I've had many active and enthusiastic business team members that were their own worst enemies because they exhibited the classic "flea on a griddle" behavior pattern and jumped around chasing one business opportunity today, and then another one tomorrow without ever putting in enough sustained and focused effort to reasonably give themselves a chance to succeed at any of them.
I can really relate to this situation since I briefly fell prey to this same "dog in a meat market" syndrome when I first started my own home based business a few years ago. I caught myself trying to chase several different opportunities at once and not being very successful with any of them.
There are so many home business opportunities (some real, some not) that it takes real personal discipline to avoid the scattergun approach...you know, throw enough against the wall and something is bound to stick. In the early going, it is really important to resist this temptation and to stay tightly focused on a single business.
Some will argue that "I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket". To those people I say, diversification is fine, but only after you have achieved solid success with your initial business. A premature attempt at diversification will quite likely cause a loss of focus and actually slow down your success rate.
If your main marketing vehicle is a website, you can fairly easily leverage your initial success and effectively promote a few other complimentary and closely related home based business propositions from the same website. However, it is important not to go overboard and offer too many choices to visitors to your website. If you do, there is a good chance of confusing your visitors to the point where they will take no action and you have, in effect, diluted the effectiveness of your website.
Whatever you decide to do, you will need to stick with it for a reasonable length of time (give it at least one year) and put in a solid and sustained effort. Stay focused and don't get discouraged. As much as you would like it to be, starting and developing a real home based business is certainly not an instant gratification situation.
Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and resides in California. For more details, visit his website at http://business-at-home.us
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