The Key to Building a Successful Online Business: Iteration
One of the biggest issues I have with a lot of the home-business guides you see these days is that they all give the impression that creating a successful online business is easy, that it just happens. This is absolutely not true.
Most new businesses fail. Get used to it.
Most startups and new businesses fail while they are still in the early stages of development. In fact, 8 
out of 10 new businesses will fail in its first 5 years! So this idea that you can simply throw together a plan, toss some startup capital at an advertising campaign or two and suddenly become unbeleivably rich is misleading at best.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t give your attempt(s) at an online business a lot of genuine effort just because there’s a good chance that the business will fail. We all need to understand that it takes more than one really good try to build a successful online business. You should absolutely give your all to every single business venture you start. You should fully invest both your money and your time into the business. But you also need to come to terms with the idea of failing, and have an exit strategy if that happens.
The key to setting up a successful online business can be summed up in one simple word: iteration.
This may involve going through several different business models, several different industries, several different services or all of the above. The important part of this process is to be open to new ideas and to progressively refine your business as a whole. Most entrepreneurs will tell you that failure has been the biggest part of creating their business, and they are most certainly not exaggerating. But the reason that these individuals have created a successful online business despite their failures is because they made mistakes and made a point to learn from them; then they applied those lessons to their next attempt at creating a successful web-based business.
Time for some fine-tuning!
Once you’ve decided what type of business you want to run and how you will run it, you need to refine the product or service you offer. Again, this may mean making small adjustments in what you offer, or even in what you don’t offer.
In my case, this meant deciding what platform I would develop websites on, whether or not I would offer SEO services to my clients, what kind of hosting options I would provide, as well as many more decisions that had to be made. This process has taken me several years to refine, and I will readily admit that these aspects of my business are far from being perfected.
So what is the takeaway from all this? How can you create your own successful online business using iteration? Put simply, give something a try. If that something fails, look at where at failed and why. Then make a change to that area of the business and try again, with just as much or more enthusiasm than before. Given enough time and effort, you will finally have created a successful online business that you can really take pride in.
Check out Tai Lopez’s 67-step program for entrepreneurs!