C'mon And Share What Distinction Caused Your Business To Turnaround? I'll Share One Of Mine.....

Probably the biggest turnaround, with the exception of when I actually
started earning a regular income, was when I started to concentrate more
on list building and providing real value to my list.

That alone probably increased my income by 2 to 3 times over what it was.

Sadly, I used to think that building a list wasn't important.

It was probably the biggest mistake I ever made early on.

Having said that, not all niches require you to build a list. Depends on what
you're doing. But in my case, it was almost essential.

My biggest turnaround happened when I stopped concentrating on things that everyone was telling me to do, and sat down and figured out what MY goals were and created a road map for MY business (i.e. wrote a business plan).

The first time that I did it, I failed big time. I just planned out all the crap that everyone was telling me to go do, and put it into a somewhat organizational form. That did nothing for me.

The second time I did it, I sat down and came up with a game plan. I figured out WHY (hint, "because everyone else is doing it" is NOT the answer) I would do certain things, and I eliminated all the rest of the crap. Shortly stated, I figured out what worked for me, and used my time on that instead of floundering trying to make something work that I didn't "get".

Rarely do I do anything like submitting articles, back linking, social networking, etc. anymore.. I don't do those things because I'm not good at them, and quite frankly don't enjoy them.

I learned that there are hundreds of ways to skin a cat, and doing work for works sake is a horrible usage of time.


I'm getting ready to go through this process again, and I'm pretty excited about it.

And that's my second huge turnaround.... Consistently auditing your actions and becoming the most efficient business person you can become will increase your bottom line hands down.

Hi Rod, I had a similar experience. In 2007 I took a mentoring program in net marketing. Out if it came an ebook with a sales letter page promoting it on highly targeted search terms.

My results were really bad off Adwords. I dropped out after losing about 800 buck. But I didn't give up on the site. I morphed it into an informational site with lots of great articles and I toned the sales copy way down. Then I split up the original 330 page ebook into smaller books that now cost between 8.97 and 11.97. Since I did that I've been averaging about 400 month in profit - all from search engines and articles I have out there.

The niche I'm dealing with is in the natural health market and I think people are a bit more saavy or suspicious - so the hard selling approach of most sales letters just didn't work.

My point is to keep changing things up until you find how things work best in your market.

My biggest turn around was targeting BUYER keywords and ONLY these. After I did that the money just started to flow in.

Perhaps because I kind of backed into an internet business, I never really struggled to get started like most do. But, I have a different kind of "turn around" lesson, perhaps just as valuable in a different way.

I built a huge content site. At one time I had about 600 pages of all original content. It had great search engines rankings for a lot of search terms, and served about a million pages a year. I was making more money than I ever had in my life, and I ain't exactly a spring chicken.

Then my site was hacked. It wasn't a normal hack job where someone just defaces your home page to get a little notoriety among their peers. This was a stealth job intended to feed off of my high PageRank, link popularity, and search engine positioning in order to funnel traffic to a site in China.

A script was hidden in a deep, seldom looked at directory. About 5,000 links were placed on various pages, but the links were placed after the </html> command and after a bit of white space so they didn't show up on the pages when looking at them in a browser, and you didn't readily notice it in the source code either.

The script didn't work though, so all those hidden links that were picked up by the search engines were dead links. So to the search engines, my site had about 600 good links, and about 5,000 broken links.

My traffic died in like two months. I didn't catch it in time because I had a book deadline to meet and I was spending most of my time on that. My site went from about 80-100k unique visitors a month to about 4k. Unfortunately, even though I had a few other sites, all my commercial interests were in my one big money site. My income plummeted right along with my traffic.

It took about a year to get back into the search engines good graces from the time my site was hacked. I don't have near as many top rankings as I used to, but it's coming along. They just don't like sites where 25 out of every 28 links are broken . . . at all.

The lesson - don't put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your sales sites, your marketing methods, your product offerings, and your traffic generation methods, etc. Don't spread yourself too thin, but don't rely on any one thing either. Don't host all your domains on one host either. Obviously if a hacker gained access to one he or she would gain access to all. There are other good reasons as well.

If there's a secondary lesson in this, build your list and treat your subscribers like gold! It's the only thing that generated reliable income for us for about a year.

Biggest turnaround was when I stopped creating products first. (Fortunately, I only did it once, then wised up.)

Instead, I figure out my marketing strategy first, including taking a good look at my competition, where I can fit into the competitive space, and where I can market cost-effectively to either a large audience or possibly a smaller audience that likes high-priced products.

