Starting out as an entrepreneur is not always easy – we all know that!

Aside from not having friends and family on board with what I was pursuing, my greatest stress was meeting my needs financially so that I would not starve myself to death.

And by starving myself to death, I really do mean that there were days where I went hungry – because I honestly did not have any crackers or rice left and had no money to go buy myself some.

It is embarrassing to admit this, but it is the truth. Besides, a humble beginning generally always makes for a good story if one pulls out of it and reaches beyond average heights so… I don’t mind sharing it!

You see, the foolish mistake I made was that I immediately relied on my new entrepreneurial venture to pay all my bills as well as feed me. The savings I had accumulated before starting out were quickly gone and here I was: dead broke with not two pennies to rub together.

I had lit the candle on both ends.  I had backed myself into a corner.  I had burned the bridge behind me.  There was no going back for me – I had to make things work somehow. And I did!

Entrepreneurial Ambitions

I had determined to become an expert in SEO.  I read 1 to 3 ebooks/guides on SEO every day (yeah, there are that many out there), listened to all the audio training I could get my hands on, watched every video on SEO that I could find, and was hitting it hard with xRumer, Bookmarking Demon, and other SEO tools like it.

What I did not take in to my calculation, was that: SEO takes time!

You can not wake up one morning and say “today I will rank my website #1 on Google for make money. Starting tomorrow I will get 100,000 visitors a day and will make $10,000 a day selling high converting ClickBank products.”

It just doesn’t work that way. SEO is tedious work and it takes days, weeks, and months to rank for worthwhile keywords IF you know what you are doing. If you are a complete newbie (like I was) you don’t stand a chance in the competitive niches.

Obviously it was harder than I had thought. SEO was hard and tedious work. Maybe my friends and family were right: I should just go and get a job like everyone else.

Well something inside me (I think it’s called pride) told me to keep pushing. I was so convinced this would work out sooner or later. And it did!

In my quest to master SEO, I had learned a thing or two about it and used my savings to invest in some pricey SEO software. I then offered backlink building services to websites owners and before you knew it, I was starting to make more money than I ever made at a job.

The Problem

I got so busy making money from selling my SEO services that I completely forgot to do SEO for my own websites.

You ever have that? You get so busy helping people that you forget to help yourself?

A very wise man once said “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and though I agree with that saying 100%, I also think that we sometimes do more for others than we would do for ourselves.

As an example: When an order came in, I would be all over it and try to go above and beyond to make sure the customer got more than he or she paid for. Yet on slower days, I could not get myself to build a single backlink to my own site.

Looking back, this was one of my greatest mistakes as an entrepreneur and fact is, it is a common struggle among start-up entrepreneurs.

You see someone offering to do your graphical work, and yet their website needs it more than yours. You find a copywriter who offers to write you a very high converting sales letter and yet when you read through theirs, you are not at all convinced that it is for you.

I guess the question to be asked: do I take the same medicine I prescribe to my patients?

It is a lot easier to sell what we have to offer if we are our #1 customer. We want to be different from all the wanna-be’s by actually living what we preach.

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