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You’re a Wuss and it’s Costing You

We’ve all heard the stat from the SBA: 50% of small businesses will fail within 1 year and 95% of small businesses will fail within the first 5. Why are we so good at failing? What in our DNA makes those failures stumbling blocks for some (those who give up) and building blocks for others (those who keep going)?

After a lot of thought on this topic, my conclusion was fairly simple: you’re a wuss and it’s costing you. Here are 3 things you can do to stop being a wuss and start making money.

Forget The Fear of Failure…It’s A Myth

This is a very real feeling, no doubt. But SO WHAT? Nobody WANTS to fail. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Today is the day I fail!” That’s ludicrous. Instead, as intelligent beings, we are much more sly with how we manifest this fear. You see, it would be too simple for us to just admit we’re fearful, address the feeling, and move on. No that won’t work for us. We have to attribute our fears to others, an experience, or a reality we face that is the REASON we can’t do something. It might go something like this:

Sure that guy can make money, he’s got _______, and _______ going for him. Not only that, he’s been doing it for ______ years. Furthermore, he probably doesn’t have the responsibilities of ______ and ______ and ______ like I do.

Have you ever had a conversation with yourself that resembles those statements in any way, shape, or form? Do you see what you’re doing by making those statements? You’re setting yourself so low that before you even start something, you’ve talked your self out of it.

Here’s a better way to deal with fear of failure.

Sit down, and make a list of the top 3-5 things you are MOST fearful about regarding your new endevour, project, or business. Be real with yourself, don’t let that manipulative self take over and write the halmark version of what your fearing. Be REALISTIC. Be HONEST. Be SPECIFIC. Once you have a list ask yourself these questions.

1. If I was counseling someone else with the same fear, how likely would I tell them the chance of that actually happening was?
2. If this fear does come to pass will it cost me my family, all my savings, or my life?
3. If I didn’t have this fear, would I feel capable to pursue this project?

Most often, when you ask yourself the tough questions, you’re able to see that the actual thing you fear is something completely different than you may think. That fear of failure may be more a matter of your feeling inadequate, incapable, like you just don’t have what it takes (because remember, NOBODY WANTS TO FAIL). The point of this exercise is to identify the real reason we continue to fail before we begin. Are you willing to go there with yourself? Are you open to asking the tough questions? Are you willing to squelch the inner wuss so you can move forward with confidence?

Play To Your Strengths, Manage Where Your Weak

This ties in so well with the fear of failure myth. I’m not a PhD, and I’m not attempting to be one, but perhaps the reason we are so good at failing is because we spend so much time trying to improve our weaknesses that we forget to spend time on our strengths.

It’s human nature. We’re taught that weakness is bad. We’re told that we need to work on it, be better at it, just NOT do it.

While that may be well intentioned advice, it’s completely backwards if you ask me. Instead of spending so much time getting better at where your weak (and remember, I’m talking in the business world), spend 90% of your time playing to your strengths and hire out where you’re weak.

Maybe you’re great at writing salescopy but suck at web design. Maybe you’re unbelievable at customer support but horrible at vision casting. No matter the comparison, identify where you’re strong, identify a business that plays to those strengths, then manage your weakness (by hiring someone else). This has probably been one of the most valuable lessons to me personally.

Set SMALL Goals

Don’t be the, “I want to make $50,000/month this month,” guy or gal.

I can GUARANTEE you it won’t happen. If you’re trying to go from $0 to some huge number in NO time, let me save you the frustration and tell you the truth: it ain’t gonna happen.

Now instead, why not focus on something like this.

If $50,000/month is your ultimate goal (you can fill in whatever number that is), then take what you ultimately want and work backwards. $50,000/month is about $1667/day, $69/hour, $1.16/minute.

