When you make the decision to become an online entrepreneur, you have energy to get everything done. You are pumped and you feel like you can do anything! You are ready to conquer the world.
As time passes by, you may find yourself wondering why you started in the first place. You don’t know why you are doing everything you are doing. You feel like quitting and going back to your before life.
What happened? Where did that enthusiasm, that energy go? Be aware that is a phase many entrepreneurs go through, especially in the first 3 months of creating their business (it can come back at any moment while you spend your time building your business.).
First things first, let’s start with the basics to make sure we are on the same page.
*May contain affiliate links. Clicking on the affiliate links will most likely result in the same price you would pay elsewhere or you may get a special offer using those links.
What is Motivation?
Motivation, when you are building a business, comes mainly from your desire to accomplish a goal:building an online business.
So motivation is about the reasons you have to build an online business that combines with your desires to achieve your goal of building an online business.
You know, it’s the part where you get excited about your project and you feel full of energy. You can’t stop talking about your online business and your head is filling up with so many ideas you don’t know where to start but you start anyways.
It’s like the honeymoon phase of a new relationship. You just love the idea of making money online. You are excited about creating something that will eventually be able to earn you a semi-passive income.
You love all the possibilities and how you can grow or scale your business income. You may get a bit obsessed and it’s ok. It should not always be like though, because you would burn out from all the adrenaline your body produces in that period!
You don’t want to burn out, you want to find your pace and focus your attention on the things you need to get done to build your business.
Why do I Lose my Motivation?
Sometimes, it feels like you’ve hit a brick wall. All the energy and excitement, all the motivation: gone. Nothing’s left.
I know the feeling, I’ve hit that wall after 3 months building my online business. There are many reasons for that, but really, mine was that my expectations were too high.
Do you know why I had high expectations? Because of what I’ve heard in the webinars and in the training, in the courses I’ve taken to become an affiliate. They made claims that I would make my money back in the first 30 days, or in about 90 days. You know, I was supposed to see some results in the not so distant future.
Then what? NOTHING!!! After 3 months of creating articles for my blogs, of creating posts for Facebook and Instagram and of pinning my pictures on Pinterest, nothing happened. But, but, but I’ve been told that usually, after 3 months you start earning money! And you get traffic on your website and interactions with your posts on social media.
You may want to read more on creating posts for social media in an article series I wrote here.
Nothing. That was hard. I hit the wall hard. Because I’ve put so much effort and energy just to find myself not having the expected results. No money, no interaction or barely any on my social media accounts and many articles that weren’t indexed in Google.
I felt like giving up. Why bother? I bother because I want to build an online business. Because I want to create multiple streams of income. I also found out that with blogging, it can easily take at least 8 months before you get some real traffic to your website.
So be careful with your expectations. As setting goals is super important, you have to be flexible with achieving those goals in your timeline. Enjoy the process.
Another reason why your motivation has left is because you now feel overwhelmed with everything that has to be done to become successful online. Trust me, there are many, oh so many things that you have to learn, then you have to take action and then you need to make choices and then make decisions, etc.
It’s a lot of work and most successful entrepreneurs agree with that. You have to put in the effort and the work. If you binge on information all day and you don’t take action, your business is not going to magically appear in front of you!
This is why many good training programs are step-by-step programs that will help you digest the information and will let you take action with that new input.
You can read more about some step-by-step programs available in my reviews section.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at the time.
The last reason I want to adress is the attraction of something new is fading away. Yes, the honeymoon phase is over. Have you heard of the shiny object syndrome? You know when you constantly are looking for the next best thing?
This also applies to relationships and everything that implies that you get money out of your pocket. Some people can’t stay in a relationship because they get bored of the person, some people always need to buy the new phone because they can’t stand theirs after 1 month of using it, same with cars, clothes, etc.
If that happens in your life, chances are your will be struggling with that as an entrepreneur. Stop looking for the next best thing. When you are building an online business, there is no best thing. Choose something and stick to it to get results.
Why is it Important to Have Motivation?
One of the main reasons people fail as entrepreneurs is because they quit too soon. So staying in control of your motivation will help you reach your goals.
Motivation is the driving force that will help you face any roadblocks, or brick walls you may encounter during your journey to become an online business person.
It will give you some positive energy to go through what has to be done to build that business.
Without motivation, you will struggle to reach your goals or you may end up quitting.
What can I do to be Motivated Again?
First of all, find out the reason why you lack motivation. What happened? Chances are that one of the 3 things: unreasonable expectations, feeling overwhelmed and shiny object syndrome, or maybe all 3 played a role.
Once you know the reason why your motivation has gone, it will be much easier to get it back.
Since I am part of a community that is building their online businesses, I reached out saying that I needed to slow down because I didn’t feel like what I was doing was giving me any results and I wanted to rethink my plan since I still had a lot to do.
This is where I learned about the 3 months wall. It can happen any time in the first year, and then in the years to come when you grow your business. Again, get real expectations.
So reaching out to people who share the same goal can be very helpful. You’ll see that you are not alone in that situation and you may get some ideas to help get through that phase faster.
The next thing you can do is to redefine your goals. See where you really need to put your energy to get the results you want. Take some time to write down what needs to be done and your plan to get it done.
Do you have to post 5 times a day on your social media accounts? If you are creating a blog, know that about 1% of your total traffic comes from social media. If you have a very visual niche, like make up, you can use Pinterest and get great traffic from there.
Other than that, I would tell you to focus on creating good articles for your blog or great videos for your YouTube channel.
If you are running ads on Facebook, then you want to have a page where you will share valuable content so people get to trust what you are doing online and you don’t spam the internet with your affiliate links.
Again, your business, your choices. Make the best ones to help you achieve your goals.
The last thing you can do is defining a strong WHY. Why do you want to build an online business? If the answer is money, you will lose your motivation unless you sell high ticket products that will generate a lot of money as soon as you sell one and that you actually get to sell one in your first month.
You need something stronger. Let’s dig a bit: why do you want to earn money online? Who is relying on you to earn that money? How is your life going to change with that money coming in? What are you going to do with that money? Who do you want to help with the content you are creating?
Are you a single parent that wants an extra income so you can afford great vacations? Are you a retiree that wants some extra income to be able to have a little more freedom and then give the money you don’t need to charity you like?
Find something bigger than just making more money. Find something that, no matter how hard things can get, you won’t give up because you can’t give up.
It will help you stay focused on your goals. You will have that motivation because you know why you are doing this.
In Conclusion
Losing your motivation is something that can happen at any moment. Be prepared to face that moment with an open mind: you accept the loss of motivation, you try to find out why it happened so it doesn’t happen again soon and you make sure your goals and your why are strong enough so you get your motivation back quickly.
If you ever feel like quitting because you are in that phase when you don’t know if it’s worth it or not, please reach out to others that are doing what you are doing. It will help you to get all that pressure off your chest and talking about it will make you feel better.
You can also email me at cyn@ibecomeanaffiliate.com I will be happy to help you with your concerns.
Cynthia