There is this one type of person in the world which which I continually clash. You might be one of them…

They are a valuable group of people… intelligent, thinking, analytically minded, problem solving people, capable of doing so many complex things with such precision that it would scare you.

But at the same time, I frequently want to take these people and strangle the last breath of air out of their stupid little heads.

I’m talking about that rare breed of humans who are obsessively focused on minute details…

For all their skills and mental ability… if you leave one of these people on their own, in a business/entrepreneurial capacity, they will get NOTHING done. They have a thousand questions, they move at a snail’s pace on purpose, they won’t execute, they will hesitate until everything’s perfect and by that time, it will be too late…

And dealing with these people frustrates me to death.

The reason is that nothing’s ever going to be perfect, there will always be mistakes, you will rarely EVER get it right the first time, but the only way you can move forward is just putting it out there! The only way you can know whether something works, how well it works, and get the feedback you need to make things more perfect, is to put it out there and do it imperfectly the first time, and let the feedback tell you HOW imperfect it is and how it needs to be done differently.

Sitting there thinking it through in all the detail in the world is worth nothing if it’s never getting put out there. I know you think you’re safeguarding against failure, but you’re not… you’re locking in failure because of your fear of it.

I’m growing convinced that it’s one of the worst qualities an entrepreneur can have at the start up phase, particularly if it’s just that person in the business.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not impossible for you to succeed, you just need to be around at least one other person who is what Eben Pagan calls, a “driver”. You need to be around someone who doesn’t care about detail, someone who would rather see a product or an idea, or a website out there making mistakes, than perfect and sitting on the shelf. In fact, when you are part of the right team, you’ll probably be the most valuable part of that team. No one will think through things like you, no one will anticipate the problems like you, no one will refine a system or a process like you.

So if you’re one of these people, and you want to make some money in your own business, you know what to do. If you’re not one of these people and you get frustrated by them like I do, remember their value and try to bear with their annoying attention to detail for the sake of their brilliance and the invaluable contribution they can make to your business.

None if you’re asking that question.

A program doesn’t “make you money”. Nothing “makes you money”.

YOU make you money. A program/software/ebook/video helps YOU make YOU money.

Don’t wimp out and let the “program” the “software” or the “system” be responsible for your success. Step up and make YOUR success, YOUR responsibility.

This post is about a little truth that every day becomes more real and more important in my life. My hope is that when you understand it, it will do the same for you.

Many of you will have started 2010 much like you started 2009 and 2008… thinking about what you can do to make THIS year YOUR year. What you can do to make this is finally the year you break through, work out that one thing you’ve been missing, and have the enormous success you’ve been waitin for for so long. But how are you going to do that?

First it’s worth clarifying what I believe to be a truism, and that is that really, for the most part, there ARE no big breakthroughs. It’s rare that one day something just changes and your business and your income are never the same. It’s rare that you learn one thing that’s powerful and suddenly your business changes. It’s rare that you suddenly reach a goal that you had and think “wow, this is it, it finally happened”.

What happens more often is something like this:

1. You read something that you think might make a difference in your business. You get a “big idea” of a change that needs to be made.

2. Next you work out a plan of how you can implement this idea.

3. Next you begin to implement this idea.

4. Next, the idea begins to have an affect and you see a small success.

5. Next you work out how you can make this affect from this idea continue to happen, so you make it into a system… you do something every day, you expand upon your plan and you scale things up.

6. Next your level of success from this idea grows, and if you are persistent and work hard enough, overcoming the inevitable problems that show up along the way, maybe after months or years, you reach a level of revenue or income that when you first had the idea, you dreamed of.

This process could take months or years to complete but the reality is, it HAS to happen this way.

It’s for this reason that I say that success is nothing more than accumulation. I don’t mean accumulation of money, but accumulation of effort, accumulation of work, accumulation of knowledge, an accumulation of implemented ideas, an accumulation of overcome obstacles.

