I got an email from Missy who owns G34media, a small network of 4 blogs and she asks:

Hi—Andrew:

I found your blog through a post on “How to Make Money Online” over at ABW.

This post caught my attention, as im suppose to be working right now, and instead im at your blog procrastinating.

I would say i have a —fear of success— not failure. It is the classic “middle class syndrome”.

My modus operandi is that i tend to take on too much, right now im managing 4 blogs. Plus i get paid to write on another.

Sometimes i want to chuck some of the blogs, and just concentrate on one, but then i feel like im giving away future income.

What thoughts have you on my blog network?Should i concentrate on one or two blogs and sell the others, or just keep them, and write when i can.

Would love feedback from you.

Missy.

—

I’m not sure if Missy expected that it’d become a full-fledged post, but I think many internet marketers are in a similar situation.

Here’s my take:

Procrastination is something that happens if we don’t have a clear goal/outcome in mind, and may not have a game plan in hand.

If you don’t have visibility of what you are going to achieve (like getting into your car and not having a destination in mind), it’ll be natural that you might wander around aimlessly (eg. spend endless hours in forums, reading blogs, filing a twitter every 5 mins) – yes, you’re right, you are a digital slacker.

–

Just think back for a moment about why you got into internet marketing?

To spend more time with the family? To generate multiple time what you’re earning now? To achieve financial freedom?

I don’t know about you, but getting onto Facebook and “poking” your friends, or writing on their walls, sure isn’t going to achieve that.

Here are some things that WILL bring you forward and help you make more money online:

• Have A Plan:

All great projects start off with an ambitious goal. I watched a Discovery documentary the other day. The first emperor of China looked at the vast number of feudal kingdoms and understood it was his destiny to unify China into a single nation.  No mean undertaking considering that China was then and remains the world’s most populous country.

In comparison to that, having a single website that generates $1m a year looks highly achievable by comparison?

Here are some success elements you want to incorporate into your goal:

• Make it ambitious:

You might be a new marketer now, but what’s to say you can’t decide you want to achieve $500,000 a month by December this year?

Take a look at Paul from UberAffiliate. He grew his CPA/affiliate commissions from $40/day in Jan 2007 to $500,000 in Dec 2007. Read his post: My 1 year anniversary.

• Take Action

Face the facts that you will never become an “expert”. You might become very experienced, you might know what works on the back of multiple failures, but it’s unlikely that you will know “everything”.

Just roll with what you know, test, track.

If you didn’t already know, the biggest success comes from tracking analyzing and optimizing your campaigns. It’s not what you do BEFORE the launch that’s important, it’s also what you do AFTER you launch a new campaign or develop a new product.

• Embrace Failure (and learn from it)

As far as I’m aware, no one’s learned to walk without falling at least once. Learn to deal with “negative” experiences. If you need to, do a mental adjust to see failure as “learning how NOT to do it next time”.

If you need to, keep a notebook handy, and take notes or keep a diary of what you did, why it went wrong and how you’re going to fix it. You only “screw up” if you do something incorrect, and you repeat it a second time, or a third time. (sometimes you need to relearn the lesson before it “sticks”).

• Take Effective Action

If you decide to do something, do it with all your effort. If you need a commitment booster, give your best friend (whom you trust) a large sum of money (I think $1,000) is good.

Give your friend a set of goals you are planning to achieve and attach a completion date to them. (You can do this via email, or set up a bulletin board).

For each goal that you miss, your friend donates 10% of that amount to charity.

If that amount doesn’t hurt, I would suggest you double or triple it till it has a measurable effect.

Studies have shown that human beings perform better under “good stress” or eustress (read my eustress post for more details) . “Middle class syndrome” or “rich person’s syndrome” I don’t think the name really matters, but the toll it’s taking on your future might be a little too terrible to consider…

So back to my original question…What’s keeping YOU from making more money online?