Then I see if I can sell something similar to what others are successfully selling. If that makes money or is breakeven and I know that I've found a way to consistently get new customers in the door, then I start creating backend products.

If it still looks good at that point, I test new ways to market because at that point, I have the money to market. I like paid advertising better than all the social media and seo stuff because I can control what happens, I can measure the results, and I'm marketing to buyers.

Long story short: find your buyers first, then create your products.

I mostly sell on eBay, as a core of my online business. It took me a while to figure out that selling large volume actually meant more money for me, even if I was breaking even on some items. If I wasn't the cheapest, then it probably wouldn't sell as fast as I needed it to. A lot of online sellers think of their inventory like this:

I don't have a lot of money in my account, but I still have $700 worth of product I can turn into $1400.

The truth is, if you have $14 in your bank account and $700 worth of products, all you have is $14 and a bunch of product. You can't rely on inventory as if its some sort of savings account. If it isn't sold for money, then it isn't worth anything.

You can't just sell, you have to sell fast. In order to sell fast, you must under cut. If you can't undercut competition, then its time to move to another item or find a better supplier.

This does not apply to eBooks.

I am going to echo a similar theme as many here - for me, I started to make income when I started to focus and actually implement strategies instead of always looking for "the one." Really, "the one" is the one that you implement and try to perfect - if it goes nowhere, try something else. Whatever you do, stop reading e-mails from gurus - implement the methods of an e-book or WSO you bought - put your own twist. Bottom line, I started making money when I started "doing" instead of planning to do.

Getting focused and building a content based network of web 2 sites that drives 1000+ affiliate clicks a month and provide steady income brought me confidence in systems, good keyword research, and I learned SEO as a result. I still fight to remain focused because there are so many possibilities but am better at defining what needs to be done first and doing it.

Really good stuff so far. I would love to read more distinctions. Keep 'em coming!

I'm going to share another one: quite some time ago I was at a seminar and I got to mingle with some of the speakers at the hotel bar. One of the guys, Mike Litman, heard about wanting to expand my business. He then asked me how many times per day and per week did I do something to promote my business.

I was embarrassed to answer that at that time I was doing one or two promotional things a week. He then advised me to do 4 promotional things for my business per day and then give him a call in 3 months. I called him in two, elated at the results I was getting. The point? If you're not focusing on promoting your business almost daily, it's not going to grow.

Maybe you need to write / submit one more article today. Maybe you need to make another blog post then ping it. Maybe you need to research a new advertising network. Maybe it's time you hired someone to write a press release for you and then use a site like PRWeb.com to distribute it. Maybe it's time to contact ten more webmasters to see if they would like to joint venture with you. Or maybe it's time to set up another PPC campaign.

To this day I do no less than 4 promotional activities per day, 5 days a week whether it's me doing it or someone else.

RoD

OK, I'll add another one as well. When I first started, and for several years after, I wanted to figure out everything for myself.

I was generally able to figure whatever I wanted. I didn't buy any products that taught things I could figure out for myself. I also didn't want to be a sucker and buy some crap product. Since I really backed into a business and was successful from the start, it seemed like the way to go.

In some ways all that was good, but in other ways, it slowed me down. Figuring everything out for yourself usually takes longer, so it slows your growth. Not wanted to be a sucker is a self-justification for being cheap!

Once I decided to invest in myself, I started progressing faster. Sometimes much faster. I didn't have to make all the mistakes, others made them for me and I could learn from them. Of course, I also started learning things I wouldn't have thought of.

The lesson obviously is, invest in your own education. It pays big dividends in the end.

For me it was when I stopped fighting my own strengths. I'm better dealing directly with people (sales, customer service, coaching/mentoring). But I was determined to follow the standard model of building sites and promoting them all from my little cubbyhole here in my home office. That worked, but I was not happy doing it. Still felt like a job to me.

Once I started returning to my core strengths, which revolve around interacting with people more often, not only was I happier day-to-day but I started making more money. Not a coincidence.

John

Mine turned around when I discovered the obvious. Follow the money. Find a hungry/desperate market, showcase a real life solution to their needs/problem, then market to them in an effective manner. Generic answer, and easier said then done, but that's pretty much the formula that works.

George

My turn around was when I stopped promoting everyone elses products and services and created my own. Both building my list and my income streams. This was the single biggest and most important decision I made myself it was just something that fit me. While for others it might be promoting others products. But as most say here having your own list is all powerful.

Sean Supplee