How To Fail Without Trying

Jan Evensen is one of the ten students on my coaching programme.

A couple of weeks ago, we did a session on focus and the importance when you’re starting out in your internet business, to give yourself very focussed 30 day projects.

Thirty days to complete a project and end up with your own saleable product is more than enough time to do everything.  In fact, I proved you could actually do it in a day, and have a sales page and autoresponders set up without a problem.

That is, once you’ve done it a few times and it becomes second nature to you.

Giving yourself 30 days to begin with is a good idea, especially if you have a day time job and have to fit in your product creation time in the evenings.  However, you shouldn’t spend much more than the first seven days to create your product.

You should spend another 5-7 days writing your sales page, setting up your site flow, and making sure your autoresponder sequence is set up correctly.

Then you should think about traffic.  If you don’t have your own mailing lists, or a regularly visited blog like this one, then you will need some time to find and write to potential JV partners.  You will probably get a ten percent response with a well worded email.

Any remaining time after that would be well spent working on your blog, and in the process doing things like linking to other related blogs, visiting other blogs and making relevant comments.

And blogging aside, generally setting things up for launch.

But the first thing you should do is make the decisions to see it all through, and set a deadline.

If you have a deadline, it will focus your thoughts as you get closer and closer to it, and realise that there are things you still have to do.  The basic list I’ve outlined above will get bigger as you get nearer to the date, and start getting contact from JV partners.

If you don’t have a deadline, then you’ll find yourself putting things back “just a few days”, which then turns into a week, two weeks and more…

Back to Jan Evensen.  He now deeply understands the importance of making a plan and sticking to it.

Jan has made a wonderfully ironic post which shows that without focus, how quickly your precious time and money can disappear, just by checking your email.

I’ve done it, you’ve done it, everybody’s done it.

A quick read through your email, and suddenly you’re on a sales page clicking the order button before you even know what’s happened.

Take the time out now and stop for a few moments to ask yourself how you can stop this from happening to you again. It’s not hard, it just takes a little self-discipline.

-Frank Haywood