Let me know what you think – do you recognize yourself in any of these symptoms?

• Career transitions – how to move from here to there in your life
• Online Success – and what it means to you
• The biggest mistakes people make online
• The differences between the “haves” and “have-nots” online
• How women market differently
• And a break-through idea on vertical versus horizontal marketing

Listen to the program online.

 

Right-click to download the mp3.

And here’s the website we talked about.

When you work for someone else it’s easy to figure out how much you make. They tell you! But when you’re self-employed it’s a little harder.

There are complex formulas you can use to calculate how much to charge for your professional services, for example. And there are guidelines on when to raise your fees. But that all assumes you have clients to pay those fees.

What about those of us who sell products online? It takes time to set up a site and even longer to market it. How can you calculate what you’re getting paid? Sure, you may have another $100 in your pocket. But if it took you 20 hours to get that $100 – you might consider a fast food career.

What we really want to know is – what is the Return on Investment (ROI) on our time? And to do that we first need to know where our breakeven point is.

Here’s a quick way to do the math:

1. Decide on your hourly rate. For example, if you want to make $100,000 per year, that’s about $50 per hour. ($100,000 divided by 2000 work hours – that’s 50 weeks x 40 hours.)

2. Calculate the number of hours you plan to invest in creating and marketing the site. For example, for a recent affiliate name capture project, I calculated it would take
 - 1 hour to create the mini site
 - 2 hours to write a special report to go on the site
 - 1 hour to write an article to market the site
 - 1 hour to write the autoresponder follow-up series
 - 1 hour to set up a pay-per-click campaign.
That’s a total of 6 hours.

3. Determine the number of units you will need to sell to cover your hourly costs. For this project I was referring visitors to an ebook. For each ebook sold through my affiliate link I earn $15. My “labor” cost to set up the site was $300 (6 hours x $50), so I need to sell 20 copies of the ebook in order to break even.

Once I have this information I’m in a position to decide whether or not to proceed with my project. In order to do this I ask a series of questions:
 - Am I likely to sell that number of copies?
 - How long will it take to break even?
 - Could I outsource this project and recover my investment more quickly?
 - What else can I sell on the backend to make this more profitable?
 - Is this the fastest and best ROI of all the projects I am considering?
And the questions could go on.

The bottom line is that many online entrepreneurs work aimlessly on one project after another, never stopping to consider the ROI on their investment. You would never do that with your 401K. Don’t do it with your time. Know what you can reasonably expect to make and how much you’re getting paid to build your Online Success.

As entrepreneurs our tendency is to take on all the detailed work in our business. Primarily because it’s what we know how to do. And secondarily because we’re sure no one else can it as well as we can.

But what role should you be playing in your online business?

There are three major functional areas in online success:

 - Decision making – things that only you, the business owner can do

 - Marketing activities – which you can hire out

 - Technical activities – which you can hire out

You need to understand what each role does, but not necessarily how it is done.

Let’s use designing a web site as an example.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is people who are experts in their field spending the time and frustration trying to learn web design. For $100 you can pay a web designer to set that up for you – then you can get on with the process of making money. While you are uniquely qualified to decide what content should be on the site, any web designer could implement that for you.

Creating web pages is like any other profession. Doing it well takes professional skills.

In your business, do you do all of your own taxes or do you hire an accountant? Do you write all of your own contracts or do you hire a lawyer? Do you create all of your marketing materials or do you hire a professional designer? The same thinking applies to designing, maintaining and marketing your website.

Do you want to spend the time and effort it takes to learn web design? Some will say “yes” and learn a new hobby. Others will say “no way” and hire a professional. Others will say “I have no choice at this time” and do the best they can. Some will hire a professional to set up the site, then do the maintenance themselves.

The important thing is to recognize that when you decide to do it yourself, you need to be willing to spend the time and effort it takes to learn it. And that time *will* detract from the time you can spend thinking about your business, making decisions, and working ON the business.

Remember what business you are in. Unless you have a strong desire to learn the intricacies of HTML (the code for web pages), don’t bother to spend your time learning web design.

Instead, become a good manager of your website. Most business owners are better served learning the what’s and why’s of good online business and leaving the how-to’s to the professionals.

Doing the actual marketing activities, such as submitting your articles to directories, building link exchanges, managing your pay-per-click campaigns are also detractors from your major role as the visionary and decision-maker for the business. All of these activities can be hired out to someone else.

Can you afford to hire all this help? In most cases, yes! In fact, if you calculate how much you can make per hour, using your unique expertise (working with clients, creating a product, offering a teleseminar), you’ll find you can hire a lot of help at $10-20 per hour – and actually increase your profitability!

And while we’re talking about hiring help, look at the time you spend on personal tasks that could be hired out. For example, if you spend 5 hours per week cleaning your house, you could hire someone to do that for you at $10 per hour. So you could “buy back” 20 hours of your time for only $200 per month. What could you do with 20 hours dedicated to your business? How much could you earn in that amount of time?

Deciding on your role in your business is one of your responsibilities as the business owner. When you choose to work ON your business, rather than IN your business, your profitability will soar!

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Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet strategist who helps experts leverage their expertise into Online Success. She shares time-saving productivity tactics at http://OrganizeYourOnlineBusiness.com