You Don’t Have To Quit Your Day Job

Quotes from : BusinessWeek.com
Image source : irishjobs

When the going gets tough and your boss is breathing down your neck, it’s easy to give in to the temptation of ditching your day job - especially when you already have a blog or website that’s earning a bit of money for you. However, you’ve got to realize that lots of things can happen (can go wrong) online. For example, a minor search engine screwup can mean your site is dropped from Search Engine Listings for anywhere from a week to a whole year. You could be penalized for an innocent infraction of SEO rules that result in the same. Either way, search engines won’t miss you. Neither will surfers. Your website is probably one in tens of millions. The one person who WILL feel the pain of such a screw up is YOU. If you’re going to depend on your online income, you’d best make sure things are running smooth and steady before you leave your day job.

You need a co-founder and some cheerleaders. If you can’t find two or three friends who are really excited to be beta testers for what you’re building, consider changing direction. Co-founders and cheeleaders are essential to keep you on track and working. At some point, you’ll hit a motivation wall. If you have a partner who is depending on you, you will find a way past that. If you don’t, you’ll often lose interest and let the project fizzle.

Accountability to co-founders is a great thing. So is having the responsibility of feeding a family.When you go into a business be it online of offline, having “too many back doors” is going to make it easy for you to quit when the going gets tough.

Have a boat-burning target. What will it take for everyone to dive in full time? Five thousand active users? 10,000 uniques a week? Funding? That should be a shared understanding. You don’t want to have one founder ready to go full time when another has reservations. This is easy to gloss over, but you should really nail it down.

I’ve know friends who got all excited that their website started to earn them $10 a day in Adsense revenue and they quit their jobs. Anyone who knows anything about Adsense (or any other online money making method) will tell you that there is NO such thing as “predictable and consistent earnings”. I’ve also known of many friends who have sheepishly rejoined the 9 to 5 working world when their online dreams crashed.

Understand that your first version is probably going to suck. It’s a long road. Almost all of the overnight successes you read about were slogging in the muck for five years before the night in question. Be prepared for a long journey and be surprised if your startup is an immediate hit. So with your first version, look for the tiny little flicker than you might be on to something to motivate you to make it better. Every week, make it better than last week and see if that flicker of light can be fanned into a tiny flame.

When I first started PositiveMoneyIdeas.com, lots of people dissed it as “fluff”. I didn’t give up. I kept slogging at it. I believe that building a website or online income stream is pretty much like playing with Lego blocks. You build stuff ONE BLOCK at a time. Those little blocks that you add every week may not look like much on their own, but when you look at the big picture, they all add up.

If you’re going to screw off at work (everyone does), spend it getting smarter about the stuff you don’t know. If you’re a coder, read a few design/usability blogs. Read up on what motivates angel investors. Research competitors and write down what they do well. Get brilliant at SEO, search engine optimization (it’s not hard). Write a lot more (blogging helps). Having said all that, do be aware of the fuzzy line between using your cooldown time at work for your startup and stealing time/resources from your employer. If you’re paid to do a job, you need to do it.

PositiveMoneyIdeas.com was created in the midst of my former company going through a tidal wave of financial problems. In the one year that the company was cutting jobs, I used whatever free time I had to research and test my websites. No, I never gave anything less than 100% to my company. My job came first but every other free minute was dedicated to learning and developing my websites.

Be sure you own your startup. I’ve had the fortune to work in places and companies where there was very clear ownership of “after hours” work. If ownership of your personal intellectual property is not clear, do not rely on the goodwill of your employer. Greed can do funny things to people, even if they were initially big supporters of your startup.

So the lesson here is to make sure you’ve got a viable, realistic chance of making a full-time living off your online endeavours before you leave your day-time job. In the meantime, whatever you earn from your websites should be a “bonus” to complement your day job salay.

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