Onward And Upward
Hopefully you have all recovered from the holiday season by now and are all primed and ready for a big 2008! If you’ve never done a business plan or even just sat somewhere quiet for a little while and thought about some goals, now is a great time! Without goals you have nothing specific to aim for and no way of knowing if you are closing in on success.
I know that it took me around 18 months before I actually stopped messing about and got serious. By that, I mean that I was trying to do 15 or 20 different things all at the same time and finally realised that if I was going to move forward I would need to choose something to focus on. Obviously if you are going to focus on anything it’s best to choose something you know and enjoy. So that’s what I did and I have to say it’s probably the best decision I have made over the past couple of years.
Never forget that we are just human and we should all be trying to ‘work for a living’ rather than to ‘live for working’. It’s a trap that’s easy to fall into, particularly when it comes to online business. But, it also could lead you to an early grave! Besides, having a strong work ethic without trying to be everything to everyone or working 20 hours every day will almost definitely be more effective than trying to run yourself into the ground.
At the other end of the scale .. well .. as they say, there aint no such thing as a free lunch. Success isn’t going to come your way by way of ‘Make 10,000 Relaxing by the Pool’. It’s easy to get excited over those sorts of headlines, but even when they come from well known, successful marketers it’s not like those marketers didn’t spend a year or more building their business before they got to the point where they had the knowledge, the tools and the mailing list to be able to earn large amounts of income from a single product launch.
It kind of annoys me a little when you see people talking about how (for example) John Reese had a $1 million launch day with his ‘traffic secrets’ product. They forget that before he launched he put in months of work, recruited joint venture partners and created a product that people would pay $1000 for. Don’t forget also that with many of these big launches there’s a 50-75% commission for the JV partners…so a $100,000 launch day is actually $25k – $50k less expenses for the product owner.
I hope you see what I’m getting at. It is possible to make a great living online but we mostly see the income discussed and no-one seems to mention the expenses, commissions or hard work!
So, I sincerely wish all of our WhirlwindTraffic members the best for this coming year. I have plenty in store for WhirlwindTraffic and I’ll be making a couple more posts later today about some changes that I’ve already made and some new features that will be coming during the course of the year.
Popularity: 15% [?]
2 Responses to “Onward And Upward”
Alex Wilson on January 13, 2008
Well said Gary. Planning is indubitably the most crucial ingredient of any venture. Someone once said that: ‘if we fail to plan we plan to fail’–and that’s a very accurate statement.
I like your reference to the profit claims, made by people in business for themselves (and not just on the ‘Net either), that are as often as not a gross figure. If they alway quoted net, the results would lose a bit of shine, that’s for sure.
Looking forward to the improvements you have coming up for WWT Gary; and may you enjoy a prosperous 2008.
Ron Hoover on January 15, 2008
Great point Gary! Planning is essential! In order to focus on your goal, first you have to have a goal. In education circles I believe they call them “benchmarks”. A benchmark is simply a reference point to determine whether or not you have arrived at a specific destination. So many people come into a business with blinders on. Some survive and some don’t. The ones that survive are the ones that figure out where it is they want to go.