I want to tell you a story.
This is a story of a boy with a magnifying glass and a piece of paper. The little boy was studiously immersed in his task. An elderly gentleman who walked by, stopped to take a look at the boy.
The boy seemed restless and frustrated as he moved the magnifying glass from one point to another. Curious to know what he was upto the elderly gentleman approched him and asked, “Son, what are you doing?”
The boy replied, “I was taught in my science class that if I use this magnifying glass on paper, I can light a fire. But I have been trying it for the past 5 hours and I have not been able to light a fire.”
The gentleman replied, “Let me help you here.” and he asked the boy to hold the magnifying glass and focus on just one spot.
The boy followed his advice and soon the paper caught fire to the little boy’s excitement.
He rejoiced at his success before he asked, “Why was I unable to light the paper?”
The gentleman replied, “You did not focus on one spot. You moved your magnifying glass all over the paper, so no one spot was hot enough to catch fire. Remember to focus” and walked away.
Now if you are wondering what this story has to do with Internet Marketing, it has everything to do with Internet Marketing especially if you have been toiling away for countless hours without any results.
The number one problem plaguing Internet Marketers today is lack of focus.
And I too suffered from the ‘Shiny Object Syndrome’ for a long time.
It took a toll of my health, energy, time and money.
I was working for long hours tirelessly and relentlessly only to be met with disappointment after disappointment.
And I was just like the little boy moving from one shiny thing to another. What’s worse these shiny objects wouldn’t even be related to each other.
I was buying products, courses and home study courses left, right and center. I learned as if there was no tomorrow and at the end of the day I knew a lot more than many people running successful businesses but I was yet to make a cent.
It was frustrating and I would often wonder, “What the heck, how can these broke, high school drop outs and bankrupt people be so successful while I having a masters degree suck at it?”
What happened during the course of time was that I became more and more unproductive as I was spending more hours in front of the computer.
I would wake up, have my breakfast and sit in front of the computer till lunch time and after lunch again spend time in front of the computer till dinner and again continue my activity till late midnight.
At the end of the day, I would have done nothing.
All I would do is check emails, open my chat window, go to Warrior Forum, read through product reviews, buy products, read them and do nothing with what I learned or would stop doing what I did with the previous products and start figuring out how to work on this new project.
So for one week it would be SEO, for another week it would be Pay per click marketing, the next week would be List Building, the week after would be article marketing followed by ebay marketing, amazon marketing, creating information products, time management etc.
Not only was I completely overwhelmed and suffering from information overload, I was also suffering from insomnia because my mind would be literally spinning with a thousand ideas to make money online.
You see that was my problem, I was interested in “making money online” and not in building a business. Initially I didn’t even know the difference between the two and it was only later that I realized that there is a huge difference between the two, as different as chalk and cheese.
Below is a fantastic presentation by Rich Schefren where he talks about the problems plaguing Internet Marketers today.
The one good thing that I did was that I never quit. As much frustrating it was, I never wanted to quit.
Because the alternative for me was far too depressing- do a day job for the rest of my life and retire at an age when I would have very little strength and interest to do things that I love in life.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Also my ego was the biggest barrier for quitting. I just could not surrend myself to accept the fact that I am one of those losers in life. Here I want to make a clarification.
By no means, I have any disrespect or contempt for people with regular jobs and a normal lifestyle.
The society literally needs people to do their jobs to function in peace and harmony. But I wasn’t wired to do a regular job and the thought of having to do that day in and day out for the rest of my life scared the heck out of me.
Slowly but surely I started realizing that buying products would do me no good, reading and learning new things would do me no good and constantly jumping from one thing to another would do me no good.
That’s when I decided to focus and start building a business online. And just this decision alone has saved me so much money, energy and resources.
I started knowing exactly what I needed to do and what I didn’t need. And when I purchased any new products it would be after careful consideration and heavy scrutiny.
The first question I would ask myself before contemplating on the product was “Would this product suit my business model?”
If it didn’t, I simply ignored it no matter how much revenue generating potential it may have. You could argue that this is not a good strategy, but this mindset helped me eliminate the noise in the environment as I focused on building the big M- momentum.
Think of the little snow ball that rolls down the hill slowly but steadily picking up mass and momentum down the way to eventually become a avalanche where barriers and stumbling blocks down the path are overpowered by the sheer pace and mass of the big snow ball.
Work on your avalanche by slowly building your snow ball but make sure that your little snow ball is growing in size every day no matter how small the growth may be.
Be patient, stick with it, enjoy building the snow ball as it makes the entire experience so much more fun and fulfilling. Over time, your snow ball would become big until you can push it down the hill to see it work wonders for your business.
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