Learning From Your Mistakes May Be Your Biggest Mistake

©Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

I saw a quote go by on Twitter recently that I really liked. I appologize for not knowing who to attribute it to, but it said:

Experience is a lousy teacher – it gives you the test first, then provides the lesson.

Amazing how true that is, yet there is a lot to be learned when we analyze our mistakes and our successes. So what do I mean when I say that learning from your mistakes may be your biggest mistake of all?

Simply this – while you should always learn from mistakes you make along your path, your wisest path avoids most of those mistakes upfront. Let’s take a look at how that applies specifically to your Internet marketing business, shall we?

Every single day I see mistakes being made in e-mails and e-zines I receive. I’m not referring to typos or grammatical errors – those are unimportant for the most part. No, I’m referring to people making major mistakes in how they’re trying to make money online, how they’re trying to build their online businesses or the people they’ve chosen to follow…

Naturally, for example, I’m invited into JVs and affiliate launches every day – every well-known marketer above a certain level is. On one last week, the ‘VIP partners’ program was paying out 40%, and I politely pointed out I never promote digital products for less than 50% minimum. May not seem like a big deal, but it’s the difference between $400 and $500 from a mailing, or $800 vs $1,000 per mail if the promotion goes over well – $100 or $200 a day certainly impacts one’s income over a year, doesn’t it? Yet the response was just ‘Well, the other VIP Partners are all happy with 40%…’

That person’s mistake wasn’t not changing his rate for me, even if many do. No, his mistake was in only offering 40% in the first place when trying to attract larger partners. While that’s a fair rate for a physical product, even regular affiliates should be making 50% or more on digital downloads, and VIP partners that much more. Don’t be short-sighted in your greed – making 25% on what big dogs can sell for you is much better than 60% on mid-level and smaller partners will bring in.

It’s the result of a common mistake – looking at everything short-term instead of keeping the bigger picture in mind. Be sure you’re not doing what seems right for right now but closing doors on future growth, or turning what could be a major long-term benefit into a short-term gain with no future benefit.

Another example is also obvious right now due to the recession and drop in sales online. A wedge has been driven between people in the mid-ground of the Internet marketing arena. There was a sudden drop in sales about the end of April this year, and two schools of thought emerged about how to deal with it.

The first group cut their price points significantly, often running sales for $1 or $2.95 on products they would otherwise have sold for $17 or $27 in the hopes of keeping their numbers up. They’re easy to spot, because they keep throwing a new product up two or three times a week and keep hammering away at their lists for the current ‘product du jour’. They have to, you see – by cutting their price they’ve maintained the same level of sales while reducing their income by 70 or 80%.

The second group, on the other hand, maintained their fair price points but added more value into their offers – as free incentives to get people to consider their offers, as bonuses to the product sales, or in the form of training teleseminars and webinars to make their product of that much more use to their followers.

And though money is tight for prospects everywhere, which group do you think is doing better? You guessed it – the latter group!

I could go on and on here – mistakes in list-building, promoting products that don’t match the interest of their lists, promoting products without checking them out, promoting products because they pay well or because they have great affiliate contests without regard for whether the product will help their followers, etc. Each is a mistake, and hopefully these people learn from those mistakes before they’re back out looking for a job instead, or giving up as one more person who thinks making money online is way too hard.

But the point of today’s post is to show that learning from those mistakes is a mistake in itself, since they could have been avoided in the first place. This isn’t a small matter – avoiding the most common mistakes can be the difference between 6 – 7 figures a year online and utter dismal failure to even get going well with your Internet marketing business and, more commonly, can shave months or even years off your income time horizon, putting you in a profit-producing state in months rather than years, and saving you considerable time and money along the way.

“Great – but just how do I avoid making these mistakes, especially if they’re so common? If so many others are making these same mistakes, how can I expect to avoid them?”

Great questions, so here’s a great answer: Instead of investing years in trial and error and spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars along the way, hire a mentor to guide you through the minefield that is Internet marketing startups! There are a number of people who started at the bottom and are now making double, triple or ten times what the average job pays, working from the comfort of their homes with no boss to report to. Use their experience to your advantage. While the fess for a good mentor may seem shockingly high at first, it can quickly become obvious to you that it was the wisest investment you made online, and possibly the only one that will pay you back time and time again for the rest of your time online!

Stop getting bogged down by things you don’t yet know about doing business online, by constant start-and-stop cycles, and by putting so much time and effort into making money online with the only result being a dwindling bank account. Unless you like doing everything the hard way, putting in 10 times the necessary effort and have too large a bank account that you need to wipe out…

Hire a mentor, listen to and learn from them, and invest your time and money wisely to maximize your returns and minimize the time needed to enjoy those profits. You wouldn’t try to be a dentist without training from an oral surgeon first, you wouldn’t put a million dollars into the stock market without learning from a brokerage, and you wouldn’t step into the octagon without training from professional fighters. So don’t enter into your own online business, or any work-at-home endeavor, without the guidance of the best mentor you can afford.

Choosing the right mentor for you can be a daunting task, though – as fraught with pitfalls as trying to go it alone in Internet marketing. Next post I’ll show you some simple guidelines to simplify the task and help you choose the right mentor for YOU and YOUR particular business intents, ok? See you then!

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