The Entrepreneurial Spirit: Unique Ways to Make Money
The best way to embrace your entrepreneurial spirit is to start your own business online because it’s fast, easy, and inexpensive compared to starting an offline business.
Even if you have the good fortune to work in a company that allows you to use your own initiative to get the work done, this will not be as fulfilling as having your own business.
It’s easy enough to set up a website, accepting payments for your digital or dropship products through a service like Checkout.com, build a blog and a social media network, but the real challenge is figuring out how to get started.
Here are 3 tips to get started:
- Get rid of your employee mentality.
Anybody who has worked for somebody else adopts an employee mentality. Even if you’re a rugged individualist, you may be shocked at the difficulty it takes to be organized and disciplined when you’ve worked for a corporation for a number of years.
As an employee, you just follow directions on what to do. A job description defines your role.
Everything is figured out for you—what to wear, when to work, how to behave, and what to do when customers complain. As a reward for your agreement to work for a company, you are given a fixed income and benefits. It’s a safe bet, unless, of course, the company is falling apart and they are looking for people to jettison off the ship.
As you rise in the corporation, you get to make more decisions and your role gets more expansive. Now instead of doing things, you delegate most of the work. This is the highest level of autonomy you experience.
As an entrepreneur, all this safety goes away. Yes, you have plenty of freedom, but if it’s not properly directed you won’t be able to sustain your livelihood.
You won’t get far if you choose the route of self-employment but you’re still seduced by an employee mentality. So you have to make a firm decision to treat your own business as a real business and not as a hobby to do in the evenings and over the weekends. Even if you can’t immediately quit your job, you must be willing to leave it once your business earns enough to sustain you. Self-employment is
If you take a halfhearted approach to entrepreneurship, you won’t have the mental resilience to deal with its many challenges.
- Get clear on what you want to do.
There are limitless possibilities for starting your own business.
For example, you could make money in the following ways:
- Blogging. You can monetize this with affiliate offers and renting out advertising space.
- Selling on eBay. While you can start out selling stuff you find in garage sales, eventually you will want to buy in bulk from liquidation sales or deeply discounted suppliers.
- Building an Amazon store. You can choose to specialize in any number of categories, then find vendors and sell at a profit.
- Affiliate marketing. By placing ads, you can drive traffic to merchant sites, then receive affiliate payment from sales.
- Writing Kindle books. If you have subject matter expertise, you could make money selling Kindle books.
- Freelancing. You could sell your services as a freelance writer, photographer, website designer, etc.
- Multilevel marketing. If you find a product you like, you can sell it. Unlike affiliate marketing, you will be paid according to a compensation plan.
However, none of these methods will work for you if you just do it for the money.
Your best chances of success come from doing the following these three guidelines:
1. Doing what you know how to do. Do something that relates to your education and the work you have done for others as an employee.
2. Doing what you love to do. If you’re lucky, what you love to do matches what you know how to do. However, many people drift into jobs that they don’t like and stay stuck in that line of work because that’s all they can put on their resume. If, for example, you’ve worked in retail all your working life but have always wanted to be a writer, there is a mismatch. If this is your situation, your first step before launching your business is going back to school or taking online courses to acquire the skills that you need to earn an income doing what you love.
3. Doing what others are willing to pay money for. Chances are that you can find some way to monetize your passion. What do you do if you love bodybuilding, reading books, or travel? Although these may look like hobbies, you can find a way to monetize them. If you love bodybuilding, you could create a website to show people how to build muscle and burn fat, offering advice on diet, exercise, and supplements. If you love reading books, then you could create a website that does book reviews and earn an income as an Amazon affiliate. If you love to travel, you could create a blog about all your travel adventures and monetize the blog.
- Build your business model.
It’s highly unlikely that someone has not done what you plan to do. Research your business idea and buy books and online courses where people share their knowledge and experience about the type of business you’re thinking of launching. If possible, get a mentor.
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