If you’re like most of us “big dreamers”, this notion is both upsetting and, if you let it be, empowering.

What it means is that there’s nothing big you can achieve in a single day. In other words, there’s no such thing as an overnight success. The “breakthrough” you’re waiting for, the big goal you’ve been waiting to achieve, it’s not just going to pop out and surprise you if only you do the right thing this week or this month.

If you want to reach any goal, all you can do today is take one small step. You can step towards your goal today, and then you can take another step in the same direction tomorrow. Having an idea, that’s one step, that’s all you can do today. Making a plan to put the idea into practice, that’s one step, that’s all you can do the next day. And so the process goes.

The empowering part is this:

You don’t HAVE to worry about doing something miraculous this week or this month that will get you to your goal. All you have to do is choose the right path and do SOMETHING every day. You do something consistently each day, and eventually all the little something’s that seem like nothing will add up to… SOMETHING!

And when I say “do SOMETHING” each day, that doesn’t mean “do anything”. You have to be taking steps every day in the SAME direction. You have to pick your path and stick to it, keep walking down it! You might be stepping every day but changing your direction so you’re effectively walking round in a circle. If you’ve ever said to yourself “But I DO work on my business EVERY DAY and I’m still not making progress!”, then there’s only one possible reason.

So if you really want to make 2010 your year you’ll commit to a journey. You’ll pick a path that you know will lead toward your goal and you’ll walk that road until you reach your destination. Find the tasks you need to do to achieve your outcome and set up a system for doing them continually every day until the outcome is a reality. Every day that goes by your results will accumulate and without even knowing it you’ll have reached your goals with seemingly no friction.

Success is as simple as that.

The last 6 weeks have been pretty challenging for me and our business.

Moving from Canada back to see the family in Australia, then to London to visit some relatives and now finally settling down in our new place in Mexico has been an exciting and rewarding adventure… but it hasn’t been without it’s consequences.

There’ve been a number of days where I’ve only had access to wireless connections at local spots… and poor ones at that. Most of the time it’s been hard to spend more than 2 or 3 hours a day working on the business.

While frustrating many times, this process has been quite the teacher.

If you’re someone who works a full day (which I normally am) it’s a fascinating exercise to ask, if you COULD only work half as long, or less… maybe only 2 hours… what would you actually do?

If you could only perform certain tasks to make sure your business grows, what tasks would you do, and what tasks would you be forced to abandon?

Before you can answer that question, you have to ask some others.

First you have to ask, “What ARE the most important things I do every day?”

And before answering that, you have to ask “How do I define important?”

You define important as the tasks you do that make the largest contribution to whatever end result is the goal of your business. For most of us, that end result is profit.

So now you can go over the things you do every day and rank them in order of their profit generating capabilities. In itself, making a list of what you actually do every day and analyzing it can be tremendous for your productivity.

As you look over your list, if you’re anything like me, you’ll realize that you actually spend a heck of a lot of time each day doing things that really aren’t contributing to your bottom line much at all.

Are you doing anything each day to bring in new customers? Finding new leads, or testing/tweaking your sales material? Or are you bogged down in admin tasks, fiddling with the aesthetics of your website for no reason, or learning about some new method that you’re yet to put into practice?

In fact, the benefit of taking this kind of personal inventory is two fold:

1. It gets you thinking about what tasks you’re doing that are actually making you money on a day to day basis, or what tasks you most need to perform to keep your business growing.

You’ll no doubt realize that the things that you need to be doing, you’re probably not doing enough of. From there you can work on… doing MORE of those things.

2. It makes you see that you might in fact be working far too much, and for no net benefit. When you know what your most important and profitable tasks are, you can work at cutting away the fat, reducing the tasks that are wasting your time and your energy, and having more of your day to spend enjoying your life.

Give it a shot when you get a chance. Maybe even test yourself by picking a day that you’ll work only 2 hours and see what, by default, you find yourself doing. Or if you’re not that game, just make a list of what you DO do on a normal day and go through ranking the tasks by their level of contribution to your profits.

