Over the past few months I’ve started to realize one of the things that keeps people from succeeding online is that they feel like they have to do everything they ever hear of or they’re a failure.
“You have to have a list”
“You have to do SEO”
“You have to do Adwords like this!”
“You have to be a great copywriter”
“You have to have an info product and give it away and then sell something else and create a newsletter to create continuity and have an audio and ship them a cd and then offer them a big box package with the goal of offering them a seminar so that they can then buy personal coaching…”
The number of things you can (and should) do goes on forever. Just not right now.
Recently I’ve seen that one of the reasons people fail is because they’re trying to do all of these things, and they’re trying to do them all their selves, and they’re doing a very poor job at every single one of them.
I had someone ask me recently, “how do I build a list as an affiliate?”
When I looked at what he was doing, he was running dozens of different affiliate campaigns that were making him money. Because he had heard “You have to have a list”, “You have to build a list”, “The money’s in the list”, he thought “I must need to build a list.” The reality is, even if he had a list what was he going to do with it? There’s no way he could service 10 lists right now. Having those 10 or 20 lists wasn’t going to make him any more money than what he was currently doing. In fact, he would probably lose money on gathering those people’s email addresses.
You don’t have to build a list.
You don’t have to have a squeeze page.
You don’t have to have an upsell.
You don’t have to do everything you hear of.
There’s so much info out there and it’s always presented as “You have to do this or else you’re doomed to failure.”
You’re really not.
Yes, I think you should have a list.
Yes, I think you should do SEO.
Yes, I think you should do lots with Adwords.
Yes, yes, yes.
But, not all at the same time.
Everything has it’s place and time.
Lots of stuff should be given to other people to do for you (like blogging, myspace, twitter, articles, seo, adwords, finding affiliate programs, social networking, social bookmarking, …, …).
Other than that, concentrate on your main business right now. Make it more profitable. Implement one thing you know of. Or, better yet, go back and do a great job of implementing the last thing you did a half-ass job of implementing.
Get deeper into that niche that is making you a little money, instead of heading off into another niche where the grass looks greener. It’s not.
Just because you hear some “guru” say that you have to do something, doesn’t mean he’s right. It doesn’t mean it applies to every single business out there. It doesn’t mean you should jump and do it right now.
Keep it simple. You don’t need to do everything online. You just need to do one thing very well (gee…you’ve heard that before haven’t you?). When you get great at that one thing, move on to the next thing.