Too busy to succeed or how to start a side business anyway

You want to start an Online Business but you have work, family and other commitments that are taking up all your available time. You feel like you can never really get right to it. Deep down inside you know that you really want to start your own thing, one day maybe. If time permits.

This approach will lead you to never ever really get started. You have to change it! Let’s look at a few ideas that will help you to change.

Work in and around your regular work

This is probably one of the most important practical tips to immediately apply. You have to make a habit out of using regular times around your day job.

For example always work one hour before your day job. Use your lunch break. Dedicate one hour after your regular work.

The key here is to do it as regularly and persistent as you do your day job. No excuses! No distractions!

Remember Parkinson’s law

Maybe you have never heard of Parkinson’s law before but it simply boils down to this:

“Things will take as long as you will have time for them”

In other words, work for your business tends to expand to always fill the time you allocate for its completion. You can take benefit of knowing about that. Just set your deadlines close enough and you have a high chance of actually meeting them. As long as you are focused enough.

Use your weakness as a strength

“I can’t do this because of this and that… etc”. You know all these kinds of excuses and you can easily get bogged down in these. But that’s the wrong approach. Whenever you have any kind of limitation think about how this can possibly be used as a strength.

• You don’t have as much time as someone doing this as a full time job.
• You don’t have a team of writers behind you to support
• You don’t have all the financial resources you wished you had to reinvest into your business

BUT you do have one huge advantage: Freedom from the income that your business earns. You are not dependant on your (new) side business. You can still live (comfortably) from your main or day job.

So take advantage out of that: Annoy the crap out of full time entrepreneurs who absolutely need their income. In practical terms this could simply mean

Create high quality resources for free that others are charging for.

This way you can outrank other people by making use of your advantage.

Get to the money as quickly as you can

Quite contrary to the previous point money is important nonetheless.

Don’t cheat yourself or your customers by putting out bad quality content and expecting money for it. Quality comes always first. But work towards getting money as quickly as you can. If your business earns the first 5$/€ (or whatever currency you are using) in the first half year it’s excellent.

Focus on your most valuable activity only

Whenever you dedicate some time to your business make a habit out of asking yourself this one question

What is the most valuable thing to do now?

You might really feel busy by doing things like

• Drawing a fancy logo for your new website
• Redesigning your business card
• Doing yet another partial redesign to one of your websites

But you have to always ask yourself: “Isn’t this just a distraction from my actual work?”

So what is your main point to focus on?

You simply have to “Publish great content”

Anything else comes second! Learn to not waste your most precious resource - Your time.

Prepare for the long run

Don’t give up too early. This is key. You will never be successful overnight. For a website project to literally “take off” and be successful it needs time.

Commit yourself for two years and use each of these 24 months to improve and work on your business.

It is actually a very common thing to be super excited at first. You really spend every free minute on your new project. But after the first one or two months have passed you slowly get into a mode of asking yourself more and more often “Am I really working on the right thing?”. Or “I don’t see any real progress, why am I spending so much time on this? Shouldn’t I do something else instead?”

The common answer to all of these questions should be simply this: Keep going, no matter what.

It’s very normal to see not much real progress in your first months. Don’t let this influence your decissions. Never even think of giving up or changing your course dramatically before at least 6 months have passed.

Only once the first 6 months are over and you really have constantly worked on your topic it’s time for a small status review. Make yourself aware of areas that need even more focus while at the same time other areas can do just fine with less effort.