How long does it take to grow an online business? Of course this depends on a lot of things. It depends on the type of business, how many hours you put in and how you advertise your business. There’s many kinds of online business too. There’s affiliate marketing and there’s drop shipping. You can own an e-commerce store or build a blog website. So depending on the particular business you choose, it can vary across the board.
Just with the affiliate business model alone there’s many opportunities to sell different things. You can sell physical products from websites like Amazon, for example. Or, you can sell digital products which typically pay larger commissions per sale. There are many affiliate marketing business models which you can use; physical products, digital products, subscription products and high ticket products.
The business model you choose will have a large bearing on how long it takes and how successful you are. One of the main problems for online businesses is creating a regular flow of new customers, regardless of the business model you choose.
How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business? Traffic
With an online business you need to focus on creating value and acquiring new customers. An affiliate business is one of the simplest business models you can use. With affiliate marketing you simply send customers to the products they want. When you make a sale, you earn a commission based on the sale. There’s many ways you can attract customers online:
- Blogging – creating lots of content on a website can allow you to attract website traffic for free
- Paid advertising – is far quicker than blogging but obviously more expensive
- Lead generation – list building is done from a website and affiliate products can be sold to a growing list of subscribers through email marketing. See the power of email marketing.
- Social media – there’s many paid and unpaid social media marketing methods you can adopt to build a business online.
Each different method of attracting website visitors and customers will vary. So the time it takes to build an online business will vary according to the strategy you adopt. With paid marketing methods and through building an email list, you’ll get much faster results typically than with a slower method such as blogging.
With blogging you can build a business over several years but with PPC (pay per click) advertising and with an email list it can be done much more quickly – within a matter of months with a large enough marketing budget.
How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business – Products
The product/s you choose to sell also has a huge bearing on the time it will take to start generating income from an online business. With low value affiliate products you can only make tiny commissions when you make a sale. This limits your potential marketing strategies to those which are very cheap or free. If you want to build an online business faster with paid marketing, you need a good high ticket offering in order to cover marketing costs and make a good profit.
For example, YouTube and Facebook offer two of the best marketing platforms for online business owners. They allow you to get very specific in your targeting of customers since they gather so much data. To use them can be expensive, particularly if you intend on driving a large volume of traffic to build a business quickly. With a low value offering in your product inventory, it is much more difficult making a profit while using such platforms. But if you choose a high ticket sales funnel to promote, you’ll have a number of “aces” up your sleeve which allow you to build an online business much more quickly:
- A high ticket product – typically one which pays out a commission of over $500 per sale
- Subscription affiliate products within your product range. A subscription product pays out recurring commissions to give you a monthly income quickly.
- A product range and a built in sales team – can help you as an affiliate because your customers are automatically offered higher ticket offerings once they make a purchase.
With a product range which includes subscription products and high ticket products, you can grow your business much faster by reinvesting profits back into your marketing campaign. See also how to scale affiliate marketing.
How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business: Learning Curve
There’s also a learning curve involved in building an online business. This can take some people longer than others. If you have come from a background in sales or marketing, it can serve you in learning the ropes of an online business. Of course you don’t need experience to start an online business and anyone can do it.
With a pre made business system much of the technical aspect of setting up your business systems is done for you. Access a course here. But there’s still work involved and depending on quickly you can go through the training, this can take weeks or months. If you have a lot of free time, you can complete much of the training quite quickly. But if you are working full time and only have a few hours to spare each day, it will likely take longer to go through and digest the training materials and get your business up and running.
Setting up the sales funnel is quite a quick process which can be done within a week or two. But learning how to advertise your business and then successfully doing so will take much longer. Depending on your methods of advertising, it can be weeks, months or years before you get traction. See also the fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing.
Mindset: The All Important Ingredient
Your mindset is ultimately a vital ingredient to building a successful online business too. Without being too negative, not every online business becomes a success! Many affiliates drop out and only around 5% actually go on to create businesses which produce a profit. See affiliate marketing success rate.
With that in mind you need to know how to develop your mindset to give yourself the best chance of success. See affiliate marketing mindset. If you’re a “dabbler”, you have much less chance of success than someone with a “do or die” mentality. So before you begin the online business journey it’s worth asking yourself whether your intention is to succeed “no matter what” or whether you’re of the mindset of just “giving it a go”. If it’s the latter, you are more likely to find yourself in the 95% camp of affiliates who fail!
Summary
So how long does it take to grow an online business? As you can see there’s many variables which makes it almost impossible to answer this question definitively. If you have a large marketing budget and purchase a high ticket sales funnel, you can build an online business in much less time than with a slower marketing strategy such as blogging, and a low ticket offering. By using high ticket products, a range of products and subscription products, you can give yourself a much better chance of success.
It’s also much better to join a community which can help you with mindset, goal setting and accountability too. Access a video series to learn more here.