Obtain Solutions

Business start up in internet marketing while still working for someone else

September 3rd, 2007

I really enjoyed a nice round of golf with my son this morning, having a day off work and making the most of a sunny morning before getting down to some of my own work this afternoon. 

It brought home to me the the importance of taking some time away from work and enjoying some leisure time, particularly with your kids, if you have any. Although, from the numbers on my score card you can tell that I haven’t been doing this often enough lately

The main reason being, like many other people starting out in business, I still have a job. I am lucky enough that it is part-time and shift work, which leaves me plenty of remaining time to spend any way I chose. As I have chosen to use most of this time developing my own business at the moment, it is highlighting some dilemmas and issues in the early stages of a business startup that I am sure I won’t have been the first to face.

The first is the time commitment. Working in two different “jobs” the hours can soon add up, and even part-time employment can still be fairly tiring, especially if it involves night work and then fitting in some work on your own business projects whenever you can, gets pretty wearing at times.

This can leave very little time for leisure, sleep and the more relaxing things in life. Which brings to mind two famous sporting phrases which although now cliched still hold a fair degree of truth “no pain, no gain” and “how much do you want it?” The answer to the latter in my case being - a helluva lot!  So I am willing to put up with a period of “pain”. As getting the lifestyle you want and to be able to only work if and when you want to, and even then only for yourself,  doesn’t come easy, if it did everyone would be doing it.

This leads me on to the next dilemma, which is that you get to a stage in a business where you have learned the methods and have the tools and you begin to see where it could possibly go. Yet, you are limited while there is only you working on it and things can progress slower than you would like.

In internet marketing a lot of the most effective methods to improve performance of websites and sales are to generate more traffic to them by putting a lot of quality, relevant content on your sites as well as out on the net, to link back to where you want the traffic to come. This content takes a lot of time to generate as it has to be higly original to be effective, as I discussed in an earlier post, and therfore is very time consuming to produce.

Like most people there are only 24 hours in my day, so you get to a stage where you know that to really take off you have to start outsourcing a lot of the content generation, particularly the writing, to freelancers. This, of course, costs money which in the early stages you ain’t making a lot of yet. I find this more frustrating than the time issue, because at least you have more control over how you spend your time and when you really need a day off….just take it. But you can’t spend money that you don’t have, well acually you can, but who wants to be indebted to the banks heavily from the outset? Certainly not me! Although obviously looking for some good term finance is a step that most businesses have to do at some point to get the boost that they need. Or even, if the press are to be believed, to very poor term finance. As rumour has it that a very famous panel member on Dragons Den was maxed out on 3 credit cards and nearly lost his house before it all came good! 

John

www.TheGardenLovers.com

www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com

Entry Filed under: affiliate marketing, business start up, internet marketing, online marketing