Financial freedom.  Being your own boss.  More time with family and friends.  You have your own personal reasons as to why you want to start your own business and work online from home.   According to the business insider there are more than 644 million active websites out there.  Regardless of your reasons for wanting to have your own business, you need to prepare yourself for the best chance of being successful.

Make a Plan of What You’re Going to Do When You Fail

You’re going to make mistakes.  There will be things that are going to happen that are going to set you back and frustrate you.  You should prepare yourself now that it’s okay!  You’ll learn from them and things will be better. If you make a plan for what you’re going to do now while you’re still excited, it will make it so much easier to pick yourself up and dust yourself off when you do make those inevitable mistakes.

Understand Why You’re Here

What’s your focus for starting your own business?  What motivates you and makes you want to succeed?  When you sit down to work every day, you’ll want to keep that focus in your mind.  That will help to keep you motivated when you don’ really feel like moving forward.

Stay Organized

The earlier you get your systems in place, the better off you’re going to be.
Start by outlining a schedule for yourself.  When are you going to work on your business?  When are you going to do other things?  Don’ forget to schedule breaks for yourself.  It’s important to be able to step away so that you can stay refreshed.
Schedule time for your kids.  When you’re working from home and have children, it can be difficult to get things done.  If you are able to schedule “family time” where you completely focus on your children, it makes it much easier for them to understand when you have to work.  I work when my children are in school and then have dedicated time with them after school until bedtime to spend with them.  Once they are in bed, I can get back to work.

Having my time structured in this manner allows me not feel guilty when I’m working and may not be giving 100% focus to my children and vice versa.  This also helps to make me more productive as I know that there are only specific times that I have to work.
How do you best work?  Do you write things out before moving them over to your computer?  Do you go straight from your brain to your keyboard?  Make sure to take this into account when you’re working in your home office.

Have a system in place for how and when you will be creating your posts.  Do the upfront work to determine what kinds of posts you will be writing and when.  Set some time aside to create a monthly (or quarterly or annual) posting calendar.  This will make you more efficient when you sit down to work each day as you’ll understand exactly what needs to be done.

Set Goals

Where do you want to be with your business three months from now?  Six months from now?  A year from now?  If you don’t understand where it is that you want to go and what you want to be when you grow up, how can you be expected to get there?  Is this something that you want to be a part time thing?  Do you want to be able to work from home full time?  How much money will it take for you to be comfortable?  Are there things that you want to do with your family that your business will allow to happen?

Your goals shouldn’t just be related to money.  If you have personal goals that are a byproduct of what your business will be create, include those.  Want to be able to send your kids to college with the money from the business?  Maybe you want to travel the world?
Don’t be afraid to set your goals high.  Make them big enough to scare yourself a little.  Get out of your comfort zone.  Remember you’re competing with millions of other people who have goals just like you.  How are you going to achieve your dreams?

Find a Space

Find a place that you can work everyday.  Even if you don’t have the space for a full home office, try to carve out a space that’s dedicated for you to work on your business.  For the longest time, that place for me was on a coffee table in my living room.  It wasn’t a huge space, but I had a place that I consistently went to work and it helped me to stay in the work mindset when I was ready to start.

Read…..Alot

When you’re working for yourself, research is going to be one of your biggest challenges.  You’ll want to research content topics you want to write about, keywords that you’ll want to use.  What are other people saying about your subject or business.  What are the trends in your field.  You’ll be in a constant state of learning.

Read what the successful people in your industry are doing.  Read what the people who have made mistakes have shared about what they did wrong.  You’ll learn from both and it will help you to make your business better.  If you’re not writing, you should be reading.

Learn How to Do Things Yourself

If you have the resources to be able to outsource some of the work that you do, that’s great!  However, outside of the more technical aspects of programming and graphic design, I would strongly suggest you try to learn at least the basics of what you’ll need to do before handing it off to someone else.  This is your baby.  Even if you are going to be hiring someone to help you get the work done, you’ll at least want to have passing knowledge of what they are going to be doing for you.

