Here is why most people fail in an online business: They see the possibilities immediately: You can market a digital or dropship product to the entire world, the process is almost completely automated, and you can get rich very quickly. They then reach out and study internet marketing and try and focus on expressing their niche interest. They reach out and start buying marketing materials and going to seminars and hanging out in forums. Often the get into debt in the process and sometimes their relationships fall apart as their significant other consider them short off dementia, but they are goaded on by this vision that they see as possible. A lot of stress happens when you suddenly become single-minded. Intense focus is both the secret of greatness and the root cause of burnout. Finally, they get overwhelmed by the amount of information that is out there on this subject, spin their wheels, suffer from information indigestion, experience failure, and then quit. Yet, remarkably, some people do amazingly well. They go through the same cycles but they come out winners. At this point, they start making in a day what took them a year in their previous dead-end jobs to make. While this is a complex topic, there are two critical elements that a netpreneur has to sort through. How he or she sorts through them determines whether they stay in the game and win big or drop out and fail, going back to the dismal jobs and unfulfilling lives that they hoped to escape. The first element to failing online is poor study skills. Its easy enough to whip out a credit card and download an e-book or a software program that promises the end to the search. Suddenly, they see an end to poverty and the beginning of riches. Suddenly, they envision the death of pain and the birth of pleasure. Unfortunately, they then have to actually read, study, and apply the information. Most people dont get this far. Its easier to just get the next information package. Often enough, they consider the information to be at fault; even if the person selling the information happens to have a fabulous track record, with lots of social and statistical proof. They conclude that either (a) they got scammed or (b) some vital information was withheld from them. They become guru-haters. The real culprit, however, is their own impatience, poor study skills, getting discouraged when there isnt instant comprehension, and failing to test the strategies out. The short attention cultivated by surfing may help them process large amounts of information quickly, but there is also a time when they need to spend a large amount of time processing information slowly to comprehend and use it. An e-book is just an e-book and a software program is just a software program-until the information is read, studied, comprehended, and applied. The second element to failing online is not understanding the learning loop. Failure is a bitter experience. Most of us shy away from it. Yet in our reluctance to go through it, we fail to get to the other side, which is success. You have to fail first before you can succeed. Failure is the process of trying something out, learning about it, improving your performance, eliminating what does not work, and finally arriving at a formula for success. Once you have this formula, then you can replicate that success over and over again. Whats more, when you refine that success, it gets even bigger. Mastery consists of three phases: learning, applying, and responding to feedback. Its a cybernetic loop. If you focus on the feedback as feedback, you will go through cycles of failing that will then lead you to cycles of succeeding. Unfortunately, most people dont let the loop run itself out. They respond to negative feedback as failure and stop dead in their tracks, discouraged, disillusioned, and upset. They only want positive feedback. Yet the feedback loop is always both positive and negative. Some things that you try out work and others that you try out dont work. You will never know what works and what does not work until you try different things out. |
