How I Made $226.39 Today...Doing NOTHING

I wish we could all be rich and do nothing! We could all sit on our butts at the beach and drink magaritas served to us by.. by.. uhh.. nm. ; )

I heard there are 10 types of people in this world; those who understand binary and those who don't.

Great post Steven. Most people who fail, fail because they give up to soon. Anyone who sticks at it, will eventually 'make it' in IM... You'll eventually have little bits of cash coming in from so many places that you won't be able to stop it - even if you wanted to.

Cheers,

Justin

Steven,

You save all your forum posts?

Is that file twice or 3 times longer than the complete works of Shakespeare?

Martin

Steve,

very cool thoughts here, and certainly something to help motivate others

My favorite is when I go on vacation and don't do jack for a few days, and still earn. Man is that cool!

My only regret is that I didn't focus on building a business at first, I spent the first years of my IM life with bursts of success that weren't scalable or long-term.

Unward and upward!

Matt

Now, Steve, here lies the secret..... " a carrier bag" she had gone to Gothem City on a shopping spree.

She was actually looking for some designer underwear for Chris, and some heavy duty razor blades for Kevin.

She.... failed,
She couldn't find designer underwear for "old farts" only for new farts.
and heavy duty razor blades ! for Kevin? His beard ........ well!
She just couldn't do it.

She obviously had to come home with something.



you all know the way to the ot forum now don't ya?

Sherice...I posted this back in the old forum for my 4000th post. It is now
deleted so I will post it again here.

I think it will help you and a lot of people.
************************************************** **
Since this is my 4000th post, I wanted to make this one to remember. It
isn't easy to do with all the great posts and knowledgeable people here,
so I hope this one is at least passable.

I sat down one day and asked myself, "What are the most important things
to remember when running your business?" I started to immediately think of
all these things. I had a nice list of 25 of them.

But then I asked myself, "Which is the MOST important?"

Wow! That's when things got HARD.

I looked at my list of 25 things and let me tell you, it took me hours to
put these in order from 25 to 1.

I don't expect everybody to agree with the order of this list. Honestly, I
think there is very little distance between 1 and 15. So many of these I
feel are so important. But, while you may not agree with the order, I think
you will agree that most of this list is very important to successfully
running a home based business.

For those of you who are new to this, please try to keep these in mind. If
you do, I think it will help you greatly.

25. Developing A Positive Attitude - It is so easy to get discouraged in
this business. So many people expect to start their business on January 1
and be in profit by January 5. Oh how I wish it was that easy. But building
a business takes time and it is so easy to start to think negatively.
Therefore, it is imperative to have a positive attitude about your business
each day, no matter how hard it gets. Negativity just breeds more of it.

24. Making Friendships - There is no secret that it's not always what you
know but who you know. Yes, you can make it on your own, which is why I
don't have this one up higher on the list, but if you make friendships,
and you do this by offering of yourself to people with no strings attached,
you will begin to see that people will be more willing to work with you.
This will help you succeed that much faster.

23. Developing Tech Skills - While this is not a requirement, it will
definitely make your life easier, at least until you can afford to
outsource some things. Of course if you make friendships, you might be able
to outsource in exchange for some skills that you DO have. But you will
ultimately need to develop some skills. Having to depend on people for
everything technical is going to put a terrible strain on your pocketbook.

22. Product Creation - You're probably surprised that this isn't up
higher. While having your own product certainly gives you certain
advantages, it is not a requirement to have your own product to run a
successful business. Many affiliate marketers do very well. But I feel that
to get to the next level, product creation is the way to go.

21. Record Keeping - So many people spend so much time running their
business from the standpoint of just "making sales" that they don't
bother keeping accurate records for tax purposes and paying affiliates. Let
me tell you, not keeping records can land you in a boat load of trouble in
so many ways that you don't even want to know. Please keep accurate
records, not just of expenses and income but of all correspondence or
anything that has to do with running your business that you're going to
want to remember.

20. Observing Trends - If you don't know what's going on around you, you
can't run an effective business. If one form of promotion stops working
because Google decided that they're going to slap it silly (take the
recent problems with Squidoo) and you're not aware of this, you're going
to be spending time on something that could be spent doing something else
more profitable. You MUST know what's going on around you.