Next, identify something IN that goal as your FIRST goal. Meaning, take $1667/day and make that your first monthly income goal. $1667/month is $55.57/day, $2.32/hour, 4 cents/minute. That is a much more reasonable place to start, but it also does something sneaky to your brain: it helps you achieve part of your bigger goal, establishing success, and motivating you to the next level. Does that make sense? Buy establishing success in a small but measurable way in your bigger goal, you establish momentum and the sense of ability to go to the next level.

If you’re a planner by nature, this will be a valuable little nugget. Always be mindful of the bigger goal, but don’t spend so much of your energy trying to go from sea level to the summit of Everest when you haven’t yet conquered getting to base camp.

So forget fear of failure and identify the real reasons you’re not pursuing what you want, play to your strengths/hire where you’re weak, and set small goals that are stepping stones to your biggest goal. Don’t be a wuss, and don’t let it cost you anymore!

WHY Most People Fail Online

Ever since I began teaching people how to make money online through my buying & selling websites training class, I’m starting to see why the “make money online guru market” is not a fun place to be.

When I decided to teach people how to make money online, I did so because I truly wanted to help people succeed. Since I’ve been working full time online the last 5+ years, I’ve learned a lot about what to do and what not to do.

I’ve been fortunate to make over a million dollars online during this 5 year stretch, but it wasn’t an accident. I worked my butt off to get where I am today.

Now that I’m sharing my experience with people, I’m constantly hit with the label of “con artist”, “scammer” and many other names not nearly as nice as these.

Those who know me can attest that I’m probably one of the most generous people they know. I always go above and beyond to help someone out and often push my own desires aside if I can help someone else instead.

I had no idea when I got into this teaching business that there would be so much negativity associated with it. Sure, I get to hear a lot of praise from the students who take my training, but the non-customers who contact me are 90% negative, 5% skeptical and 5% excited to hear what I’m saying.

The biggest problem people have when trying to make money is the negative mindset.

If you are constantly thinking people are out to rip you off, you will never be successful. You’ll spend so much of your time trying to “prove” someone else is a fraud that you’ll never have time to actually make money yourself.

I’m yet to find a successful person in business who is always negative and pessimistic. Success just doesn’t match with this type of personality.

But, just being positive won’t make you successful however…

You have to take action!

It’s pretty sad, but most people never take action and actually put in the work to make things happen.

Usually what happens is someone will read an article or take a training class and store away that knowledge in their brain and never use it. Even if it’s the most valuable piece of knowledge in the world, they just absorb it and move on.

They spend most of their lives searching for more information, when in fact they probably already have enough knowledge to be very successful as it is.

An example of this is from my training class I teach. I just got a refund request this morning from a guy who said he “already knew everything I was teaching”. Yet, somehow he was not successful and still searching for a secret solution to his problem of not making any money online.

Maybe he did know everything I was teaching in the class, but if so, he should be selling websites for six figures like I’ve been doing. The problem may be that he is just an information junkie who never applies anything he learns.

It’s interesting when I hear people say “it’s too hard to make money online”.

That’s a bunch of nonsense!

HARD WORK is digging ditches in 100 degree sunshine for 8 hours per day.

Sitting on your butt writing a few articles is NOT hard work. Getting links to your website is NOT hard work. Spending 3 hours watching Google’s free video tutorials to learn Adwords is NOT hard work.

Yes, it takes time and yes, it can be boring, but it is not hard…

Sitting at a job you hate for 8 hours a day is much harder than an internet business.

Most people get overwhelmed.

A lot of times people are not successful online because they are simply overwhelmed. There are two possibilities here.

1) People are overwhelmed by opportunities.

Maybe you are signed up to 80 different internet marketers’ email lists, and each week you get a new “magic button internet billionaire training program”. So you jump from one idea to the next without actually doing anything. This is a very common problem. The solution is simple though, just unsubscribe from all of those email lists.

Very few email lists, from what I’ve seen, actually provide much value. In most cases, you just get hit with offer after offer of things to buy, which doesn’t help you one bit. In fact, it hurts you more than anything because of the distractions.

