motivation

What’s The Difference Between Those Who Do And Those Who Don’t?

I’m talking about achieving here.

The difference is attitude.

Those who don’t have one or more blockers that stop them from achieving. These blockers usually boil down to the individual’s perception and attitude.

Yes, I know you’re probably saying to yourself, “oh no, not another Positive Mental Attitude article”. Well, maybe this is a little different. Maybe not…

Have you noticed that the people who gripe in life are ALWAYS griping? Nothing is ever right for them. They’re always unhappy with something, and expend a lot of energy looking for the next thing to moan about.

“I can’t come up with a product idea.” “I’ve got my product idea, but I can’t get started.” “I’ve created my product, but I don’t know how to create a sales page.” “My sales page is up but I can’t get any sales.”

It’s just worn me out writing that and thinking in that way. It’s so negative it makes me feel ill just experiencing it, and I’m sorry if it’s taken you the same way.

How do people get anything done with an attitude like that?

Well, in most cases they don’t, but there are always some that do, and then they hit a “blocker”.

A blocker is that one thing that they can’t get past. Correction. The one thing they think they can’t get past.

All they need is a little help to change their thinking.

Let’s take the final example above. You have a product, but no sales.

The first question to ask yourself is “do I have traffic?” and if the answer is no, then that’s the thing to work on.

There are probably as many traffic sources as there are ways to make a million dollars.

Here’s a few…

  • JV partners
  • Forums
  • eBay
  • Squidoo
  • YouTube
  • StumbleUpon
  • Article sites
  • Blogging…

I don’t think I need to go on – just ONE of those sources worked upon and used exclusively should be enough to bring in traffic to make at least a sale a day.

So… You match your traffic source together with your product.

For instance, you might be selling something that helps ebook sellers deliver their ebooks. Such as SmartDD. 😉

Then JV partners and eBay would be the first / best way to go, and the way to build affiliates. Once you have enough affiliates, you reach “critical mass” and they do all the selling for you.

Now… As always, the devil’s in the detail.

You may know about all of the traffic sources above, but how do you get traffic from one of them? Well, they’re all different and need to be treated in different ways.

But choosing one and trying to get traffic from it is probably a good start.

This is where many people fall flat on their face.

They try… and after a month or 6 weeks, nothing’s happened.

They decide that it’s impossible to do.

Despite the fact that people are milking traffic from many of these sites, some people don’t get immediate success and that’s it, they give up.

(I blame all the BS artists out there who get people excited by the prospect of it being “easy”. When the real world hits and they find it isn’t as easy as they were led to believe, then the depression sets in.)

I’ll put you right now so you don’t get the wrong idea.

It isn’t easy.

Anyone that tells you it is has either got to the nice place where affiliates are now making sales for them, and / or they’ve forgotten that to start with it was actually quite hard.

See my post on Your Big Steel Ball.

Let me give you an idea of the kind of sales you should be making – these are pretty much standard numbers.

If you get 100 mildly interested visitors to your site, you will make 1 sale.

If you make less than 1 sale per 100 visitors, then you may have a poor product, or more likely, your sales page is at fault.

If you make 2 sales per 100 visitors, then you’re doing pretty well.

3 sales and you have an excellent combination of product and sales page.

More than that and it looks like you’ve found yourself a highly qualified (well targeted) traffic source.

In most cases, if you have traffic but no sales, then your sales page is crap.

I have a site that I’ve never done any work on since I set it up a couple of years ago. It was a practice for me when I was learning. (I think the domain may have just expired.)

I’ve never promoted it, I’ve never done anything with it since the day I set it up. To my knowledge, I may have submitted it to Google once, and that was it. There are no graphics other than the PayPal button, it’s text only.

To my amazement, that site has resulted in a sale about every 3-4 months… A tiny amount of traffic must be finding its way there, and every so often it results in a sale.

I’m quite pleased with that…

All I did was follow a few rules about setting up a sales page.

All I did was try.

All I did was give it a go.