19. Branding Yourself - So many people when they start their business,
especially if they're getting into affiliate marketing, don't take the
time to really create an identity for themselves. I did this from the very
beginning by branding myself as the "no nonsense marketer", somebody who
would tell it like it is no matter how many feathers I ruffled. And believe
me, I ruffled quite a few. If you don't stand out, nobody is going to
remember who you are.

18. Attention To Detail - This may be one of the most difficult things for
people to do. It's hard enough to get a handle on the big picture, but
sometimes it's the details that screw up our business. For example,
putting up a sales page with glaring errors on it, or putting together an
autoresponder series with missing links in some of the emails. There is
just so much that can go wrong because of the little details, which is why
it is critical to make sure each T is crossed and each I is dotted.

17. Focus - This is another big problem for new marketers. They start on
one project or "business" and then get sidetracked by something else. I
see a whole bunch of people laughing right now because they know how true
this is. Yeah, I know. I used to be that way so I am speaking from
experience. I can't stress this enough. Focus on ONE thing, complete it
and then MOVE ON.

16. Establishing Credibility - The Internet has gotten to the point where
nobody believes anything anymore. So it is critical to establish as much
credibility for yourself as you can. This is easier said than done, I
admit, especially when first starting. But there are ways to do this. When
first starting out, if you're promoting your own product, give it out free
to some people and let them try it. Let them see the value in it. If they
do, most likely they'll provide you with testimonials that will help
towards building your credibility. It won't happen overnight, but it's
something you should be working on everyday because the more credibility
you have the easier it's going to be for you to make sales.

15. Dedication - So many treat running a home business like a hobby.
There's nothing wrong with doing this if you want to get a hobby income.
But if you're serious about making big money then you have to be dedicated
to your business. This means putting it above watching the TV or going to
the movies or whatever other pleasures you might rather be engaged in. At
least in the beginning, until you can outsource your whole business, if you
ever get that big, you need to be totally dedicated to running your
business.

14. Legal Protection - With lawsuits flying all over the place these days,
make sure you're legally protected with everything you do. That means
protecting your products, insuring against liability and so on. There is a
reason why these sites all have tons of disclaimers. It's so they don't
get their butts sued. So find a lawyer and make sure you're as well
protected as possible.

13. Getting Customer Feedback - You can't run your business in a vacuum.
If you don't know what your customers and potential customers think of
your sales page, product, web site or whatever, how will you know what to
fix? You'll be doing nothing but guessing and guessing is a dangerous way
to run a business. Every bit of feedback you get is a little bit more
information that you'll have to correct any problems. If 90% of your
customers in a survey say that your software is too hard to understand,
then some restructuring of the interface is probably in order.

12. Market Research - This is a must if you're going to sell your own
products. The first thing you better do is find out if there is any demand
for what you want to make BEFORE you make it. This point needs no further
elaboration. If you don't know what the market wants you can't
confidently sell a product that has a better than average chance of
selling.

11. Understanding Buyer Psychology - Just recently I made a post of 10
reasons people buy things. Let me tell you, if you don't understand buyer
psychology you can't write effective ads because you won't know what
buttons to push. You can't create sellable products because you won't
know why people buy things and what makes them buy those things. If you
can't get into your customer's head, you can't make the connection with
the customer. If a connection isn't made, no sale will result.

AND NOW THE TOP 10

10. Establishing A Routine - A lot of you may be surprised that this one is
up there so high. Let me tell you something. If you don't get up in the
morning and know exactly what you're going to do from the time you start
to the time you call it a night, there is a very good chance that nothing,
or very little, will get done. We are creatures of habit, but first we have
to get into a habit. Establishing a routine leads to increased
productivity, which in turn leads to our business becoming profitable
sooner.

9. Backing Up Your Work - Ever have a computer crash? Ever have one with no
backup? I rest my case. If you don't back up your work you are looking for
more trouble than you can possibly imagine. Or maybe losing 2 years of work
is okay with you. Backup and do it often.