Oh and if you do, come back here and let me know what you learned!

I’ve talked often in the past about my failings online in an effort to try and make people see that the sheer act of having something NOT go the way you want is not in itself a representation of your level of success… at anything.

In other words, failING is not failURE. Failing is a process, it’s dynamic, it’s at least moving. Failure is static, it’s final, it’s an outcome.

But at the same time, failing OR failure in itself won’t make you successful. Below are two factors that I think determine how successful a person or a business is…

First we need to recognize that failure is, like few other things, a constant.

If you want to achieve anything in your life, you soon realize that failing often is just part of the process.

But as so many wiser than I have observed, it’s what you do with your failures that makes the difference. Here are two factors that separate great people and organizations from mediocre ones.

Note that I’ll call them here mistakes, not failures, again because a mistake is part of a dynamic process but a failure is final.

1. How Quickly You DETECT Your Mistakes

Think about that. Experienced companies are the ones who can very quickly detect when something is failing.

They have stringent measures in place to analyze the results of any venture and so they see as quickly as possible when something isn’t meeting the clear standards they set.

They don’t have to keep sinking money into something they know isn’t moving them towards their goals. Their goals are clear and their measures are precise so when the outcome isn’t hitting the target, it’s bye bye, and fast.

Think about that in your own life. Are your goals clear enough that you’d know immediately if you weren’t moving towards them? Do you have a tangible measure for your results so you know within weeks if you’re not meeting them?

2. How Well You RESPOND To Your Mistakes

Of course, being able to quickly detect your mistakes doesn’t mean much if you’re not able to make whatever change is necessary to turn them into successes.

So great people and companies are flexible enough that when something doesn’t go as they’d planned, they can quickly and effectively change their course and begin acting in a way that’s more aligned with the goals they’re clear about.

It’s about being bold enough to say “AWESOME, I screwed it up badly and now I’m going to take responsibility and make it right!”. It’s about being able to say “Yes, I thought that other way was going to work, I invested alot into that EMOTIONALLY and now even though it damages my poor ego I’m going to put that aside and do what has to be done!”

And those are hard things to say.

Successful people can quickly implement new strategies based on what their measuring told them was wrong about their initial approach. The factor that caused the failure is quickly phased out and progress continues.

The Point…

… I’m trying to make is that success in anything isn’t about NOT failing, it’s about failing often but failing RIGHT. I’m always laughing to myself about what people think about some of the failures I make on a continual basis. Just this last couple of weeks I implemented something new in our business that I had known about all along, never gotten done, and as a result had left probably $10-15000 dollars on the table. Suffice it to say I feel like a complete idiot until I remember that failing is constant, and learning is your only option.

There’s no need to beat yourself up if something didn’t work, or get frustrated and quit. Just love your failures, take enjoyment in exploring them for the lessons and for goodness sake love the whole process of it… you’re running your own business, it’s EXCITING!

Hope this post gave ya some food for thought

In 2008 Elysia and I were in the Philippines and on one particular day, stranded by torrential rain in our tiny hotel room on an island called Bohol.

Resorting to our only option for passing the time, we were flicking through channels of local cable, between soap opera’s in Tagalog (the local language) and low quality American cable shows…

We happened to stop the channel surfing at an interview with the musician and pop singer Alanis Morrisette.

I watched only half interested until she was asked a question, and gave an answer so profound that it has stuck in my mind right until this day.

They were discussing being happy in life and in your work and the question came up:

“Are you a religious person?”

She answered, to paraphrase (as I recall):

“I’m not really a religious person, but I do have a code, or a religion that I live by… and it’s just something simple, but over time I’ve found it’s the surest way to happiness…

And that is… I live by the religion of gratefulness”

How profound.

Gratefulness to me is the simple recognition that every day, each one of us has so many things in our lives to be happy about, and thankful for.

Every day you get to wake up, and DO things!

