10 Different Hats To Wear When You Become An Internet Entrepreneur

There are many kinds of hats that an online entrepreneur has to wear when running his/her online business.

At first when you look at the roles, you may be thinking becoming an online entrepreneur is a difficult process (especially if you are jumping from a day job to online entrepreneur). You may be scared to even think, that you have to take care of these roles by yourself.

However, things are not that complex than what they seem to be. Some of the roles can be outsourced and some of the roles you will eventually come familiar with when you start building your business.

1. Employee

This is the most obvious role that you have to play. In the beginning, you have to work quite a bit to build a foundation for your online business and you may have to do the most of the work by yourself.

Later, you will still be the employee, but in a lesser degree. Some of tasks you will outsource, because you want to focus on more meaningful things related to your business (creating products, offering services, forming new partnerships …)

2. Boss

Even if you are an employee, you are also a boss.  It is pretty much in your hands to decide, when to work and to which projects to work with.

As a boss, you also control the investments that you are doing to your business.

Being your own boss requires discipline, since there is no-one watching over your shoulder of what you are doing (and if you are doing something in the first place).

As a boss, you have to do future planning and reviewing too: where are you now and how are you going to move forward with your business. Once you have the plan, you have to review it frequently to see how you are doing and if any corrective moves have to be done along the way.

3. Team leader

At some point, you will start hiring people working for you. You may have a one virtual assistant (VA) working for you (part-time or full-time) or team of VAs. You may even hire traditional workers to help you to grow your business.

Whatever the case may be, you will pretty much see yourself as a team leader, coordinating activities between your team members and making sure, that everyone has all the required knowledge and possibilities to do their work.

Your team may consist of content producers, web designers, web developers or search engine optimization experts. All of them have a very important part in your business. Yet, you are the one who is coordinating all the activities and tasks between them.

4. Project manager

When handling a project (for example launching your site), you may have to coordinate activities with other parties that are involved in the project (graphic designers, web developers …). You may have even planned a schedule by when everything should be ready.

When you are in a situation like this, you are acting as a project manager: you want to pull the strings and make sure that everyone (your employees, other parties) do their job in time and that the project will become ready within a schedule and budget.

5. Joint Venture partner

At some point, you may team up (short-term or long-term) with someone else to grow your business. You start a joint venture.

I haven’t joint ventured myself, but I can understand the benefits of doing so: synergy benefits between the partners (resources, cost sharing …), reaching new markets or technological benefits.

Partnering with someone else has lucrative possibilities and you may become a partner at some point, if you both feel that your businesses can benefit from this kind of alliance.

6. Web designer/Graphic designer/Web developer

If you are visually orientated, you might design your site’s look and feel by yourself. Also, if you have graphical skills, you may even design all the graphic elements to your site. On the other hand, if you own some software development background, you can develop a WordPress plugin for your site as well.

Whatever the case may be, you might be playing between one to three additional roles on your online business. At some point, you may want to outsource these roles to someone else, so that you can focus on more meaningful tasks on your business.

7. Copywriter

Especially when you are starting out, you are most likely to take care of all the content needs for your online business by yourself. Not only is it important to produce content on regular basis, but it should be written in a way (especially the headlines), that people notice your work and are interested to see and read what you have to say.

Although you can become a decent copywriter by yourself, this is yet another role that can be outsourced to someone, who is a full-time copywriter him/herself.

8. Technical engineer

There are many people out there (yours truly included), who take care of all their blog’s technical needs by themselves. These needs are for example installing and configuring a WordPress sites, applying new themes to your blog, installing new plugins or just keeping up to date the latest versions of those plugins.

Although for me this stuff is easy to do, it still takes time away from content creation and I’m considering of handing out this task to a VA.

9. Product creator

At certain point, you start creating information products by yourself (and not just marketing stuff as an affiliate marketer).  You feel that you have something unique to give to people in the form of an info product and there is also a market demand for your idea.

You become a product creator which in turn can help you to establish yourself as an expert on your market and grow your business.

This is yet another role that you can outsource – either completely or parts of it.

10. SEO specialist

SEO stands for search engine optimization and the core idea of it is to make your site more visible towards search engines, which in turn helps people to find your content.

In order to make your pages more visible towards search engines and people, you need to optimize your pages, so that more people are able to find your content and your online business.

This task is yet another thing that can be outsourced to a dedicated SEO expert and you don’t have to take care of it by yourself.

“Many of the roles can be eventually outsourced to a specialist. When you do this, you save your time and you can focus on the most essential roles of your business.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different hats that an online entrepreneur has to wear when running his/her business.

Although you may have to adopt many roles at first, you can outsource some of them (like copywriting, web designer, web developer or technical engineer) and free up your time to more meaningful tasks (partnering with others, product and service development and creating more relationships with other entrepreneurs).

How do you deal with setbacks and challenges? Do you have any tips for feeling better and more positive when difficulties occurs?

“Please share this information in the comments area.

If you liked this article, I would appreciate it if you tweet it on Twitter, like it on Facebook or just vote for it on various social bookmarking services.