Are You Building a Business or a Hobby?

A big part of generating a consistent income online is taking consistent actions.  Spending time every day working on your business.  Yet far too many people let how they feel at any given time to determine what they do.

While starting your online business, you’ll likely have other responsibilities – a day job, a family, commitments to your community, a home to run. Time is a premium and often the consistent actions required to build your successful online business are edged out by “life”.

For example, you have great plans to work on your business on Monday night when you get home from work.  But Monday at the office was hectic, you had to take the cat to the vet after work, and your kids had soccer practice. By the time you wrap up the day it’s 9:00pm and all you want to do is sink into your comfy chair and turn on the TV.

It’s at this point a moment of decision occurs.  Write a blog post?  Work on the articles for submittal to Ezine Articles?  Or… take the night “off” and sink into the easy chair.  After all, you’ve worked hard all day, you deserve it.

Unfortunately many people will choose the latter – and push those business tasks off to the next day.  Only the next day something else happens that prevents you from working on your business again.  Before you know it, it’s the weekend and you’re in catch up mode – trying to cram a full weeks worth of work on your business in on Saturday.

And while you may think that working on your business for six hours each Saturday is equivalent to putting in an hour a day in the evenings – it’s not.

Because you’re not training your mind to think of your business as a business. Instead  you are sending the message to your subconscious that it’s a hobby.  A hobby that gets fit in “when there is time.” And that’s a powerful determinant of the results you’ll get.

When consulting with my entrepreneurial clients, one of the first things I tell them is this:

“Treat your business like a business and it will pay you like a business. Treat your business like a hobby and it will cost you like a hobby.”

Consistent daily actions are the secret to your success. Spending an hour each day focused solely on your business will guarantee greater results then cramming it all in on the weekend and being a weekend entrepreneur.

In addition to sending a strong message to your brain and your subconscious that this is a business, it also gets you in the habit of thinking about and working on your business on a daily basis – even when you’re not actively working on it.

When you work on your business daily, your  mind will be creating new ideas, problem solving, coming up with clever new headlines, and writing your next info product even when you’re not at your desk.

Don’t feel like writing that blog post on Monday? Do it anyway. Think today isn’t the day to track your sales? Do it anyway. Cataloging and listing inventory got you down? Do it anyway… Consistent actions produce consistent results.

• The business-minded entrepreneur spends time each day working on their business.
• The hobbyist works if and when they feel like it.
• The business-minded entrepreneur tracks their market, sales, and results and learns from that information.
• The hobbyist takes a shot in the dark and hopes for the best.
• The business-minded entrepreneur knows exactly where their business stands at all times.
• The hobbyist has “a feel” for how things are going.
• The business-minded entrepreneur knows that it takes time, work, tweaking, testing, and learning to build a profitable long-term business.
• The hobbyist wants it to happen “right now” and when they get bored or frustrated, they abandon the “business” to move on to the next one—unfortunately, usually with the same results.

Consistent daily actions work like compound interest in your business.  Taken on their own, a little bit each day may not seem like a lot. But when compounded over 5 or 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year- you will be amazed at what you’ve accomplished.

So the next time you’re tempted to forgo a business task because you’re tired or feel like doing something else – remind yourself that there’s a lot more at stake here than the accomplishing the daily task.   Remind yourself that your actions are the difference between building a business or a hobby.