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It’s almost an axiom of entrepreneurship that you should expect, sooner or later, to be met with failure and disappointment in your professional life. This is by no means a sign of failure overall. Just consider the example of some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, such as Richard Branson, who has more than a dozen failed business ventures to his name.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that being in a business where your business venture is clearly faltering is a disheartening and deeply unpleasant experience.

As with all obstacles in life, however, you will always be better off rising to the occasion and taking proactive steps to amend or address the situation, rather than allowing yourself to get swamped by feelings of despair.

Here are some things you can do if your digital business venture is failing.

Deepen your skill-set

Failure is sometimes driven by bad luck, or simply bad timing, but it’s important to acknowledge that it is also sometimes drive by a lack of skill in a given area, or a skill-set which simply hasn’t been rounded out to the necessary extent.

If you are involved in running digital businesses, online marketing, for example, will be a major part of your professional life — even more so than with most businesses.

If you hate online marketing and have no real skill at it, that is going to present a major obstacle that will need to be dealt with before you can have any reasonable expectation of success.

Studying an Online Marketing Master degree might, therefore, make all the difference to your current, or future, digital ventures. Of course, maybe you don’t quite need that level of intensive training — but this will likely depend on your unique circumstances.

Seek out a mentor

Throughout human history, people have been seeking out mentors to help them develop and succeed in their chosen areas of expertise.

Throughout the Middle Ages and for centuries afterwards, the prevailing system of training for tradesmen in Europe was for apprentices to work under masters in a given trade in order to develop their skills.

Not much is different today. If you’re struggling to find out how best to direct your energies and spend your time, in regards to your entrepreneurial activities, seeking out a mentor might an excellent idea.

You don’t necessarily need to pay someone to mentor you in person. Online courses and even books may be adequate stand-ins.

Consider a course correction

Sometimes, the stars just are not aligned in order for you to succeed in a particular venture. Maybe you built the foundations of your business on faulty premises, and now the whole operation is showing irreparable structural flaws.

Whatever the case, it’s important to know when to walk away, and when it’s the right time to take a radically different approach to what you’re currently doing.

From time to time you may need to scrap your current business altogether and start again from a better foundation, or you might just need to edit your current business heavily, so as to re-focus your efforts and correct for issues that have developed along the way.