You might think that’s not something to be happy about, but remember there are people in hospital beds everywhere who are praying for the ability to take this simple action.

If you’re reading this post, you live in a place so wealthy that you can have your own computer and internet connection!

Fate could have just as easily seen you born in another part of the world where such a thing would never be possible.

Every day you wake up with unlimited OPPORTUNITY! It doesn’t matter what job you have, how much money, what your circumstances are, you always have OPTIONS. No one holds a gun to your head to make you go to work or live where you live, or spend time with the people you do. You’re free to live your life in whatever way you choose and to CHANGE your circumstances if you don’t like them.

Yes, that lmuch opportunity is rare but YOU have it.

And these are just the little things!

You might have a loving family or a really inspiring group of friends, plenty of savings in the bank, you might have traveled a lot, you might be starting a business online thats on it’s way to setting you free from having a job forever…

EVERYONE has these things.

Gratefulness is just about recognizing them and focusing on them.

It’s easy to focus on your problems, we’re all good at that.

But if you can do that so easily, why not spend a little time focusing on what’s awesome too?

It might not be popular… you might not win many friends by going around telling everyone about what’s amazing in your life (which is a real shame and a flaw of our culture) but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Because the thing is, it’s pretty hard not to be happy when you’re rattling off all the things you love in your life on a DAILY basis!

It’s hard to be sad when you’re thinking about everything that is fantastic in your life!

And really, happiness isn’t much more than that. It’s not something that you wait around for, it’s something that you just decide, not just today, but every day.

Try it this week, just allocate 15 or 20 minutes each day to sit and do nothing but think about everything that’s great about your life. Do it for a week and tell me how it feels.

If you need even more reason to be happy and grateful, think about this…

Did you read my post yesterday about Reticular Activating Systems?

The little secret is: the more time you spend thinking about the things that are awesome in your life, the more sensitve you become to awesome things showing up… the more you focus on awesomeness, the more of it you see… the more of it happens in your life!

Make gratefulness a part of your daily routine and watch how your life improves.

I’ve said many a time before that I am NOT a believer in “the secret”. In fact, I think in many ways, the permeation of the idea of the secret, as many people believe it, is detrimental to society as a whole.

Got your attention?

The idea of “the secret”, that just by focusing on your goals, putting up a dream board, and sending out positive energy to the universe, you can “attract” the things you want into your life, is false, and dangerous. It’s an idea that’s dangerous kind of like how a gun is dangerous… it’s dangerous when used in the wrong way.

If you need any proof of my conjecture, all you need to do is ask anyone you know who’s become wildly successful by their own definition, and ask them how they “attracted” their success. Their answer will almost always be along the lines of:

“Attract it? I worked my ass off, that’s how I attracted it!”

They achieved something not by “thinking” but by ACTING.

Everyone intelligent knows that, we don’t need another TAKE ACTION rant here (if you haven’t come to that understanding yet, you will soon).

But allow me to not simply shoot down this popular meme without some explanation, without contributing something important to this school of thought.

Because I believe that the guy who put up the dreamboard with the house on it REALLY DID get that house however many years later. It’s HOW that counts…

Here’s how it works…

Tell me if you’ve ever had this happen to you…

You drive to work (or to where ever) each day, and on the way, you pass lots of cars.

You don’t notice any in particular, except the occasional Ferrari, but for the most part, they’re all just cars.

One day you start thinking “I quite like the Toyota Prius, I think I’m going to start researching them”…

On your next day’s drive to work, you notice a couple of Prius’ on the road and you admire how nice they look. You realize there is more of them around than you thought.

Finally you pull the trigger and buy a Prius. Needless to say, the new car is at the forefront of your mind on your first day driving to work in the new machine!

