Nicolás García: The Truth of Starting an Online Business

October 7, 2010

Let's get straight to the point. If you are reading this blog, it is because you are already an entrepreneur, web entrepreneur, businessman, SEM specialist, whatever.

Therefore, you may have already realized that not everything is as easy in online business as described by the "gurus" who supposedly receive checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. (I say supposedly because if you look closely at the famous millionaire adsense checks that travel the network they are the sum of several accumulated months. Well, that does not detract from the man either.)

FORGET wanting to start a site by buying a new domain, installing a wordpress blog and filling it with adsense banners and amazon affiliates. No gentlemen, this is no longer 1999.

FORGET of pretending to earn thousands of dollars a day working just a couple of hours lying in a hammock looking at girls in bikinis in a hotel in Hawaii.

FORGET from buying an ebook with the "last secret to becoming a millionaire with adsense overnight" or scripts that automate the publication on your blog while you just count the bills. Oh, that you can forget about.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you believed that the life of online entrepreneurs is as fun as it seems to work at Google or in pajamas from your bed or in slippers and shorts with your feet in the sand of an aphrodisiac beach in the Philippines, you are wrong. Unless it's Markus Frind, founder of Plenty of Fish, they're sooo wrong.

Online businesses are the same (or more) complicated, difficult and time consuming than any other offline business.

Let's use blogs as an example. What if blogs were magazines? Writing articles, copying some others and filling the magazine with publicity is not enough.

Readers will not come to your house to ring the doorbell and request a copy of the magazine. They need a whole system of publication, promotion, distribution and yet it would not be all that will lead them to fame and will bring them millions of dollars. To cover expenses and begin to have income they need to maintain a constant rate of publication and not only that, but also a constant rate of the quality of their articles.

Many people get excited about the idea of becoming an Internet millionaire by reading so many success stories in magazines and other blogs. He starts by putting his best in his first 3 articles, he comments them among his friends, on Facebook, on Twitter, but in the second week he checks his statistics and has only received 20 visits (of which 12 are from him or herself who accessed from several computers and the others from friends whom he practically forced to enter) and has only billed US$ 0.08.

There they automatically start publishing every other day, then once a week and then they leave the blog cursing the Internet, Google and the damn magazine that published such a lie. What you don't know is that nowadays it takes minimally a year of constant maintenance, good articles, excellent SEO and promotion, countless hours of work, many sleepless nights, constant research, updating and optimization.

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This article was a collaboration of Nicolás García, founder of Yiipu, a new social network aimed at making friends that share your same tastes.