Give Yourself Some Time

If you’re looking to build a business that’s going to be successful overnight, then you’ve already set yourself up for failure.  Remember there are 644 million other sites out there.  They’ve likely been around longer than you have.  You’ve got to give yourself a chance to break through the noise and make your voice stand out.  Are there those who are able to do this is a short period of time?  Sure!  However, if you prepare for the long-term and work hard, you won’t be disappointed.

Have a Place to Keep All Your Ideas…But Don’t Feel Like You Have to do Anything with them Immediately

When you first start your business, you likely have a million ideas going through your head.  You have ten ideas that you’d like to implement tomorrow.  Having all of these ideas is great, but let’s focus!  If you try to immediately implement every idea that comes to mind, you’re going to end up with a bad case of Shiny Ball Syndrome.  When those ideas come to mind have a place to save them and then forget them.  Keep focused on what you’re doing and when you’ve finished one project and are ready for a new idea, they’ll be there.

Don’t Beat Yourself up if You Don’t Get Something Done

You’ve planned everything to a T, but unfortunately life happens and you may not have gotten to everything on your checklist.  Perhaps one of your children got sick or you have another emergency, or maybe you’re just tired and simply need a break.  Don’t beat yourself up about it.  It happens to the best of us.  The important thing is to pick things back up just as soon as you can.  Keep moving the ball forward.

Hold Yourself Accountable

While you shouldn’t beat yourself up for not getting things done, you also have to be able to hold yourself accountable.  Don’t allow yourself to use your kids or friends or family as an excuse for why you can’t get things done.  This is your business.  At the end of the day, the buck stops with you.

It’s All About Momentum – Take Action

Doing a tiny bit of something is better than doing a whole lot of nothing.  When you’re building your business online, you’ll be able to see this as you create your site.  Once you’ve selected your domain name and set up the initial site, that’s something you don’t have to do again.  When you write a post, it will be there forever.  You never have to write it again.

You can move on and concentrate on other things.  Don’t be paralyzed by perfection.  You can always make updates later.  Getting something 80% there and being able to complete five tasks can be much better than having one post that’s 100%.  You can always improve it later.

Reward Yourself

All work and no play makes for a very dull girl.  Celebrate your milestones.  If you get your website set up, take yourself out to dinner.  If you’ve gotten a certain number of visitors, take some time to celebrate.  I find that celebrating even the smallest of wins helps to keep me motivated to move forward.

Ask For Help

Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.  Ask for help.  We can’t be successful in a vacuum.  If you reach out, it’s amazing how much people are willing to lend you a helping hand.  Something you might spend six hours researching on your own might be resolved in two minutes simply by asking for your help.  I’ve made that mistake plenty of times.

Help Others

Be willing to help others who reach out for assistance.  You can establish friendships that will benefit you both personally and professionally for years to come.

Find a Community of Like Minded People

There are numerous forums and communities out there of people in your business space.  Connect with these people.  These communities can be a lifesaver when you’re feeling frustrated and ready to celebrate your successes with you.

Write

Share your thoughts.  Let people know what you think about things.  If you’re doing a product review, give your honest opinion.  Try to write consistently, whether it’s once a day or once a week.  All those posts that you create will eventually add up.

Do Not Give Up

Hang in there!  You’ve planned for what you’re going to do when you have failures.  Put that plan into action.  If you’re especially frustrated, take a break and come back to things.  Just don’t give up.  99% of businesses fail.  There are millions of sites that are simply abandoned each year.  Don’t be one of them.  Stick with it, you can do this!

Share Your Tips

What tips do you have to help you be successful?  How do you stay motivated?  We’d love to hear from you.  Wishing you the greatest of successes.

If you’d like to learn more about the community that has helped me to build my business online and be successful, please feel free to read more about them here.