Over your next week of driving to work, you notice LOTS of Prius… many more than you ever have before. Suddenly it’s like everyone’s got one! You give a little grin to the guy in the Prius next to you at the lights as you ponder about what it is that caused so many Prius to spring up right after you bought one…

Has that ever happened to you? Not just with a car but anything, an outfit, a cell phone…

Now let me ask you a question…

Did you ATTRACT those new Prius into your life? Did you magically bring them into your life by sending out thought vibrations?

I don’t think you did.

I think this phenomenon is the result of something called a Reticular Activating System.

Disclaimer: I first read about Reticular Activating Systems about 6 years ago in Tony Robbins second book Awaken The Giant Within.

In short, RAS is a biological system, a mechanism within our brain left with us through our evolution thanks to it’s helpfulness to our survival,  that makes our brains hyper sensitive to the appearance of circumstances or things with which we are familiar.

In other words, RAS makes sure that if you’ve been thinking about Toyota Prius’s for a while, you’re going to be hyper sensitive to the appearance of Toyota Prius’ in your environment.

If you’re still skeptical, take this quick experiment, again straight out of “Awaken The Giant Within”

Look around the room right now, where ever you’re sitting, and try to find as much of the colour BROWN as you can…

Spot all the BROWN everywhere it is… look hard and in depth for BROWN, notice all the BROWN in places you never saw BROWN before… BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN… keep doing this for about 20 seconds.

NOW STOP!

I’ve got a question for you?

How much GREEN did you see?

Not much right? But look around the room again and check how much GREEN there is that you totally missed because you were so focused on BROWN.

In fact, I bet you were so focused on BROWN that you saw things that were dark red, maroon, or beige and CALLED THEM BROWN ANYWAY!

Sure you did

Now let me ask you this…

Did you ATTRACT all that BROWN into your life? After all if before the experiment I’d asked you to name everything around you that’s brown, you might have only named a couple of things… but after you FOCUSED on it, you could have named a bunch?

NO, you didn’t “attract” it… your focus on it just made you hyper sensitive to it’s every occurence in your environment!

So how did the guy in the movie ATTRACT the house?

The same way.

He put it up on his dream board and looked it every day, that’s the START.

Obviously he started to realize that to have that house he was going to need a good chunk of money.

Then he realized to have a good chunk of money he was going to need a business or a high paying job to afford it.

So suddenly, he becamse hyper sensitive to any opportunity to start a business or get a high paying job that appeared in his environment… Maybe he even took some actions to MAKE those circumstances appear in his environment…

He came across an opportunity and he started a business… Did he ATTRACT the opportunity? No, he noticed it because he was focusing on business opportunities.

Along the way he started to meet people who had houses just like the one he wanted… Did he ATTRACT these people? No, he noticed them and put himself around them because they matched the concept he already had in his head… people with THAT house…

Is it starting to make sense?

Phew, alright, now we’ve got that out of the way, we can all get back to work and start bringing our dreams into reality by setting plans and taking relentless action towards achieving them.

When you teach how to make money online to people from all walks of life, it’s difficult not to start seeing patterns in people’s behaviour, patterns in their approaches and to notice how those patterns affect the results they get.

I’m not the kind of guy who says “just believe it, and it’ll happen!”…

I don’t particularly like “the secret” or the idea of the “law of attraction” (in fact, ask me some day about my take on that, I think you’ll find it interesting)…

But I do believe that what YOU believe affects how you act, and how you act affects what you accomplish.

This video has been passed around like crazy already but I thought it was really worth sharing here for you…

It’s one of my earliest old time fav’s Tony Robbins talking to Frank Kern and John Reese, amongst other things about the subject of what makes the difference in people who “break through” in their online business and those who keep spinning their wheels.

It’s a little cheesy in parts, but in particular, pay attention to when Tony talks about the “4 Squares” chart about half way in…

Here’s the link:

http://tonyrobbinstraining.com/320/interview-with-frank-kern-and-john-reese/

Love to hear what you think (if ya haven’t seen it already!)

This week, I got into a terrific debate with a strange gentleman on Twitter.