If someone truly wanted to help you by making recommendations, they wouldn’t be promoting a membership site coaching program one week and then the following week be promoting a software program that churns out 400 adsense websites per hour.

It’s no wonder you’re not successful, you’re getting pulled in 100 different directions that teach completely opposite business models.

2) People are overwhelmed by projects.

If you do have the ability to focus without the distraction of the “product launch of the week”, another issue you may face is being overwhelmed by the scope of your project.

You might decide to start a website on dogs, but when you are planning your website you think about all the things you want to cover.

You want to cover dog training, but then dog supplies look interesting too, so you plan out that section of your site. Then dog breeding looks like a good topic to get into, so you spend a couple weeks researching that topic. But then you figure some people might want to learn how to start their own dog sitting business, so you think about how you are going to get into that sub niche as well.

After you figure out all 214 dog related topics you want to cover on your site, you look at your outline of things you want to cover and say “there’s no way I’ll have time to do all of this work”.

And since it looks too much like work, you file it away until the next time you are feeling ambitious.

The months and years pass and you still never start your web business because there’s just too much to do.

Resolution to this problem - just break up the project into small chunks. Give yourself a deadline to complete each small chunk and slowly but surely you will get where you want to be. Maybe focus 3 weeks to building the dog training part of your website, then move on to the next part.

So what do you think? Any of these common problems apply to you?

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Making Big Money In Weird Niche Markets

Typically when I talk about making money online, I tell people to focus on the big, proven money making website ideas like health, wealth and relationships. Those markets are always in demand so it’s easier to make money in those markets.

BUT, every once in a while I come across a story of an entrepreneur who takes an unlikely idea and turns it into a huge money maker.

Here’s one of these examples I just came across…

As you know, gas prices are out of control right now. It’s a super hot topic that is on the news pretty much everyday. Most people sit around and complain about it because they think there is nothing they can do.

Here is one guy who is not complaining one bit!

Basically this guy found a way to run a car using WATER. It sounds crazy to me, but after watching the video on the middle of this page, it’s pretty impressive.

He says in the video that his car was about to drive about 100 miles or so on 4 OUNCES of water.

I’m not trying to start an argument over whether or not you can run your can on water or not. I don’t know anything about cars or how they work and I don’t see myself converting my car into a water burning machine anytime soon.

But it’s a great lesson of taking a huge problem in the world and coming up with a possible solution to the problem.

I’m sure this guy will make millions if not BILLIONS of dollars if this thing actually works.

Anytime it feels like everything is going wrong, the economy is crashing and the sky is falling, a few smart people always find a way to capitalize on the situation and become wealthy…

I wonder what other kinds of solutions we can come up with like this guy just did?

Millionaire Lifestyle With 2% Profit Margins

What if you ran a website that made a whopping 2% profit per month? Would you be living a millionaire lifestyle?

Most people would say “no way”. If I didn’t know any better, I’d be right there with you…

Basically what a 2% profit margin means is if your site makes $1,000 per month in sale, your expenses to generate that $1,000 is $980, leaving a profit of $20.

Wow, how exciting, right?

Well, this is exactly what a friend of mine does, but on his 2% profit margin website, he is able to fly around the world in first class and stay at 5 star hotels every single month. He is truly living the millionaire lifestyle.

Here’s how he does it…

He has a website that sells kids outdoor wooden playground sets. Obviously by selling these huge wooden playgrounds online, after shipping and all the competition in that market, it’s a very low margin e-commerce product.

But, his average order size is $2,600 per sale. His cost for a $2,600 playground is $2,100 and he spends about $450 to generate each sale (advertising, credit card processing fees, etc), so his “profit” per sale is a measly $50 per playground set.

I didn’t even know you could sell playground sets online, but he does and he sells a lot of them!

In fact, he sells an average of 6 playgrounds per day, every single day of the week.

By running some quick numbers, he is making about $300 per day in profits based on $15,600 per day in sales. His total profit for one year comes out to about $110,000 (about $9k per month).

