EPP 095: Five Biggest Lies We Tell Our Entrepreneurial Selves

In this week’s episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast we are talking five big lies that we tell our entrepreneurial selves.

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Starting our own business sounds amazing. We get all excited about the idea of controlling our schedules, deciding when we work and when we take a vacation and of course let’s not forget all the money we’ll be making. However, that excitement often wears off when we actually start thinking about our new business adventure. Many of us will use different strategies to sabotage our own success. I know this sounds unreasonable but I’ve met enough beginner entrepreneurs and I have my fair share of experience to assure you that this is the hard truth.

In this episode I am addressing the five biggest lies (in my opinion) that many beginner entrepreneurs tell themselves in order to avoid success. Scroll up and press the PLAY button to listen to this episode.

5 Biggest Lies We Tell Our Entrepreneurial Selves

1. I need to have a perfect business.

When starting an online business most people want to launch a perfect business. They need a perfect logo, perfect website, perfect marketing strategy, perfect niche, perfect product, etc. Guess what? Perfect doesn’t exist. The worst part is while we’re trying to figure out how to create a perfect website, we’re losing months if not years of our valuable time. My advice is, just start. Set up that site and with time you’ll be able to make it look perfect or almost. Start marketing however you can while learning better strategies. You will always be able to improve but you won’t be able to get your time back.

2. It’s 2017 so it’s too late to start an online business, a podcast, a YouTube channel, etc.

This mentality was present in year 2000, 2005, 2010 and it surely is present now. When I was starting with affiliate marketing in 2007 I was feeling the same way. This is a big lie mostly because there is an constant flow of new internet users, hence new potential customers and visitors. There are new apps, channels and blogs popping up every single day and many of them succeed. Sure, some do fail but they don’t fail because it’s “too late”. They usually fail because of the lie #4 which I’ll be getting to in a few moment.

3. I can’t possibly compete with the big players in my industry.

Another lie that many of use in order to procrastinate. You might take a look at the first page of Google for your main keyword phrase and you’ll notice listings from sites like Amazon and Walmart. This might seem frustrating and you might think to yourself that you could never possibly outrank these huge corporations. This is false. The main reason these websites rank so well is simply because they are old, have high authority and because no one is serving better content. For example if you’re looking for a specific product and Google gives you an Amazon page as a result it’s simply because there are no better results to show (yet). Google would love to display a great article on that item however no one has written such article. This is your chance to outrank the giants. Produce better content than they do which isn’t impossible if you’re willing to work. Check out “How to Create Viral and Profitable Blog Posts” episode where I explain how I am able to outrank Entrepreneur, Forbes and Inc.

4. I haven’t made money in the first few months, I will never succeed.

This is the lie #4. Even in our time and age a lot of people jump into online entrepreneurship with the idea of succeeding overnight. I try to talk about the success time-frame as often as I can on this blog and podcast. Starting an online business is not a magic shortcut to riches. Just like any tradition business it takes time, effort and consistency in order to succeed. Some might see their first income within weeks while other might work for 2 years without seeing any huge results. However, those who stick to it and work on their business consistently end up succeeding. If you’ve been working on your blog for 6 months and haven’t made a penny – ask yourself why you aren’t seeing results. Have you set your goals? Are you tracking the results? Are you actually working hard or are you spending time looking for perfection? Try to figure out how you can improve your strategy but most importantly, don’t quit.

5. The success will last forever.

Oh the dreaded comfort zone… I’ve fallen into that trap more than once. Imagine you got your online business income to $3,000 per month, or $5k or $20k and you’re feeling great. You have achieved your monetary goals (at least for now) and you’ve been able to automate your business in such way that it doesn’t require you being there most of the time. This is when we tend to romanticize. Is this the holy grail? The passive income? Well, let’s just go on an endless vacation and never work again. At some point you realize that your product is no longer being sold or that you got hacked or that your Adwords account got banned and everything starts getting blurry. Your income starts dropping significantly and you start panicking.

Before any of that happens, you need to be aware of that comfort zone trap and you need to be aware that nothing lasts forever.

There is quite a bit more information in the actual podcast episode so if you’ve been reading until this point maybe it’s time to scroll up and press the play button 😉

Now that you know the 5 lies that you need to be aware of, go ahead and start building your own online business!

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If you have any comments or question feel free to post them in the comment box below and I’ll reply to every single comment 😉

– Alex