It ended when I realized it was going nowhere fast, but in the process I learnt a profound lesson about what it means to be truly intelligent… maybe even the DEFINITION of intelligence…

When I say intelligence I’m talking about intelligence in your business, and in your life – that force that allows us to make quality decisions, sound judgements, and generally make our ways more easily through the maze of life.

Let me tell you what it is…

This debate was about people, life, the “nature” of human beings, work, and values… yes, it became rather convoluted. A critical point was reached when this gentleman said (and the meaning of this statement isn’t changed being outside the context of the argument)…

“Funny that those who make the most money work the hardest … and the longest hours. I admit, it’s a tough one to swallow.”

Now, to you or me, that statement is obviously false. Not only on the internet but in any business, the people who make the most money – the business owners – quite often (not always) in fact work the least.

You or I know that beyond doubt… but this gentleman, in his mind, from the knowledge that he’s gathered, won’t hear a bar of it. Not only does he find it to be a fact, but he believes it so strongly that his second statement implies that to him, it’s beyond discussion!

He had gone on to build entire theories, ideas, BELIEFS (which we know affect our lives greatly) around that, and likely other, false assumptions.

I realized at that point that all of us have ASSUMPTIONS that we’ve made, about life, about business, about money, about people…

We have assumptions, that we believe are facts. If you go digging through your brain for them, you wouldn’t find them in the “assumptions” department, you’d find them in the “truths” department.

And we develop beliefs out of these assumptions, and the beliefs direct our actions and so affect our lives.

We thought we were doing the right thing when we made the assumptions, we thought they were facts but we were missing some extra information, so now, we’re running on a piece of software with a major bug!

And here’s the kicker…

We build a whole house of knowledge upon those foundational assumptions and we build the house without any WINDOWS. Our houses lack a portal through which we can see, or be influenced by, all the houses of knowledge that are right outside our own. We can’t take in any new information, so we can never change those foundational assumptions that shackled us up in our houses in the first place!

So what can we take from this?

I invite you here to look inside your mind, and see if you can find some “facts”, perhaps some that you’ve believed for a long time, and ask yourself the question “could this be false?”…

This is HARD to do… and scary! To confront the thought that a fact that you may have made many life decisions based upon, might have been false. You’ve gotta have some serious courage to do this!

But give it a shot…

Think about the things you believe to be true about online business, what it takes to make money online… or outside of the web, what you believe about people, about the world… about life itself?

Dig them up and put them under the spotlight for a moment. Ask “Is this REALLY true?”

When I personally did this, I found MANY. Things that I’d clinged to, argued with people about, and believed so strongly… that upon review, can quickly be seen as wrong. Because we’re always gaining new knowledge, but we rarely go back to update the brain softwares we installed based on our older knowledge!

Finally, let me leave you with this thought…

Imagine if people at all levels of society, were able to be intelligent like this. If they were, instead of being so insistent upon their own knowledge houses being superior, could keep their windows open, recognize and challenge their own assumptions when necessary, and be able to take on new information or ideas when it is helpful or productive to do so…

Different world, wouldn’t it be?

So my new definition of intelligence is to have a house of knowledge with some windows. A house that’s solid and strong but has those all important portals to let you look out onto the street. And of course to live in that house with the humility of Socrates who said:

“The only true wisdom is in knowing, that you know nothing”

I talk alot about the kind of mindsets that get you failure at online marketing.

“Opportunity Hopping”, “no work” mentality “fast money” mentality, are all mindsets that don’t work, but what mindset DOES work?

How SHOULD you view, and pursue a business online to give yourself the greatest chance of success?

Here’s a question.

What if you viewed your affiliate marketing, niche marketing, blog making, whatever your business model is, as an investment?

What if you asked… If I spend $100 on this site, how much might that return over the course of a year? Of 5 years?

Let’s play out a little scenario…

You put up a blog today.

Assuming you do everything right, you spend $8 for a domain, $8 a month for some hosting, and you spend $50 on getting some content written.

Total yearly cost, $154.

