Are You Tough Enough to Make Money Online?

This is a guest post by Melvin Dichoso who is a 3rd year college student of Computer Science who has been into internet marketing for close to a year now. He’s much more involved with affiliate marketing and writes his thoughts on his blog melvinblog.com. Be sure to check out his handsome face and subscribe to his feeds.

As has been said a million times, making money online isn’t really as easy as it looked when we first started out. When we first started researching the subject, we were all amazed at how people like Chow were making over $10,000 per month using the internet. Now that we know it’s actually damn hard to make money online and even harder to make a living from it, the question now is, “How Tough Are We?”

Most people will have a mindset such as, “Ok its hard, but i’ll try my best to succeed” I think it makes sense for us to analyze this statement a little bit. I have been into internet marketing for close to a year now and I’ve seen a lot of projects that entice me, only for the person behind the project to call it quits after a few months. I assume that maybe he didn’t feel the site met the initial expectation or maybe he needs money now and doesn’t want to risk any further. So I guess what it all boils down to is, are you tough enough to handle it when things go wrong, as they inevitably will?

I’m sure most people will say yes but then no one really knows what will happen next. I have been doing affiliate marketing for a long time and I am still being surprised by problems that I don’t anticipate. Some are just small things, but some are really hard to swallow. It is especially tough when you’re consistently losing money over a long period of time. Now is there any way for us to toughen ourselves up? Well hopefully we can learn from our mistakes but here are also some other points to consider that can help when the going gets tough.

1. Check Your Assets First – Most people jump into internet marketing head first and obviously they fail head first too. Before trying to dabble with anything online, be sure to check the obvious things. Do I have enough in my bank account to pay for Adwords? If I’m quitting my 9-5 job in order to start an online venture, will I have enough in my pocket to feed my family and supply our needs in the mean time? If the answer is yes then good luck.
2. Commitment in life – If you are a parent with kids to support, and you are starting out purely from scratch then its not going to be easy. Although its entirely possible for a parent to work at their internet ventures and still be a good parent, sometimes it can be hard to strike that balance between the online venture and family. We have to understand that any kind of work, whether its online or offline, can cause a lot of stress. I would like to present myself as an example. I am the eldest of the three and on days where I see a red on my affiliate campaigns, I tend to have shorter temper and of course its easy to become irritated and say hurtful things to those you love without realising it.
3. Your Health – Like I said above, starting an online business can be very stressful on our bodies. There are a lot of people that work so hard that they neglect their health. If you’re thinking about toughening yourself up in order to succeed online, you also need to be thinking first of being tough physically! It’s not a good idea to just say, “I need to work hard, so I’ll just skip lunch today”. A sound mind and body are essential to be able to work and think effectively.
4. Learning From Mistakes/Failures – This one has been stressed a lot in almost all blogs and books. But how hard is it to learn from our failures? In my own opinion, it tends to go one of two ways. A failure will either endow you with a little more wisdom and will strengthen your persistence or it will go the other way and break your spirit. Let’s say you have started a project with good potential but in the end you see that things are just not working out as you had planned. The added problem now is that you’re hurting financially so what now?

The idea of being ‘tough’ obviously varies from person to person. I will also depend on who you are and your personality traits. Becoming tough can be just as difficult and becoming rich! There are some days when even I have thought about just selling up and going back being just a student who loves to play on the PSP and watch NBA basketball. Oh well I haven’t done that so I’m still in the online world.

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