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7 Habits of Highly Profitable eCommerce Storeowners

Habits are those things we do and we don’t even know we are doing. I interviewed several highly profitable eCommerce storeowners about their business day and their approaches to learning. Being an entrepreneur is a path of life-long learning.

Entrepreneurial success means you write your own Freedom Formula. Most people feel rich when they have consistent cash-flow greater than their means, they are happy and they have as much time for themselves as they want.

Getting profitable is where most would-be eCommerce store owners fail. These 7 Habits of Highly Profitable eCommerce Store-Owners increase your likelihood of achieving your financial independence in this lifetime.

Habits 1, 2 & 3 require mastery before daydreaming about firing your boss, please. These first habits increase your efficiencies.

* Habit 1: Pick 1 mentor per discipline.

Can we all agree that Dan Theis and Leslie Rhodie are genius SEO gurus? Yet, there are times when they disagree. How can that be? Well, they have slightly different models of effectiveness. When you are getting started, you will achieve the results you want fastest by picking 1 mentor per discipline you are seeking to master. Pick 1 mentor per discipline. There are a dozen ways to skin a cat, however, if you use more than 1-way at a time, you are bound to get blood all over the place.

* Habit 2: Separate planning from implementing.

Highly effective implementers separate planning from implementing. Why? Because they’ve learned that when they plan their work, and then work that plan… they get a lot more done than if they 2nd-guess themselves all the time. Plan your work and then work that plan. Planning is often more fun than implementing. Eventually, you can outsource the implementing. In the mean time, plan for outsourcing.

The output of planning is a process map. Following this process map is implementation. As you are getting started, you will be implementing a mentor’s process map. Eventually you will customize a process map so that others can be hired to implement your plans with minimal supervision and minimal interaction.

* Habit 3: S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Practice reverse engineering your success. You look at what you want to get done, then chunk-down those big goals into immediately accomplishable actions. Specify weekly, daily and even hourly goals.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals = Specific Measurable Action that’s Realistic and Time-bound.

Please notice the term “Specific Measurable Action.” Measurable is what makes S.M.A.R.T. Goals cut-and-dry as to whether or not you got your goal done. If you are not sure if a goal is S.M.A.R.T. or not, ask yourself this question: “How will I know that my goal is done?” If there is a cut-and-dry way to measure when the task is completed, you have a S.M.A.R.T. goal. When you get in the habit of using S.M.A.R.T. goals, you will see yourself get exponentially more profitable.

Habits 4, 5 & 6 prepare you to fire your boss. Getting from profitable to sustainably profitable so you can securely firing your boss usually requires scaling, you need to level-up. Often, the skills that got you to be profitable are not the same skills that are required to thrive.

* Habit 4: Think R.O.I.

The greatest Return-On-Investment is free time. Select for repeatable solutions. Return-On-Investment requires you to allocate a value to every effort. If you paid yourself for selecting and managing a solution… how would that effect your R.O.I.?

Free, Fast, Effective: pick two. Quit looking for free.

Nothing is “free.” Free only works when you don’t pay yourself for the time.

Similarly, just because something is the cheapest doesn’t mean it is the least expensive. Hiring on the cheap often means you spend more time training, managing and finding replacements.

* Habit 5: Inventory your effort

Tracking how you invest your time is key to effectiveness. Gauging the R.O.I. on your time will allow you to see what you might want to stop doing. Time management is as much about doing more of what works as it is about doing less of what isn’t profitable.

* Habit 6: Automate

Automation may include outsourcing, but simply hiring a vendor doesn’t automate your process. Automation is hands-free. Outsourcing requires time training, managing and finding replacements. Most eCommerce store owners seek to fully automate as much of their business as possible. However, automation is often more of a goal than a reality. The goal is making more money with less of your effort.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN TO QUIT YOUR JOB? Jay Conrad Levinson suggests that when your part-time net income exceeds your salary for six-months straight, your probably ready.

The 7th Habit is the scientist’s way of life…

* Habit 7: Always be testing.

There’s only 1-thing I really care about testing… profits. To begin with, you need to ask for the sale in multiple ways and see what makes a sale. Tracking is an easy way to begin testing, it is testing how many visitors came from a specific source. If you are testing against sales, you aren’t branding. If you are always testing and you are testing against sales… guess what? You are always closing.

Always be closing… Up-sells, cross-sells and newsletters are just the beginning. Remember that anyone who markets more aggressively than you often appears as an a**hole, and everybody not selling as hard as you probably appears as an idiot. The same goes for you in the eyes of other marketers. If you are serious about quitting your job, you might find yourself needing to market harder than you were first comfortable with. Many people will choose an avatar, a pseudonym adopted by a marketer. Benjamin Franklin had 42 avatars by the age of 23… each pen name wrote about the benefits of giving an almanac as a present for the holidays. That’s how Benjamin Franklin popularized Poor Richard’s Almanac, article submissions under scores of pen names. “Poor Richard” was an avatar Benjamin Franklin created for himself. Then, he created social proof through scores of avatars promoting Poor Richard’s Almanac. I’m not endorsing FLOGGING. I’m just sayin’ that at least one of the forefathers of these United States made his fortune as a flogger. I’ve heard Benjamin Franklin called a lot of names, but idiot wasn’t among them.

And so concludes my listing of The 7 Habits of Highly Profitable eCommerce Storeowners. Before I sign-off I want to ask you a couple questions…

1) How come habits are usually discussed in really negative terms?

2) You never see a got-rich-slow story on the news, do ya?

No. Always the rags-to-billionaire story. But the news is supposed to be objective. It's not. At minimum it's sensationalistic. I mean, aren't there more people who went from okay to millionaire than there are jet-owners, or cheats of some kind? Then why is every "newsworthy" success story about lottery winners, overnight-millionaires, billionaires or a negative story? I've had some friends really do some really cool stuff, but few of their accomplishments get seen on TV.


The "Whiz kid" news story seems like the same story every time: "Young man graduates from Ivy League School and their Alumni are proud to announce he just sold his company for $230,000,000! Meet his proud parents..."

When I was a kid, all the local Eagle Scouts were on the local news. Now, local news has such a global feel that the mom and pop accomplishments often get glossed-over.

But wouldn't you like to see your local Mom & Pop story? Would that be newsworthy?

Imagine seeing this on the news: "Today a young woman in Harleysville, Pennsylvania realized that her 2009 profits from her eStore had exceeded her salary and she gave notice to her boss. She realized she was freer than she had ever felt before. For the first time in her life she could spend her time, with whoever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and nobody could tell her what to do because she was her own boss and she was happy. Here's Tom with the weather..."

If you would like to share profitable eCommerce habits with your family, learn more about writing your own Freedom Formula with your family… search eStoreOpoly on FaceBook.



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