8. Time Management - This ties in closely with establishing a routine but I
feel it is more important for this reason. You can establish a routine but
it can still be a pretty bad one because you're spending too much time on
things that aren't productive. Time management, which involves making a
list of all the things you have to do and then designating how much time to
spend on each thing, based on priority, will make more efficient use of
your day. Sure, you can allocate X number of hours to doing something that
is a waste of time if you don't know it is, but that's taken care of by
something higher up on the list. Point is, you MUST manage your time or
before you know it, your day is over and you didn't get the critical
things accomplished.

7. Testing And Tracking - You put 20 ads out on the Internet and make a few
sales. Problem is, you have no idea which ad brought in the sale. So how do
you know which ad to kill and which ad to keep running? You don't. Testing
and tracking, with so many variables to running a business, is so important
that I can't stress it enough. This applies to ads, sales pages, or
anything where you are deciding between using X or Y. leave this out at
your own risk.

6. Developing Communication Skills - Oh brother. This is such an important
item that I can go on about this for an hour. Communication involves so
many things, including ad writing, email communication with potential
buyers, autoresponder messages, sales copy for sales pages. All of this,
and a lot more is communication. If you can't effectively communicate with
your customers and potential customers, you're not going to get any
customers. That's all there is to it. The person who writes an email ad
that consists of "Hey, check out this web site" is not going to make tons
of sales. So learning how to communicate is a must. There is no way to run
a successful business without this skill.

5. Education - If you don't know what you're doing, you can't run a
business. This one little thread is part of your education, and it is just
a miniscule fragment of that education. There is no such thing as a natural
salesman. Even if you have the gift of gab and can write, you still have to
learn how to do market research, how to track ads, how to test and so on.
There is so much to learn it's mind boggling. So education is another one
of those things that are a must if you're going to run a successful
business.

4. Advertising - I have said it 100 times and I'll say it 100 times more.
I don't care how great your web site is, if you do not learn effective
advertising techniques and USE THEM, you are not going to get people to
your site. That's all there is to it. That's why I say advertising it 90%
of this business. Sure, if you have a crap product you're probably going
to get a lot of refunds even if you make a lot of sales, but even with a
crap product and great advertising, you CAN make money. With a great
product and NO advertising, you can't.

3. Planning - I learned this late in my IM career and I'm sorry I did. If
I'd learned it sooner, I would have become successful a lot sooner. You
can't just say, I want to make money online. You MUST have a plan. You
have to sit down and decide what you're going to do and in what time
frame. Everything for your business MUST be planned out in advance IF you
want to take the most direct route to success. Sure, you can wing it and
maybe eventually get there, but after having done that, I can honestly say,
it was the BIGGEST mistake I ever made. Plan, plan, plan.

2. Honesty - Surprised? I know a lot of people will be. But my reasoning is
simple. If you lie to people ultimately you will be found out and your
reputation, your credibility, everything you worked so hard to do, to
learn, everything that I've listed before this, will all be for nothing.
Dishonesty is the one thing that can totally destroy your business. So
you're probably wondering why it's not number 1. Well, I had a tough time
with this because number 1 is just as important, with all the honesty in
the world, if you don't do it, you're equally as dead.

1. Customer Service - If you don't take care of your customers, and I'm
talking about on a wide scale, you will be out of business before you know
it because word will get out. I'm not talking about the occasional pain in
the butt customer who you probably don't want to deal with. I'm talking
about something like this. You launch a product, something goes wrong with
the download process and you've made 500 sales at launch. You also have
500 emails from people saying that they couldn't download your product.
Well, you have 2 choices. You can do whatever needs to be done to take care
of these people while you fix the download problem or you can take your
good sweet time about it and maybe get it straightened out in a week or so.
What do you think is going to happen if you choose the latter? Think word
won't spread around the Internet like wildfire that you had a launch with
a problem and it took you a week to get people their product? Think this
won't seriously damage your reputation? Think people will buy your next
product?

And this is just one example. Customer service is an ongoing process.

Bottom line: If you want to run a successful business for the long haul,
you MUST take care of your customers. This means being courteous, helpful,
punctual and whatever else you can think of that you'd want somebody else
to do for you.

In other words...

Treat your customers the way you'd want them to treat you.

I hope this 4000th post has been of some benefit to you. I wish I had this
list when I first began. Maybe by having it now, I can save a few people
from making a lot of the mistakes that I made.

Now get out there and start running your business.