Hardworking self-starter

The question was asked of me some time ago, what personality traits I thought were important for entrepreneurial success? My immediate reply was a spontaneous one about passion, dedication and hard work. Later that week and after considering the question a little deeper, I decided to elaborate a little more.

The result was this self-examining article pertaining to what it takes to achieve entrepreneurial success, which is by no means definitive, but you can lay odds that if you don’t possess most of what’s contained in these paragraphs, your chances of business success will be greatly diminished.

You must be self motivated, and if you don’t have the wherewithal to bounce out of bed each day without your spouse drenching you with cold water, chances are you don’t have the self motivation or discipline required to be an entrepreneur. Business demands that you take action based solely on your own volition. You have to do a hundred things every day that will not get done unless you make yourself do them.

Another requirement is hard work. You can’t be afraid of hard work because if you think working for someone else is hard work, try starting your own business. You will be required to give every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears you can muster and then some. You will have to work long hours and be on call 24/7, at least in the beginning. If the mere thought of hard work makes you tired, it maybe advisable that you just keep your cushy day job.

Experience and resilience

If you can’t locate your car’s engine you have no business buying an oil change franchise. The most successful business owners have prior experience in the industry in which they have set up shop. Consider working in an industry at least part time for a year before jumping in with both feet.

And you must be able to climb back on the horse. I always say: “If business was easy, everybody would be doing it.” Starting a business is hard work and the odds for failure are against you in the first few years. If you want to ride herd on your own business, you must be willing to fall off your horse and get back on a few times without giving up.

Support and humor

You need the support of your family. When you start a business you may have to spend more time away from the family than you like. The business may also put a strain on you financially, and you will have enough obstacles in your way without having to worry if you have the support of your family and those closest to you. In fact you’re going to be met with challenges big and small so you will have to develop a sense of humor to replace any thick skinned-ness in your make-up.

If your feelings are easily hurt, keep your non-threatening day job because business is not for you. Many days in business, rejection awaits you around every corner and you must be able to handle rejection without taking it personally.

Interaction and delegation

You must interact well with others in order to be a successful entrepreneur. Interaction is a requirement in most business pursuits and an entrepreneurship is most certainly a business, so interacting with a variety of people, from your own employees to vendors to customers to investors. You must have the ability to effectively manage people without offending them; the ability to accept good advice from mentors and politely discount the bad; the ability to overlook mistakes or quietly rectify them; and the one I have trouble with: the ability to tolerate incompetence without losing your cool (at least not on the outside).

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget money, the lack of which is perhaps the number one cause of business failure, so the deeper your pockets the better. Before you start your business you should have access to enough capital to see you through until the business can sustain itself and replace your previous income.

This is a skill that you’ll have time to develop as it may not be required until your entrepreneurship becomes relatively successful and you have hired on some help. That skill is the ability to delegate. Running a business requires the performance of dozens of simultaneous tasks and it’s foolish to try to handle them all yourself. You must learn to put your trust in others. If you can’t dish out responsibility without worrying over the result, your business growth will be limited.

prior business experience

Previous business ownership is a plus but it is not a prerequisite. Of course you would have an advantage over budding entrepreneurs who lack such experience so it can’t hurt. Many successful entrepreneurs have the skeletons of past businesses rattling around in their closet.

Think of it this way – Business is a lot like marriage: you learn a lot from the first one that may come in handy the second or third time around. With that kind of advice you can see why I didn’t go into marriage counseling. But, according to the old adage…Grab the Bull by the horn and dig in to make your business a success!

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your Web host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be.

For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behaviour. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

This article concludes with the second part of Analyzing Your Website Traffic.