How much could that investment return over the course of a year assuming you don’t spend any more on it and assuming you work on a good model (of picking a market, building your site, promoting it etc)

You’d need 5 sales at $31 commission to cover your costs, and the rest is profit.

5 sales in a YEAR. It’s not alot.

10 sales in a year, less than one per month, and you’ve doubled your investment. 20 sales in a year, one every 3 weeks or so, and you’ve tripled it! 200% return in 12 months.

Try tripling your investment in 12 months on the stock market…

Now, $150 or $300 profit in a year isn’t something to get excited about, but the point here is the mindset.

How DIFFERENT is this mindset to the mindset of…

“How can I make $1000 a week by the end of this month”

“How can I make $500 a day without spending a dime”

You get my point?

Guess which mindset is more likely to succeed online?

Now, the thing to note here is that “money” as the investment we’re talking about is just a currency.

The other currency is time.

You can move your online business forward by investing your money into it, or investing your time into it.

Let’s look at the time example.

Let’s say tomorrow, I decide that I’m going to invest a month of my time into a new blog.

So each day, I write an article for it, I do a submission to an article directory, I spend time building backlinks, I try to get guest posts on other blogs, and so on.

Let’s say after that month invested, (and let’s be honest, a month of consistent focused effort is a big deal) my site is earning $100 a week. A modest sum.

Even though if I had’ve worked the same hours at my day job (assuming I had one) in that month, I would have earned triple the amount, I’ve now created an income stream.

I’m now set to earn an extra $5200 per year from this site, from that one initial investment of my time.

Do you get where I’m going with this?

What we’re talking about is a mindset of  “delayed gratification”. You spend some money now, make less in the short term but more over the long term. You spend more time now, it’s frustrating and hard work now, but in the long term you’re rewarded.

Is that a good or bad idea? Well what do you WANT from an internet business? Do you want to make $1000 next week and then have it die and make $0 the following week? Or do you want to setup an income stream that will provide for you and your family for years to come?

There’s a great quote by Tony Robbins that I’ll never forget

“Short term pain equals long term pleasure… and short term pleasure leads to long term pain”

In other words “chasing $1000 a week by next week” leads to long term pain.

The thing is, the GAME of online marketing is secretly rigged toward people who are seeking long term pleasure. Think about it…

Domain names become more valuable with age…

Search rankings favor sites that have been around for the longest time…

The game changes so quickly that those who have gotten in and secured the big lists and great followers early on are at a continual advantage…

So why aren’t YOU “investing for the long term” with your online business?

Here’s a great example:

A long time ago I set my dad up with a little site. I told him to spend $60 on getting articles written and submitted to promote the site. He did.

It took a while for results to come through, but eventually, the Adsense income built up to $1-4 a day.

At first, Dad wasn’t enthusiastic. When I would say this was a great result, he always replied “hang on, we haven’t even made our money back yet.”

Today over a year later, that site still ticks over at that same amount per day with no additional work. It’s not making anyone rich, but it’s long since returned the investment, and the percentage profit on that $60 grows every day because we never spent any more money on it.

If you asked him he might say that the site was a failure, or at least not a success. But me… I’m wondering when he’s going to ask if we can spend another $60 on it (Dad if you’re reading… *hint*)

Do ya seeeeee what I’m getting at? I know I’ve asked that thrice now but I’m really hoping the point of this post comes through.

If it’s not clear enough in your mind, online business is a business just like any other, and the more you treat it as such, rather than a random foray where you’re trying to grab for cash where-ever you can find it, the more successful you’ll be.

Accept delayed gratification, invest in your business (whether it’s with your time or money) for the long term, and set yourself up for a future filled with true passive income, personal freedom, and the kind of lifestyle that is always promised but rarely achieved… the “internet lifestyle”.

ADDENDUM: I actually wrote this post last week, and the following day Shoemoney wrote a post on his blog echoing the same sentiments from a slightly different angle – great stuff!