The Responsibility of Entrepreneurs
There’s a driving force inside every entrepreneur. It’s something that they all own and it’s an absolutely necessary ingredient for success.
I’m not talking about ambition. That should be there to a degree, but some entrepreneurs have no more ambition than to create a home-based business that lets them kick the day job and pay the bills. That’s fine if that’s what makes them happy.
I’m talking about personal responsibility.
Being an entrepreneur means recognizing that you are responsible for your life. No one is going to give you the income you want. You have to make it yourself.
No one is going to give you a working business. You have to build it, one page, one link and one ad click at a time.
And no one is going to plan and create your future for you. That’s down to you and you alone.
And yet I use Google AdSense. I also use Kontera and Chitika, and if someone comes up with a better way of delivering ads to my website, I’m going to try using that too.
I have some control over those ad systems. I get to choose where to put the ads. I get to choose the formats and the layout. I can use filtering to make sure I’m not serving ads that I don’t want to serve, and I can play with keywords and content to influence the kinds of ads that do turn up.
But I don’t have direct control over the ads those algorithms give me, and I can’t select the prices either. By using those ad systems, I’m handing over some of the responsibility for my site’s success to a company and its software.
I’m willing to do that because it works. They pay me, and as long as they’re paying me, I’ll keep using them.
But I always remember that I have options. I can choose to switch to a different system if the one I’m using doesn’t deliver the returns I want, and I can always cut out the middle man and sell ad space on my sites directly to people who want to buy it.
That would give me more work and probably a less stable income. But whatever I do to bring income into my sites is always my decision — and I’m responsible for it.
