There Is Something All Successful Online Entrepreneurs Have in Common

Photo by Hamed Saber

No, it’s not that they’re all rich.

When you follow the lives of these guys you realize that at some point they:

1. Came up with a good business idea — or stole somebody else’s.
2. Acted upon it.
3. And ultimately, made money from it.

It seems very simple, right? So, why can’t you do it?

After all, we all think of things that could make us money, sometimes even involuntarily, everyday.

I can’t find any good info about this on Google. Hey! Maybe if I started a small niche AdSense website based on the subject it would rank well and earn me some nice passive income.

And we certainly think everyday about how others’ ideas could perform better.

Hmm, the content on this site is pretty cool. It’s a shame their design is so bad. Some SEO could also help. If improved this site surely would be a hit.

I guess almost all online entrepreneurs, successful or unsuccessful, realize those things and think about them when they browse other sites. It’s not hard to realize when there’s an opportunity to make some money online, neither it is to realize where a lacking site could be improved.

So, if it’s not hard to do, we can’t blame the failure of so many aspiring web entrepreneurs on coming up with ideas. Yes, you could have thought about HOTorNOT, YouTube or Digg before someone else did. But even if you did, would you have made money from that idea?

What makes successful entrepreneurs successful is not coming up with ideas. It is acting upon them. That’s what they all have in common: the habit of taking actions.

We live in a world of laziness. No one wants to get out of their comfort zone. Few people transform their good ideas into a business, be it a big one a small one. A niche AdSense website usually takes no more than a couple of days to be set up. An information website — also know as a blog — takes less than five minutes to be set up. And those are all internet businesses you can add to your portfolio. How big or small will they will be is up to you.

Photo by rougerouge

But you can’t just wait for the stars to align before you start performing the actions needed to transform your idea into a profitable business. When successful online entrepreneurs realize that an idea is a winner they just grab it. Otherwise the idea will become just another wasted opportunity.

Tim Ferriss, author of the bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, says in his book:

It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.

Coming with great business ideas certainly plays an important role in determining the success of your career as an online entrepreneur, but those ideas will come naturally, and you probably already have lots of them if you think about ways to make money online.

Ultimately the actions you take — and the ones you don’t — are what makes the difference. Certainly someone with a mediocre idea who works hard at implementing it will have much more success than someone with a brilliant idea who never uses it.

The path is easy: have an idea, act upon it, make money.

The problem is most people, by nature, are lazy when it comes to doing things they’re not used to. So the second part of that equation is delayed forever, and most of the time we never get to see it put into practice.

Quoting Mr. Ferriss again:

If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually”, just do it and correct course along the way.

If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, make money and enjoy a good life, you better turn all that laziness into meaningful actions.

So, what have you done today to become richer tomorrow?

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