Online Entrepreneurship & Side Hustles: So Many Lessons, So Little Time11 min read

Being an online entrepreneur is such a fascinating idea to so many people. The thought of having a side hustle is alluring to some and downright scary to others. I'm in the category that find it alluring and fascinating.

As I've grown up, I grew up around my dad starting and running quite a few businesses. When I was old enough, he made sure that I got the spirit and started putting me to work in the various places, teaching me many different lessons along the way. Looking back along the journey, I went to make a list of all the different things that I've learned to do through our many adventures. I would like to share a few of them with you. I hope these lessons inspire you to dig deeper, chase your dreams of being an entrepreneur, and not make the same mistakes I did.

Businesses I've been involved in range from working in a few different service type business offline to running my own membership sites online. I started my own lawn care business when I was 12, making up flyers and passing them out in my neighborhood. I've worked my way up in an MLM business, learning to recruit and work online leads that we purchased. Promoting many different online affiliate programs, both free and paid, I've learned many different strategies to build a list. Helping to run a 4 site membership hub, we've learned a good deal about building a following.

If It Sounds Too Good To Be True, It Probably Is

I have joined my fair share of different opportunities that didn't hold up their end of the bargain. I got "sold", if you will. This has happened to me a couple of times. It's partly my fault for not doing the due diligence on the opportunity I was joining but it also happens when you are getting in on ground floor opportunities.

One type of opportunity that can easily be like this is MLM opportunities. I'm not saying that they don't work, I was in one for a couple of years and was making some pretty decent money. But, you have to know what you are getting into before you get started. I learned some valuable lessons for sure during the time that I worked as an affiliate of this MLM.

Build Your Team, Not Your Upline's

When you are as excited about business as I am, it's easy to get caught up in talking to people. Just make sure that you are talking to the right people. I was holding joint conference calls with my upline. We would both get our team's on the calls to provide more people and make the time more efficient. However, as I started hosting more of the calls, I ended up doing a lot of the training for my direct sponsor's other team members and not just mine. This was a big mistake on my part as I should have mainly just been working with my team.

Know What Business You're Getting Into

If you aren't careful to do your due diligence, you can easily get sucked into a business that you know nothing about or turns out to be completely different from what you thought you were doing. This is another lesson that I learned when I worked in a MLM business. I thought I was getting in and selling product and going to be helping people use the product. This turned out to be only partly true. However, the real money in MLM is normally in the recruitment of other business affiliates. As we worked the opportunity more and more, we learned to play the game, but were having a hard time finding other like minded people who really were looking to recruit and not just sell product.

Easy Come, Easy Go

Another thing that happened with me in some different opportunities was that I got used to the money. Never do this. Getting used to money coming in will make you lose some of your drive that made you successful in the first place. I had some very lucrative business opportunities where I was earning quite a bit of money building an email list and earning commissions very easily from that list. Then, one day, the business model gets turned upside down and, POOF, it's no longer viable! When you don't have a backup plan in place, or "put all your eggs in one basket" you can be wiped out without warning.

Downline Building Is Never "Easy"

If you've done any work on a business, than you know that you need others that buy into your product/opportunity/whatever in order to make money. All the gurus out there will tell you that it's so easy to build a list in your sleep or that you can do it very quickly using some secret formula. I've checked those out and they all basically say the same thing. Give someone value in exchange for their contact information and continue to deliver. As you build the relationship, you will start to see people trust you enough that they take your recommendations. It's not going to happen overnight and it's not going to happen automatically.

You Will Move Along The Affiliate To Owner Path

As you progress and learn more as an online entrepreneur, you are probably going to follow a similar path that I did as you learn and get more involved in online business.

Try Promoting FREE Programs -> Promote Paid Programs -> Start a Site to Promote Multiple Affiliate Programs -> Build Your Own Product/Service/Program

This progression could be a post in itself (I might have to do that later on) but it still is important to mention the path.

