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.

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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?

It’s nothing to do with the Google Slap, the Squdio slap, competition from other niches, or knowing what to do. It’s something even more insidious and could affect you more deeply that you realize.

Notes follow (click on “more” below)

Solving the IM Engima

The IM insider and the IM outsider

Biggest challenge to new internet marketers is not the google slap, squidoo slap, competition, or even knowing what to do.

Biggest challenge is not taking action.

The major stumbling block seems to be giving yourself permission to succeed.

“Are you merely an IM worshipper?”, or are you an IM practitioner?”

Emails go out saying “XYZ guru is such an expert, everyone should be learning from him”

Implication: he’s your guru and you are his follower or disciple.

A follower will never overcome the master.

Take steps. Move yourself up.

Instead of “following” why not focus on “doing”?

Big difference between “saying” and “doing”.

Talk is cheap.

Ideas are a dime a dozen.

Talking never earned anyone anything, unless you’re a professional speaking.
In this case, you’re an internet marketer.

And actions certainly speak louder than words.

–
Before you take action though,
I realize that giving yourself permission to succeed can be a major stumbling block.

Like runner Roger Bannister and running the 4 min mile.

“impossible run a mile in less than 4 minutes”

Long time psychological barrier to success.

Once you’ve broken the barrier, you can’t go back to running 4 min miles.

In the internet marketing race, have you broken your own “4 minute mile” yet?

If you’re still struggling to generate any decent internet income, what i want you to do is to start taking action. put your knowledge into practise.

It’s only once you’ve got yourself all bloody and earned you first $1,000 a week, or $1,000 a day using the techniques you’ve practised that you’ll truly be an IM insider.

You’ll also no longer be blogging about making your first $5 sale.

As you’re reflecting on all of this, also reflect on this thought.
Are you still sitting at the table of life, expecting success to be served to you on a silver platter?

Shouldn’t you be getting up and get what’s rightfully yours?

Although you might already be bombarded each day with a barrage of emails and irresistible offers, here’s a tip to help you achieve your 2006 goals over the next 70+ hours.

• Focus, Focus, Focus

I call it a tip (some might call it a trick). The mind can only fully concentrate on one task at a time. Have you ever been in a race (whether on land or in a swimming pool or some other situation) and you found yourself watching the competition?

You may have noticed your concentration waning and the gap widened.

Here’s what I do when I’m power walking (or rushing to dash across a road crossing). Just focus on walking. Focus on your outcome, be single-minded about your goal.

The moment you stop to look around, or to think, or to hesitate for a moment, you’ve lost the opportunity.

Likewise, in the game of Internet Marketing, stopping to think, to consider, to ask for a second opinion could prevent you from making a drastically wrong decision 1% of the time. The other 99% of the time, you’d do better to decide on a path/strategy/action, and plunge headlong into it.

Whether you’re a product owner, or an affiliate, hesistation can be sensed even if you’re posting text on the Internet.

You may not realize it, but you leave telltale microsigns of your hesistation in your communication.

Bottomline: Plunge into something 100% or stay out of the pool.

If something you’ve been work on doesn’t turn out the way you expected, do a self-audit:

• Did you commit to it fully?
• Did you hold anything back?
• Did what you actually did vary much from what you planned to do? What was the difference and how did it affect the outcome?

Here’s a tip from my investing experience which translates easily to Internet Marketing.

It’s important to keep a diary (it doesnt need to be a paper diary, you can use a microsoft word document) recording your efforts or strategies you’d come up with and detail the outcomes. Was it successful?

You’d want to document both the winning and losing outcomes. More important than the result was the process which you went through. (Too many are focused only on the end result which is why they don’t really learn the lessons which will help them reach the next level)
As you might already know, one of the key features of online marketing is the replication of winning strategies.

Once you’ve worked out the winning formula for a niche site. It’s merely a matter of repeating the results to achieve similar results in a different niche.

If you haven’t compiled your winning strategies, or systematized it, it makes it more difficult to replicate it.

Likewise, two of the ingredients to online success are:

• Laser Sharp Focus
• A System which can be Replicated Easily

Once you have the two elements in hand, it’s a matter of application.

Here’s to your next 72 hours.

Exactly what that step is, I’m not exactly sure.

He may not be totally aware either.