I went in with the right attitude, not knowing whether it would work or not. I believed it would, and I was more pleased with myself for having done the site as it was good practice for my next one.

You can do the same as me. Be pleased with what you’ve done, be pleased with what you do. Don’t get upset or decide “it doesn’t work”.

If you want to achieve, if you want to build a successful business, then you have to give it your very best attitude.

Moaning when things don’t magically work out won’t achieve anything.

Being pleased with any of your achievements puts you in the right frame of mind to go do some more.

-Frank Haywood.

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Is Your Strong Motivation Killing your Chances of Success?

Having good motivation to build a business is a great thing, but there’s something even better than that, and that’s good habits.

At some point, we’ve all felt the strong motivation to go and DO something. But after a while the strong sense of motivation dies off, and we wander aimlessly a bit until something else fires up our motivation to go and do something else instead.

The result for most people I guess is the same as mine has been in the past. No steady, coherent plan, no movement forward, just a bit of thrashing about, and then it all goes quiet. Until the next bit of motivation hits.

So what can you do about that?

Well once you know that motivation is emotionally driven, you can understand why it doesn’t last very long. If you kept the same emotional high for a prolonged period, it would burn you out.

I’m sure you know what I mean. You have this great idea, you get excited about it, you spend a few hours looking into it and building the idea to the point where you think it’s worth doing.

You may then even spend a couple of days working at it, and go to the point of taking out a domain name, putting up a web site and writing a few words. Great!

Then the emotional high dies, you start to think about other things, and the “great idea” is forgotten about until 12 months later when it’s time to renew the domain.

Yes, I’ve done that. What a waste of effort, what a waste of a good idea.

Over time, I gradually came to the realisation that I can’t possibly follow through with every good idea I have, so I’ve now become very selective. I ask myself “Do I have a minimum of 60 minutes every day to work on this? Is it worth the effort?”

In most cases the answer to both those questions is no. So that then leaves me with the choice of either binning the idea altogether, or putting it in my ideas document for a later time.

Some make it into the document, but about 90% get binned, as realistically I just don’t have the time.

So if motivation is hurting you, what can you do to fix it?

The answer is to develop good habits that replace the temporary motivation.

Here’s an example.

I’m on the mailing lists of a lot of marketers, and I have a single email account I receive all my marketing email into. I get an average of 30 emails a day, all making me various offers. If I read them all and followed them through, that would be my day over.

So what I do is scan the name of the marketer and the subject line to see what it’s all about. If the subject catches my eye, then I may scan the email, or if it’s a marketer I admire, then I’ll properly read the email. Either of these may result in me clicking through.

If I do, unless the product is exceptional, I’ll only spend about 2 minutes on the sales page as I’m now immune to sales copy (I know how to write good copy myself and how it works, so other people’s is never going to work on me). If the product is exceptional, then I mark the email as unread, and continue scanning the others.

If I find one email that I follow through each day, that’s about it. The whole process takes me no more than 5 minutes usually, and quite often less than a minute. I might do this once in the morning and once in the afternoon, so my total time with marketing email is no more than 10 minutes per day.

In the evening, I may go back to the email I marked unread and give it up to 15 minutes of my time, sometimes longer if I find it particularly interesting, but generally this time is dropping.

Very infrequently (about every 4 months or so) I’ll take an email I’ve received that is good sales copy and has really grabbed my attention, and I drop it into a “Well Written Emails” folder to use as a crib sheet for a later date.

So there’s a habit I’ve developed that saves me hours of my time, while still getting the benefit of following up on interesting offers, and also taking note of what worked on me as it will likely work for me too.

A habit I’m also developing is posting something useful like this on my blog once a day. It’s beginning to pull in traffic and new subscribers, so it’s something I’ll keep up. I’ll write about this in the next week or so, but it’s a very good habit to have. Take that away from here, if nothing else.

There you have it. Motivation is great, but in many cases it’s short lived and does nothing for you. It’s the day to day mundane habits that will make a real difference to your business.

What do you think? Comments below please.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business