Not bad, that’s for sure, but that’s not really that much money to be taking trips around the world every month like he does. So what’s his secret?

Credit card points!

You see, he has an American Express card that allows him to earn points for travel. For every $7,500 he puts on his AMEX card, he “earns” $100 in free travel.

Since all of his playgrounds are dropshipped from the manufacturer, he is able to pay for all his inventory using his American Express card. Also, his advertising is put on his AMEX card and whatever other expenses he has.

His business spends $465,000 per month on his American Express card. That means, his card is earning him $6,200 in FREE TRAVEL every single month. He earns almost as much credit for free travel than he does with his entire business…

It’s a pretty neat concept. His passion is traveling, so rather than spending his own money on flying to Paris for the weekend, his business expenses allow him to do it for free.

Imagine what you could do if your business generated $74,000 worth of free travel for you this year. You could take your entire family on multiple vacations, all fly first class and stay at the best possible hotels, all completely free. Now that’s a sweet benefit of starting your own business…

How hard would it be to make $2,000,000 per month in sales if you were spending $1,980,000 to generate those sales? You would be making a whopping 1% profit of $20,000 per month from the website, but you would also be earning $26,400 PER MONTH in free travel if you used your AMEX card.

Crazy…

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Do You Have A Mastermind Group?

I never realized how important it is to have a mastermind group of like minded people when you are trying to accomplish something.

Over the past 5 years of my full time internet marketing career, I had basically been living in a cave. I would work on our private projects and not interact with anyone besides by business partner.

Sure, I would read the occasional blog post or participate in a couple forum posts here and there, but I just never got too involved with other people who did the same thing I was doing.

My wife has absolutely no idea what I do for a living and most of my friends, neighbors and family all have typical 9-5 jobs, so I couldn’t exactly talk with them about my latest split test results or sales letter copy.

In fact, teaching my buying and selling websites training class over the last 2 months has been the first time I’ve really been super involved with people who love internet marketing. Not only have I been sharing my knowledge with the students, but I’m also learning a lot from them as well. Everyone has knowledge and experience to bring to the table.

That’s another good lesson you should take away…becoming friends with your customers is a GREAT way to become more and more successful online. Your customers are your market. They know other people in that market. When you treat people right and make friends in that market, the word starts to spread and before you know it, your business grows dramatically as a result.

(You’ll see proof of this in my May 2008 income report I post next week, pretty interesting month we had)

Aside from working closely with my training class students, I also recently joined a smaller, closed door mastermind group of internet marketers. There are a total of 7 of us, each in a different niche market, but all working on the same goal (generating money online).

This is an informal mastermind group that we put together. Nobody paid anything to get into it, but I think it’s one of the most valuable things I’ve ever been a part of. Since there are only 7 of us, we can be completely open about all aspects of our businesses without worrying about someone stealing our ideas.

We share exactly what we are working on, what we are testing and what we are having trouble with. Since we meet on the phone every Wednesday, it also keeps us accountable for our actions (if you report that you didn’t do anything since last week’s call, you feel like a complete moron)!

Our mastermind group has one person from California, one in Washington, 3 from Canada, myself in North Carolina and one in Australia. All we do is get on a Skype conference call for 2 hours on Wednesdays and chat about business. It’s absolutely incredible the amount of great advice you can get in that short amount of time.

Finding a mastermind group isn’t all that difficult. You can go to any forum in your niche and find people interested in the same things as you. Put up a post asking if anyone wants to join your mastermind group. You can filter out the responses based on the type of person you are looking to mastermind with.

If you can find people that are more experienced, smarter, or have more contacts than you, then that would be great. You should probably avoid a mastermind group if everyone is a newbie and nobody has ever had any success (unless you are all willing to work hard and share with each other what is working vs what’s not).

Sometimes it just takes an extra set of eyes on your website and with a couple changes, you could go from making $20 a day to $100 a day literally overnight.