—

Going by his recent ruminations, starting with his post: In Search of Excellence (which was penned just after his 24th birthday), he notes:

Thankfully self-awareness (and the fact i turned 24 last friday) has somewhat played a major role in making me sit down and revisit and review my true north, as Stephen Covey would most likely have put it. During the wedding event (more on that later), i’ve managed to catch up with a couple of ex-classmates and the whole “Hey, what are you doing now” ass-probing questions were more than enough to keep me silent for the entire evening… It’s been 4 years since we all last met and the time span couldn’t have been worse in my opinion. The intentions of finding out what you were up to just weren’t right….if you ever had friends you never met in a long time ask you those questions, you know how its like.

—

I guess for most of us, after doing whatever we were doing (or supposed to be doing) in our first career choice, achieving some level of financial stability, we’ve moved beyond Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs levels of:

• Physiological Food and shelter (level 1)
• Safety (level 2)
• Love and belonging (level 3)

We’re might be focused on the esteem (level 4) and self-actualization (level 5) segments.

Abraham Maslow: Hierarchy of Needs

You know you’re moving up the pyramid, when you have moments of:

“Since reading it, i’ve experienced some kind of higher awareness where my time goes and what i do with it. Even managed to purchase a cheap but big clock to hang next to my PC to remind me of the time (and how fast it ticks away). Marvelous.” (Ryan’s No Bullshit! post)

and a couple of days later, culminating in:

Declutter:

Mental note to self, reduce and simplify life, workplace, and home. Focus and clarity of direction and goals will be much easier after that.

—

I know Ryan doesn’t particularly like to write, but he’s penned his thoughts at:

Site Dev, Site Dev…and more Site Dev

I won’t summarize his post here, but do visit him and leave a blog comment.

While we won’t always know exactly where we’re going, or what we’ll end up with, we do have a sense of whether we’re moving forward or not moving forward.

And if there’s a secret, if you want to call it that, we’re the ones who determine the direction.

Go forth and prosper.

What do you do when you are blogging every day, and nothing’s happening.

Nothing’s happening? I asked.

Well, I got 23 visitors a day, maybe one Adsense clickthrough. I haven’t made a single sale yet.

Hmm, I pondered and pointed to a sign in the distance:

Well, let’s talk about this then, I offered.

I’ve been working on it and nothing’s happening, he moaned.

I see. How much time have you been putting in?

Well, every spare moment I have. Maybe an hour every day or two days.

I think that’s the problem. We talked about it more and he’s got a plan to put into action.
Here’s the rub: too many people take any aspect of Internet Marketing, whether it’s blogging, affiliate marketing or adsense as a hobby.

But I’d like to challenge you to think of it as a business.

If you don’t, there’s major consequences to consider.

Consider this for a moment:

How’d you feel about someone who:

• Checks their email every 3 days
• Sometimes replies you a week later
• Updates their blog once a week. Maybe once every 2 weeks.
• Has no idea what the affiliate product they’re marketing contains, or if it works with a certain computer configuration.

Would you be inclined to go back regularly?

I didn’t think so.

The Internet though vast, is still a small community at times.

The inside happens at many of the big Internet boys are subjects of lunchtime conversation in as far flung a place as Singapore (literally halfway around the world).

Your reputation and credibility may be swayed sometimes by hearsay and rumor.

The Internet sometimes moves faster than facts can permeate.

Given all this, do you think checking your email will cut it?

I suggested to him that a major change in strategy is in order.

Here’re some tips to jump up in the rankings (pick your poison) and drive traffic.

Blog:

• Update at least once a day if you can. 2 or 3 times if you want to get noticed.
• Quality is more important than quantity. One quality post is prefable to 2 mediocre ones.
• Talk to your blog visitors. Carry a dialogue with them in your blog comments. A double-sided interaction will bring you much further and faster than just one-way blog posting

Email:

• Answer emails within 24 hours. Immediately if you are able to.
• Be polite, you wouldn’t know if “XYDDJS” might’ve been the guy who bought $500 worth of affiliate marketing products from you.
• It’s a 2-way street. Treat others as you’d have them treat you.

One of the most crucial success factors is to be disciplined.

Everyone’s enthusiastic about a project in the beginning. The winners stick it out.

How’ve your own experiences been?