Don’t you think they get tired of hearing it – all of those people who struggle to get their online business off the ground, who have had false starts or just can’t find enough hours in the day to proceed with their own information publishing and marketing business hear it all the time – just take action!
Is that really true?
If I’m standing in front of a brick wall and my current perspective is that I can knock it over with my head – will it help me if I bang my head harder against the brick wall?
Not exactly.
For anyone just starting out with their own online business – it’s a little like standing in front of a brick wall without any perspective of how high or wide the wall is, how others have gotten to the other side, what techniques work best or even how to get started – then you get yelled at to just TRY.
Wouldn’t that just drive you insane?
No – it isn’t JUST about taking action. In fact, here’s what happens before anyone can build a new, thriving business and experience life on the other side:
1. You need to know what stands in front of you. Granted, there are a few people that can operate from the perspective of lacking total perspective of the challenge in front of them and still manage to work their way through – but for most of us, we need a sense for what the challenge is, how long will it take, how much work does it demand, will I need additional expertise or relationships and what can I expect to encounter along the way. Absolutely, you should not expect to know everything about achieving great business success in the beginning, but you need to be reasonably comfortable that it is possible given your own life context.
2. What’s the first method and what’s my Plan B. In order to begin taking action you need a first plan of attack. Even better, you understand the entire roadmap or set of steps that stands between you and your goals. Will you try and climb the wall or go around it? What tools can you use to make your climb faster and easier? Should you begin by testing the climb or just jump in with both feet?
3. Feedback. Now you’re ready to give it a try, how will you measure your success? How many tries to you give your first plan before you try something else? Yes, you need to be persistent, but there is often a fine line between persistence and stupidity isn’t there. So – you need feedback on the results of your action. In the beginning it helps if you can get the feedback of someone else who has tried as you are now trying.
4. Partway there, now how do you proceed. It’s often the case in starting and operating your own online business that you achieve certain stepping stones of success. Perhaps you prove your product sells in the first 3-months, but things are not exactly booming. Or, you have reached a 50K milestone at the end of your first year and you can now quit your job to devote full-time effort to your online business – but now what do you do? For others, you will reach a 100K or 200K level where you need to start making decisions around hiring staff or outsourcing to keep you from going completely nuts. You need to go right back to #1 and revise your plan or else taking action doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
5. Adjusting and Learning. Perhaps most important to learn about taking action is to always take planned action with feedback designed into your plan. Using the example of the brick wall above, banging your head against a brick wall has built-in feedback doesn’t it – it hurts like hell.
But… It’s not always so straightforward in business – you often take actions that achieve small returns but what you are looking for are the few actions that generate LARGE returns. To recognize those few actions that really make the most difference to your business you need to be watching closely – testing each action you take so you know which ones get the best response.
Of course, progress does not get made without action. And yes, I’ve come across many people who have enough of a plan in place to at least BEGIN to take action, but I’ve also met many others who are not yet in a position to take action.
If they were to begin today they would surely give up because they are not yet confident enough about their plan or have such a faulty plan that it will discourage them before they really achieve anything they seek or they don’t understand that lots of effort for little achievement is NOT the result they ultimately want – instead they need to seek out the BIG result from little effort.
If you’re just starting out – how do you get this context?
Fundamental products from those who practice and have achieved results in your marketspace.
Even though there are hundreds of products available to you for learning about online marketing, there are a very few that teach you the fundamentals and are produced by people who have built long-term, fundamentally sound businesses. You should seek to learn from them.
I’ll not provide an exhaustive list, but here are a few suggestions for building healthy, strong online businesses:
a) IMC "Insider Secrets To Marketing Your Business On the Internet" – still the best overall, fundamental training course for those starting out building and marketing their business on the internet
b) Marlon’s "Amazing Formula That Sells Products Like Crazy" – nobody does a better job of simplifying the entire online infoproducts business model than Marlon in this course.
c) My own Ultimate Information Entrepreneur’s Success Package" where you not only get a 6-week Information Product Marketing roadmap, action plan and solid foundation for finding your niche market and business ideas, but right now you get a full 30-day exclusive membership to InfoMarketer’sZone where you get a 6-week video training course, private mentor forum where you can get the feedback, help and motivation you need to stay engaged AND lots of tools we’ve used to grow our own business.
I started and built my own highly profitable information product marketing business based on information from the first two products alone – the third is our own addition to make progress even faster, more systematic, easier to practice on a part-time basis and with a more personal mentor factor with the private discussion and feedback forum.
Whether you go it alone or decide to leverage these systems make sure you are combining a solid plan with action and feedback to speed up your path to massive success.
Jeff
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