Gary Smith

Note: this is a post I wrote on one of my other blogs, but it's a favourite of mine so I decided to post it here as well.

Have you ever felt foolish … like REALLY foolish. Foolish because you learned a lesson (or maybe twenty) but kept going back and doing the same old thing?

For the past four or five years I’ve had this very loud voice in my head saying things like:

• Automation is bad
• Most internet marketers just want your money
• Write real content for real people
• Stick to the one project with a ‘I’ll make this work if it kills me’ attitude
• Don’t make impulsive purchasing decisions
• Be patient

I’d like to discuss these one at a time because I think they are important to anyone who wants to make a living online.

Automation Is Bad

I’ve always felt that automation is bad simply because in most cases the sites that are the target of automated software weren’t created for the purpose of allowing a whole lot of lazy, greedy people to fill them with sub-standard content. One of my sites – an article repository – was the target of automated software and I ended up disabling submissions because the workload became far too great – picking through and deleting articles that were submitted to the wrong category or had really broken english, or were duplicates submitted to multiple categories or were simply really poorly written articles. So what did I go and do earlier this year? Bought some automation software! That’s kick number one. What drove me to purchase was sheer desperation. I’m sure many others have been there… where things just aren’t going right and you will try just about anything to try and make a few dollars.

I’m kicking myself for that and I won’t ever use that software again.

Most Internet Marketers Just Want Your Money

If I had a dollar for every time that thought went through my head I’d probably be quite wealthy by now. The truth is – and this is only my opinion – is that the old 90/10 rule applies to Internet marketers just as it applies to how many people will genuinely pursue success and how many just can’t be bothered. There are around 10% of Internet marketers that have worked hard, made all the right connections and done everything they needed to do in order to launch, sell or resell products. Then there’s the 90% who want to emulate the success that the 10% are having but they don’t really want to do the work. Maybe it’s closer to 80/20… I really don’t know. But I am convinced that there’s a much larger percentage of people out there looking for wealth that doesn’t require work than there are people with the right mindset and work ethic. That’s not a new situation of course – it’s probably been like that since the beginning of time. It’s worth some thought though and I guess the message I got when I thought about this was that you really need to give some serious thought when it comes to who you want to learn online business from. There are some brilliant online marketers out there who are really passionate about helping other people become successful but for every passionate marketer there are probably 3 or 4 lemons.

I’m kicking myself for following too many lemons.

Write Real Content For Real People

I’ve been hearing the old ‘content is king’ mantra for years now – I guess I just didn’t listen hard enough. It took a blog post from Jeremy Schoemaker to wake me up on that. He mentioned how he’d built his blog with no attention to search engines or other fancy marketing techniques and ended that post saying you should write for people – not search engines. I’m sure that deep down we all know that if you are passionate about something and knowledgeable about the topics then as long as you stick to your own program and keep pumping out useful information… you’re going to get a steady stream of visitors to your website. That is unless you’re devoting all your time to writing about something weird like monkey risotto!

I stopped looking at things like keywords and trends a while back and started looking around at real issues, problems and their solutions.

I’m kicking myself for getting too wrapped up in the science and neglecting the community.

Stick To The One Project

…with a ‘I’ll make this work if it kills me’ attitude. This is a bigun’. I threw so much money away at dream killing products. I call them dream killing products because they promise ridiculously easy income and nearly always fail to deliver. They play on your emotions, impatience or greed and the frustrating part is that most of us know that it just isn’t possible to be ‘making $10,000 next week’ and yet we get drawn in by carefully crafted sales copy and end up going back to a day job with all hopes and dreams pretty much destroyed.
If you don’t get out of that vicious cycle of buy, fail, buy, fail and buy again then you have little hope of ever building a profitable online business. You really have to go into your primary online project with a do or die attitude.

I’m kicking myself for jumping from program to program and product to product without ever giving any of them enough time or attention.

Don’t make impulsive purchasing decisions

You have to stop and think about whether you can afford to spend and, more importantly, whether the item you are purchasing is really going to help you create more income to your business. Most sales pitches are designed to create some sort of emotional reaction or urgency. In the case of things like limited offers that’s fine, but many products are set up in such a way that the ‘real’ product is the upsell. Seriously think about why you are thinking about buying a product. Does it promise to make you rich within a month or two? Does it suggest that it’s going to solve all of your problems in one little ebook? If you delay your buying decision and go back to the site when you’re not just a little bit depressed about how little you are making online will you still want to buy it? Desperation is a powerful motivator but it can lead you to buying a whole lot of products that you really don’t need.

I’m kicking myself for buying more products when I already had about 50GB of things on my hard drive I could use or sell.

Be Patient

You probably remember your mum or dad telling you to be patient hundreds of times during your childhood years. Why didn’t you listen!? Seriously though, we’re all impatient at some time in our lives – but impatience doesn’t really work when it comes to making a living online. If Edison had been impatient we may have had to wait years longer before someone came up with an efficient light bulb. He wasn’t though. He had that ‘do or die and failure is not an option’ kind of attitude. If something isn’t working the way you want it to then you need to change it. Find out why it isn’t working. Einstein said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Now you could easily think I’m a hypocrite for saying, on the one hand, that you should stick to something, do or die, and then using a quote that looks like it means the opposite – that you should try different things. There’s a big difference though, between jumping from one thing to the next OR testing and tweaking something until it starts to show some positive results.

I’m kicking myself for being far too impatient for far too long.