1. Save Money By Doing What You Can For Your Online Business By Yourself – Although it would be nice to rely on others to handle your online business, you can save A LOT by doing most of the work yourself.

And even if you don’t decide to keep doing the work to run your business yourself, at least do so at the BEGINNING. The beginning of your first online business is often where the most confusion and uncertainty arise. Being in complete control of everything, especially at the start, can ease stress and prevent you from becoming “a wreck” emotionally.

2. Stay Up To Date With The Latest Advertising Options – Right now, blogging and guest blogging is HOT. You can net tons of new customers and sales leads if you know how to do it right. But in the future, this could change. The Internet has a way of being dynamic, so we never know what the future holds. Taking time out of your day to explore new avenues/ways of advertising is a smart idea.

3. Listening To Customer Feedback / Taking Action Is Important – Not all businesses post surveys for their customers, or participate in the betterment of their business through customer feedback.

If more online businesses did, there would be more solutions and a lot less complaints. We’re not saying bend to the customers every whim, we’re just saying that “keeping an open ear” to customer feedback makes business sense.

As an example, if you sold honey, and for some reason 60% of your customers started requesting you add “spiced” honey options, then wouldn’t you be motivated to do so?

4. Know How To Manage Your Business And Personal Life – As an online business owner, one of the most frequently faced issues is having time for a personal life. While spending  quality time” with friends and family is important, the fact that you own an online business shouldn’t in itself, cause a problem with that.  

Just like anything else, your online business exists as itself. So, never should you look at your online business as an extension of you, because you and your online business are two different things.

A healthy outlook that many people who own an online business have, is to operate the business “a step back” from the fact they own the business at all. They conduct their behavior just as they would a working employee for someone ELSES company.

Point being, just because you own an online business, doesn’t mean every decision you make  should be designed to fit you personally and comfortably. There have been many first time business owners who’ve tried to design their business and the way it functions around their preferences and comfort level, JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN.

It is hard to make sacrifices in your online business life when you don’t want to, and you’re the one in charge. A cool trick to remember is that business is business, and personal is personal, and that doesn’t change just because your the owner.

5. Always Plan Ahead And Have “Disaster” Plans Ready To Follow – Another frequently experienced problem for people who own online businesses, especially first time business owners, is failing to plan ahead and dealing with the stress when something goes wrong. Do you have “disaster plans” ready to follow in the event something goes wrong with YOUR online business?

Using an erasable white board as a tool, or pen/notebook paper, “mapping out” all possible scenarios you could face helps a lot. And being aware that many of the decisions you make with your online business, such as expansion, adding new employees, buying items in bulk to save money, etc., ALMOST ALWAYS has an effect on future events.

Alternatively, you could draw a tree with branches, and use captions to make notes. Each branch of your tree represents a decision you’ve made. Each twig (with additional captions) growing from the branch represents a “cause and effect” event that resulted from that decision, be it good or bad.

Example : Tree Branch 1 is the time you used part of your online business profits to make a 1 time purchase of a new warehouse to hold a supply of tractor beams. The twigs growing from the branch represent each new good or bad thing that you know happened as a result of buying the warehouse.

Anyway, you get the idea…

Being Smart With Your Online Business Starts Here!

By Haroon Qureshi – CEO and Founder of the E Com Experts