I’d HIGHLY recommend starting up some kind of mastermind group if you want to make money online. The key is you all must stick to it and the conversation must remain positive & optimistic. You also need everyone on the call every single week for it to work. Everyone holds each other accountable, and that’s where the success comes from.

Go out and find 3, 4, 5 or 6 people to mastermind with. Report back here after your first call and let me know what you think.

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Think Pennies…Get Pennies

How much money are you making on the internet?

Chances are, it’s right around the amount you think you are capable of earning. Call it the law of attraction, a strange coincidence, fate, whatever you want, but the results you are getting right now are exactly what you are thinking about.

When you are looking to start an internet business or a new website, how are you planning your business, specifically the monetization of the business? Are you thinking about things like “If I can get 500 people to my site per day and if 5% of those people click my google ads and I make $0.15 per click, I’ll be making $3.75 per day”.

Or maybe you say to yourself “If I can just sell 4 of these 125×125 ads at $25/month, I’ll be making $100 per month”.

You probably don’t even realize you are doing it, but you are limiting yourself based on your thoughts. You have to stop thinking in pennies if you want to make real money online.

I think entrepreneurs online have this mindset that the internet is “different” and there are certain rules that limit you from making the amount money a real business can make. That’s complete nonsense.

The minute you start thinking about your website as a REAL business is when you will start to see a drastic change in your income. I think part of the problem is, most people who want to try to make money online do not know how the real business world works.

Ford, Coca Cola and AT&T each spent $35 MILLION just to advertise on American Idol this year and Ford alone spends $150 million per year on online advertising campaigns.

A single ad in the yellow pages (which almost nobody even uses anymore) will cost a company up to $30,000 per year for one full page ad!!

A billboard advertisement can costs about $800 per month. Who ever responds to a billboard ad anyway?

National TV commercials can run into the millions of dollars for airtime…

…And you were stressed out and feeling doubtful that you could sell 4 ads for $25 each on your website?

What you need to do is convince yourself that you are WORTHY of being on the same playing field with real businesses and that you shouldn’t be settling for a measly $0.39 per day in adsense income or $20 per month for an ad on your site.

Don’t be afraid of selling products and services, and don’t be afraid of charging a premium for these products and services.

This really hit me like a ton of bricks once I started seeing success online a few years ago. When I was first starting out, I bootstrapped my startup business to the extreme.  I didn’t spend a penny more than I had to for anything related to my business.  I *thought* everyone felt this way when it came to their businesses too.

BIG MISTAKE!

Once I started making about $5,000 per month with my web businesses, I realized I could boost my business by buying things that would make me more money. I could buy tools that would increase my productivity. I could hire someone to design my logo for $50 rather than me spending 8 hours of my time making one just so I could save a couple bucks.

My mindset had completely shifted with the more success I had. No longer was I squeezing every penny I had in my business. After my mindset shifted was when I realized THIS is how bigger business owners must be thinking. They aren’t cringing over the decision of whether or not they should spend $500 on a training course to improve their skills. In fact, if they have two choices with one being a $500 training course or two being a $29 ebook course, most would opt for the $500 course because it MUST be better since it costs more.

Even if the material is basically the same, the only difference is the mindset of the person or company selling the course. One person is thinking BIG (and making $500 a clip) and the other is thinking small (and struggling to make any decent money with their $29 ebook).

If you are very cost concerned (nice word for frugal), keep in mind that not everyone else is. Just because you wouldn’t spend $400 per month for an ad on a website doesn’t mean another company won’t. In fact, if you are ONLY charging $400 per month for an ad and you offer the ad space to a large company like Ford for example, they won’t consider the ad because it’s too cheap! They have a mandatory and preset ad budget to spend each year on advertising and marketing, so they can’t waste their time on $400 per month ads.  It would take forever to split up that $150 million ad budget at that rate…

The next project you think about, try thinking BIG and see what happens.  Focus all your thoughts and energy towards that big idea, that big income and that big website traffic. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the outcome.

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