While there is no magical means, or secret formula to guarantee business success, there are several common traits that nearly every entrepreneur who’s started a business has.

If they don’t posses all of them, they either learn them or surround themselves with others who have them. If you plan to start a business online, or even just want to earn a secondary income from your hobby or blog web site then this will help you.

1) Value – your product or service must provide a value to costumers. Only fools (and mobsters) believe they can earn a sustainable income from garbage. Make sure you under-promise and over deliver on the value to your customers and they’ll not only come back for more, but they’ll bring their friends along too.

2) Sell to humans – while search engines are important for building traffic, your goal is to sell your products or services to human beings, so design your web site and write your content text for humans first. If people like your pages they’ll bookmark them and link to them. That will increase your rankings with search engines, and drive traffic to your site. If you spend too much time and efforts catering to search engines instead of your human visitors, it’ll show and you’ll lose sales.

3) Networking & P2P – a great resource that the web provides to small business owners and is often overlooked, is access to other small business owners. Finding other small businesses who deal in related products or services but aren’t direct competitors; and then collaborating with them on cross-merchandising and marketing campaigns can be of great benefit. Learn to network and develop working relationships with owners of related businesses.

4) Brand your business – while Fred’s Carpet Installations may seem like the perfect descriptive name for your carpet laying business, do you think Fred’s Search Engine would have ever done as well as Google? Branding isn’t limited to a business name though, it can be done with your logo, or company slogan. However you decide to brand your business is fine, as long as it’ll lead to people remembering you when they’re looking for your products or services.

5) Follow up – customer service should never end with a completed sale. Keep a customer contact list (with the customer’s permissions), and follow up with them from time to time. Inquire if they’re happy with their purchases? The service levels? Ask if you could have made their purchase better or easier in any way. You don’t need to get suggestions from them, though if you do you should give them proper consideration, but by following up you give them a sense of importance to your business and people like that and will reward it by repeat shopping with you. They’re also likely to suggest you to others because of it, and word of mouth advertising is the Holy Grail every business wants.

6) Be professional, disciplined, and friendly – it’s a hard balance to maintain, but you have to remember that you’re doing business with a customer, they aren’t your best friend–while at the same time, they often want to feel like your best friend. How to find this balance will depend on the nature of your business, so keep it in mind when developing your business plan and operational structure and that’ll put you in the right direction once you actually launch.

7) Plan for everything – and expect to go off course often. A Business Plan that doesn’t account for every detail is almost doomed to fail. However, no matter how thorough your plan is, I’ve never known of one that didn’t need adjusting on a regular basis to meet unforeseen challenges that arise. Be as prepared as possible when starting out, which includes being prepared to make unexpected changes along the way, and your chances for succeeding will be greatly improved.

8) Set realistic, but hard to achieve goals – Nobody wants to always be trailing their goals, so you have to set them at realistic levels that you can meet. Still, there’s a danger in setting your goals too low that breeds complacency. By making your goals hard to reach, but also keeping them at realistic levels you’ll force yourself to work harder and do better every day.

9) Learn to say “No!” – to yourself, your family and your friends. You have to be able to tell yourself no when the urge to slack off hits you during the work day. You also have to tell yourself no when the urge to work at 4AM strikes. Keep a fair balance of your work and play time to avoid burning out. Also, it’s too easy to offer your products and services to family or friends for free or at cost. This may not seem like a big deal, but can turn into one quickly that leads to resentment, as well as lost profits. Remember, you’re in business to make money, and early on you’re fighting for the life of your business. If you simply explain to family members or friends that every penny can be the difference between your business growing or folding in the first few years, they’ll understand.

10) Be a smart scheduler – a smart schedule includes non-work time to keep you rested and fresh, and makes the most efficient use of your working hours. This can be hard to accomplish, and every business will have unique challenges for you when creating your schedule, so plan your time as best you can and constantly revisit and review your scheduling to see where tweaks can be made.

While all of these may [and should] seem like common sense to someone about to launch a business, if you’re like me then having them in a listed form will help prevent you from overlooking anything along the way.

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Also See:

• My Google Reader Shares – June 15, 2009
• 1 Part Developer, 1 Part Marketer, 1 Part Domainer-Shaken and Stirred
• Necessary Rant!
• The only rule you really need to learn

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Business, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.