Basically, people start out trying out affiliate marketing with either a free or paid opportunity to see if it will work for them.As they have a little success, they end up joining and promoting multiple opportunities. This is where most people get stuck and don't take it to the next level. Others realize they need to build a list to promote all the different things, so they start capturing leads and promoting all the opportunities to the list. Others on the path go further by deciding they can earn more by creating their own program to entice people to join while promoting their multiple affiliate opportunities inside that program.

We had this same model happen to us. We started out using free traffic programs to generate traffic to our paid affiliate opportunities. As we started making money with that, we put together a main website to put all of our links to all the different opportunities we were referring together into one place. Finally, we decided to create our own membership site to build our own list and market to. This took us about three years to go through this entire process.

 Learn Everything You Can

Learn How To Use The Internet

In this day and age, knowing how to use a computer and navigate around is not just a privilege, but more of a life skill that most people have to have. Being born at a time when I would actually grow up with computers in a way I'm not completely reliant on them like today's generation, I feel fortunate. I remember starting out on a 56k modem with AOL, learning to navigate chat rooms and check email. There is a lot of nostalgia in the Internet past, but it was nice that I was able to learn the ins and outs of making different things work. Not like today, where you can just pop in some plugin to make a website load up and do everything we want.

Learn The Ins And Outs Of What You Are Doing

One big thing that I had to do while I was working online was run a few web sites. While promoting one of my businesses, I put up a web site that reviewed different advertising programs that paid their users for being active and paying for "ad shares". It was highly speculative, and in the end, the government ended up calling them ponzi schemes and shut them down. My web site was an advice site where I tracked my experience in the programs that I used. I was posting which ones I tested and having a good experience with.

As I started building my web site, I remember learning how to code in HTML and learning quite a few of the code snippets that I still find helpful today. I love that I basically taught myself basic HTML, because now, I can go into the code of my current website and fix certain problems that I find.

Learning all about what you are getting into is going to take you much further than just following someone blindly. Read about the opportunity.

Find others that do it successfully and learn best practices.

I'm always looking for others to contact, asking opinions on what makes them successful. Working in MLM, I constantly read other's reviews and asking other people in the business what they were doing successfully. Working with affiliate opportunities, I contact top affiliates to pick their brain. While running our own membership sites, we talked to other site owners in our niche for strategies.

Learn To Balance Your Time

This can be the hardest lesson to learn, as it's always in flux and is different for everyone. Running a business is a lot of work. There are many things to do and only you to do it, at least initially. You have to be organized with your time, or you will fall by the wayside in a rabbit hole.

It's so easy for me to get sucked into conversations on social media sometimes if I'm not keeping myself aware. I can get sucked into reading tutorials and how to guides for other traffic building strategies all day long if I don't limit myself and move on.

Some things to consider when working on time balance with your business:

• Manage your work time well. Set hours that everyone knows you will be working and focus so that you stay productive.
• Don't work nonstop. There is always something to be done to promote more, write more, build more. Take time to get away from it. When you come back to the business, you will be fresh and will work more focused.
• Working during a rush. There are going to be times when the iron is hot and you will need to strike. Your life balance can take these swings from time to time. Just make sure the pendulum swings to the life side as well.
• Responsibility to keep up with the work. Just because you are running your own business doesn't mean you get to slack off. Make sure you aren't committing to too many things and can actually keep up. Slow and steady wins the race! Business building can be a marathon with little sprints built in from time to time.

Wrapping Up

Looking back over all these points, there are many more lessons I could go through. But, hopefully these lessons hit home and give you a realistic sense of being an online entrepreneur. Heed the warnings in here, do your research, learn everyday, and manage your time by getting organized. I would have loved to have nailed these tips down sooner in my online journey and side hustles. However, some are just learned through experience as we go along. For more reasons you should start side hustles, check out my post 5 Reasons You Should Start a Side Business.

What kind of experiences have you had in regards to these tips? Have you got any lessons to share that you've learned? I would love to chat about it in the comments below!

This post originally appeared on AkashSky.com. You can view the original article here.