tips to success in online business

Always use all the available metrics to see where you are with your project. Dont be fooled by your imagination nor let those wishful thinking episodes get in your way. Measure your impact. Watch your money, trends, team, partners and see whats happening. Keep your eyes opened and be ready to cut if things are not looking as you would expect. Better sooner than later.

Sometimes, your projects wont work. Accept it. Even more, manage them carefully. Closing a project is a skill in itself, a skill that youll have to master. Each closed project may and it should give you resources for the next one. Just leaving debris floating around in the web universe will not make you popular, on the contrary. Not to mention the hidden costs of keeping those projects around.

Your product or process will be useless without a backing community. It might be the next best thing since sliced bread, but if you dont have a reasonable pack of people vouching for it by using it and promoting it every day, that product is as good as dead. Building a community first is one of the awkwardness of the online field, when you have to build a positive reaction around your product even before launching it for real.

Dont assume you know everything. Allow yourself to be curious about stuff that looks interesting or intriguing. Creating good online products or processes is often the result of an unstoppable curiosity about why is this like this and not the other way around?. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but that really has nothing to do with your projects. Really.

Carefully write down every step you need for your project. Create milestones. Respect them. Try to predict any potential danger and take it into account. Planning thoroughly your projects will be the best service you can make to yourself and to your team.

You already have high goals, all you need is some discipline. The bigger your internal discipline, the higher your chances to respond well to market changes. Being disciplined wont make the field less hectic, youll still be walking on very thin ice, but youll be able to react faster to external change.

Each project has an excitement stage. Its the beginning, the novelty, the thrills of making something happening. It will not be like this for ever. Many entrepreneurs are abandoning projects after this initial stage, and thats a pity. Just use the fuel you get from this enthusiasm but still walk the path when the thrill is gone.

After the excitement come the real action. This is where you actually start to implement the processes in your business. Its a long and sometimes tedious interval. In my experience, the involvement is the most expensive part, in terms of time consumed, skills and money. This is where you build your business, stay there.

This is where you start drawing lines and do the math. This is most of the time the moment you know if the investment was good or bad. Its fundamental and you should not skip this under any circumstances. Be sure any project have a measuring stage, in which you can decide the resource allocation.

It might be overrated lately, I agree, but social media really works. As an observer of the online phenomenon in the last ten years I can tell you for sure that this IS a revolution. Much slower than its perceived or presented, but there is a real shift from consuming information to interacting in larger communities. Social media is a place where you really want to be if you want to do business on the internet.