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Road to Success

Step 1: Name Your Pain

Perhaps it seems like a strange place to start a discussion of internet marketing techniques, but without this key ingredient your prospects for success online are dim. Honestly now, can you think of a reason why you would start a new business if you can’t say what you’re doing it for? The fallback answer, clearly, is the money. I want to make more money. I want lots of money. I wanna be rich! Blah, blah, blah. Okay, join the club. Most everybody wants that.

Why?

What are you planning to do with all that money once you have it? Go on vacation? Pay off your bills? Buy flashy cars to impress some hottie? Become a philanthropist? Pile it up and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck?

Drink the hater-aid!!!

This is the point where many bloggers will set about telling you how they hated their jobs. Find your freedom and stick it to The Man! Hate your job! Hate your boss! Okay, fair enough. Maybe they did hate their jobs. Maybe you hate yours. The economy is down. Unemployment is up. If you still have a job, be glad. I am.

I don’t hate my job. I don’t hate my boss. The people I work with are actually quite nice and it’s been a pleasure keeping company with them these many years. The problem for me, particularly, is the lack of scalability where it comes to my income. If I’m running a bit behind on my bills or I need to save up a chunk of change to go on a special trip, I’m basically SOL. I earn what I earn and that’s all there is to it until review time and it’s anybody’s guess whether or not that will yield anything. It is at best, disquieting. So, how about you? Are you beyond broke or are you swimming in loot or somewhere in between? Maybe money isn’t a motivating factor for you at all. It’s never really about the money. It’s what the money can buy.

How about time?

Perhaps you’re doing quite well. You’ve got a high paying career that requires a lot of hours away. No time to start a family? No time to meet that someone special to plan a family with? No time to even go home and feed your fish? Perhaps you’ve got a bankroll that would be the envy of the average Joe but you haven’t a spare moment to spend it on anything but take out and hotel rooms. Frankly, I have a typical 8 hour office job. Unfortunately, it actually consumes about 11½ – 12 hours out of each weekday. Monday through Friday I get to travel 1¼ hours or more in each direction. Stick in an hour for lunch halfway through and I’m basically spending the hours of 7AM through 6:30PM (if I’m lucky and the traffic’s good) not at home, not relaxing, not with my wife and kids. Sounds like a dream job to some of you. It’s not half bad for me despite the inconveniently long commute. All the same, it’s wearing on me and I needed an alternative.

YRU? Not such a simple question after all.

Because of this, I challenge you to think seriously about why you want to join the multitude of people who are pursuing the dream of owning our own businesses online. Give it a serious bit of soul-searching and think about why you’d bother. If you cannot name your pain, if you cannot identify a pressing reason why you would do something as outside the box as starting an online business, what are the chances that you will stick to it when the going gets tough? When you become disillusioned by an inbox full of churn & burn promo grenades or when you become frustrated with your inability to drive free traffic to your perfectly apportioned site, what will you do? If you don’t know why you’re doing it, chances are you’ll hang it up and go watch some TV. That’s okay, the Screen Actors Guild appreciates your attention and so do the various industries represented during the commercial breaks and awkward in-show commercials.

Depressed yet?

No? You know why you mean to go through with this either exactly or vaguely?

Great!

Stay tuned for my next message. Consider your why to be the ultimate fork in the road to your success.

To your success!

Rob Knowlan

PS: Here’s another point to ponder until we meet again

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost