
I believe it 100%.
That’s why most people are stuck in a 9-5 job with their weekend life.
Most People are Not Entrepreneurial
Meet Alex.
Alex is someone who read a blog post about making money online and suddenly, he came to a realization that he should have a digital business.
After all, that’s what the future is. Passive Income, right?
If you dig into Alex’s career, you will very quickly realize that he has never sold anything in his life. Not in school, not online, nowhere. He was never an entrepreneurial person till he read that blog post.
A blog post will not change who you are.
If you look at the background of any entrepreneur, you will see a pattern. You will see that they were selling stuff in their school, they were involved in different arbitrages during their early life and they basically always had an interest for business which was visible.
I can tell you my story. I used to rent out story books when I was in school, I started an online pet accessory business in my early college life and I was always creating websites.
You can’t just suddenly become an entrepreneur because you read a book or you took a course. It takes time and some people just don’t have it.
Yes, it is true that some of those Alex will make it big but the percentage is way too small.
Not everyone, at their core, wants to be an entrepreneur. They want the limelight, they want the website and comments, but they are not cut for the work that it takes.
Enjoying The Process
Making money online requires a lot of hard work, intelligence and patience. Unlike other jobs (like a banker for example), you don’t have a fixed task list that you perform every day. Every day is different, new challenges are coming up daily, platforms are changing and the whole industry is still in it’s early growth phase.
If you don’t enjoy the process of building a business and are only in this for money, chance is very low that you will make it big.
That’s because you will never be able to invest the amount of time and work it requires when you are not enjoying the process.
Trust me on this.
Starting a new business excites me even today and if you follow my case studies, you know that I am doing new stuff all the time.
Do I need all of them to be profitable? Not really.
Do I want them to be profitable? Hell yes. That’s what a successful business looks like.
However, for every success I have, I always had 7-8 failures.
I enjoyed those failures just as much as I did the successes.
If you are not that type, making money online will be a hard task for you.
Trying to Follow a ‘Formula’ of Making Money Online
You can make money online as a freelancer or as a remote employee and it wouldn’t require you to be a smart person.
You will be given tasks, you will finish those and bam! you are making money online.
However, that’s not what the goal of this article is as I explained in my introduction. I am talking about creating a real business here and you can’t do that with a fixed formula of success.
You need to be able to use your brain like an entrepreneur and THINK.
Trust me, it is not easy.
Let me use a guitar analogy to help you understand what I mean.
When you try to learn an acoustic guitar from a very good tutor, they will try not to give you chords of a popular song.
They don’t want you to play the songs that soon. Do you know why?
It will make you a robot. You will be able to play those exact songs that you ‘memorized’ but you will not be able to create new songs, understand new music, play things on your own.
Why are We trying to give you music knowledge here?
That’s because the process is exactly the same when we are dealing with internet marketing.
In one of my keyword research articles, you will see people commenting about DA, PA and other metrics (these are metrics related to SEO)
Those are the people who are trying to look for a fixed formula, in other words, looking for the chords of a song.
A very few of them will become true musicians.
The goal of this article was not to discourage you, rather the opposite. I want you to become a business owner, not a freelancer or not a job holder.
Once you become a business owner, making money online would be the easiest thing in the world.
Do you think you fall into one of these categories We mentioned? Be honest. Let us know in the comments. Self-realization is the first step.
And then we’ll leave you with this nugget…
if you love what you do YOU CANNOT FAIL. Because whether you are MAKING MONEY or NOT you are in fact WINNING! People fail because they can’t fathom this concept.
If you dig into Alex’s career, you will very quickly realize that he has never sold anything in his life. Not in school, not online, nowhere. He was never an entrepreneurial person
