It’s easy to find winning strategies for making money online. Do a quick look-up on the words ‘make money online’ and any search engine will give you hundreds of results. There is not just one way to make money on the Internet – there are thousands.
And yet very few people actually do make money online.
Why? Fear of failure.
Fear of failure is the single greatest obstacle to Internet success. We’re taught in school that failure is bad. This notion is reinforced so strongly that often our fear of failure is even stronger than our fear of the consequences of that failure.
Our fear paralyzes us into inaction, and doing nothing is the certain and sure road to failure.
The truth is this: Anyone can make thousands of dollars on the Internet. But it’s equally true that almost no-one succeeds immediately.
My own Internet success came in the pay-per-click arena, which I now teach to others. My story sounds encouraging at first blush. I started a pay-per-click campaign for some affiliate programs, and the first month I cut a $1500 profit. I now
But the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey would say) is this: the first two days I failed miserably.
The first day I ran my ad campaign I lost $30 dollars. The second day I lost almost $50.
Now I know that’s only a tiny amount of money to lose on a business venture, but still it’s difficult to describe how awful those first two days were. Here I was, giving my best shot at Internet marketing, and I was crashing and burning. I came within a hair’s breadth of pulling the plug and walking away from the whole thing.
But I hung in there, and the third day I cut a profit. From there, I refined my ad campaigns, gradually increasing my profit margins, day after day after day.
See, failure isn’t all bad. I learned valuable things those first two days. I learned what I was doing wrong, and I refined and tried again.
The truth is failure is the first stage of success. The Wright brothers didn’t soar with the eagles the first time they tried to fly. Edison blew up hundreds of light-bulbs before he ‘cracked the code’. Every great achievement of humankind was initially marked with failure before it met success.
So the next time you hear a nagging little voice asking, “What if I fail?” take the time to answer the question. If I fail, I learn. If I learn, I can refine. If I can refine, I will succeed.
And always remember this: The successful people are the people who got up one more time than they fell down.
About the Author
Daniel Brough is the founder of AdWord Wizards, a free mentoring program designed to teach anyone how to profit from pay-per-click search engines. Want to start a profitable AdWords campaign in less than 30 minutes? Come to http://www.adwordwizard.com and sign up for this free program.