I’ve noticed a pretty critical pattern among the various people we help with their online businesses through InfoMarketer’sZone – that they tend to set the bar extremely low in terms of expectations for their business.
When people work on improving their online marketing results through the Zone, they typically have wishes/dreams and expectations.
Wishes and dreams are fine, but we rarely get what we wish for but almost always achieve our expectations.
The difference is the degree of certainty we have about our specific goal. Wishes have far more less certainty around them than expectations do.
Expectations of how much money we make in our business, what we will pay ourselves, the value our business provides to the marketplace and exactly what that business looks like become certain for us.
We visualize actually having achieved that level of success…with wishes we would like to get there, but really our internal self-talk is that we would be OK with something less.
WHERE IS THE BAR FOR YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS RESULTS?
What are your expectations from your online business?
Are you certain you MUST achieve $100K or more within 2-years of starting your online business and have a plan and work ethic to back it up?
Or, do you wish you could reach $100K, but really you would be ok with $20K to help pay the bills or take a nice vacation?
My experience is that new online business entrepreneurs (newbies!) tend to set the bar extremely low in terms of expectations and extremely high in terms of wishes.
In doing so, they are most certainly setting themselves up for a fall…
WHY DO NEW ONLINE MARKETERS SET THE BAR TOO LOW?
Why does this trend exist?
Why do most new internet marketers set low expectations sending a clear message to the market that they aren’t really ready to make big money?
1.Aiming lower keeps the risk low. While I’m all for working smart and that sometimes means starting small, to be a successful business person you MUST aim big…I’ve not yet seen a successful business person who aimed small. Fact is many newbies don’t really have that drive…they value security and caution more than creating and growing with calculated risk. Not all, but many.
2. There is a TON of material targeted at newbies supporting the thoughts in #1. I prefer to model Branson, Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs and others to learn everything I can from the way they made it big…keeps the bar very high.
3. They are not thinking of this as their primary business – making $100K or more from their online business is not a MUST in their life. Fact is many would be happy to see a couple of extra thousand to take a vacation. Their wishes and dreams may be high, but their expectations are low…which means they will struggle to ever exceed their expectations.
Now that we understand how setting the bar too low can almost guarantee that we under-achieve, we can go out and work on setting our expectations (backed by certainty and advanced realization) more in line with our dreams and wishes.
By taking this approach, your internet business will take on a new urgency backed by renewed energy on your part and will achieve at levels more satisfactory than what you have achieved so far.
YOUR TURN
What are your thoughts on why newbies under-achieve? Have I got it right or do you have another explanation? Leave us a comment and let us know.
