This post is a little different. It may get a little long and confusing too, but I have to start getting this out of my system. I have failed a lot and I am glad I did. I have learned a lot from my failures and I have learned lessons that can’t be taught, you have to learn them. I have a different perspective on failing. You have to understand that I don’t look at failing as a bad thing. To be successful you have to fail. Failure is an education. I embrace the lessens learned in failure and I try not to repeat my failures. 

Get Rich Slow

This next point is probably based on an old subject in internet time, but I am just tired of hearing about all of these get traffic quick pitches. I get angry when I see all of the mind tricks directed at the naive to try to convince them that they don’t have to fail to succeed, that they can just buy something to skip the failure and jump to success. If you have a website and you are looking for ways to be successful with it, you may have seen what I am talking about. Your inbox may have a few of these offers from SEO magic tricks to turn key affiliate systems. I’m writing today to say that you can’t loose weight with just a pill or exercise machine, you are as likely to get rich quick online as you are to win the lottery. You can blog, tweet, and update your Facebook status until you are blue in the face, but it doesn’t mean you will get 5,000 visits per week in a week. You can join some exclusive group, download the latest and greatest strategy and software, attend every success seminar you can get to, and you will end up with the same results as someone else who took the time to learn and keep learning about business reality on the internet. Don’t get me wrong I am not saying you shouldn’t go to seminars, because I do. You should learn about different strategies and network in groups of like minded individuals, but you should do it all with the right expectations. You can be successful, but you have to pay your dues, you have to put in your time and learn the game before you can win it.

It’s A Business, Act Like It

If making money is the overall goal of your website, face it, your web site is a business. It is no different than a business you would run offline. You have to treat it like a business. You can’t have a “get rich quick” attitude about it. You have to understand what you want from your website. You have to plan how you are going to get it. Then you have to work your plan, evaluate results, and adjust the plan and keep the ship going.

Learn the Ropes

OK, so now you see it as a business, but what should business owners know in order to be successful on the internet. Well that depends on your contribution to the website. Naturally, you will be responsible for the financial health of your internet business. So, you need at least a basic understanding of bookkeeping and an understanding of how to create a pricing strategy, project sales, monitor financial reports for problems and know how to address financial problems. You are probably going to be responsible for marketing. So you should know a little something about analyzing your market conditions (customers, competition, legal issues, potential for growth…). You should know how to develop your message, how to talk to your target market in a way that will influence buying behavior to your benefit. How do you build your brand? You should know that. What if you are going to build your website yourself, what do you need to know to do that? I can’t tell you in this post, but its a lot easier than you think. The point is you need to learn the business you are in whether it is online or offline. You need to know a little about every aspect of your business. Yes, people have succeeded without knowing much about business or the internet, but they are not the norm.

Know Your Limitations

If you want the kind of internet success that you hear about, on top of luck, a great idea, creativity, maybe some financing, you have to out work the competition. Your product or service will be competing for limited dollars, so you have to fight for every dollar you get and battle to keep the hearts and minds of your customers. To be successful you have to know how to play on the same field with your competition. You don’t have to be as smart or as knowledgeable as them, you just have to know enough to be dangerous. You have to have you bases covered throughout your business. If you have gaps in your business you have to fill them. If don’t know something about your business, you have to hire someone to do it for you or learn how to do it yourself.

Let’s take marketing. You may be great at marketing an offline business. You may be well versed and experienced in the many intricacies of the marketing dicipline, but how are your SEO skills? If you don’t know what SEO is and you have a website you are probably not maximizing your potential for success. What do you know about online interactive marketing, social network marketing, or pay-per-click? If you know about marketing online, do you know how to track it? Do you really know how to use Google Analytics? How many analytics programs should you be using, can you just trust your server stats and Google Analytics to give you what you need to identify trends and areas that need improvement? Do you know how to adjust you site to address a specific problem you have identified? Are you linking your analytics back to your overall strategic goals? Are you even doing what you know you should be doing? Knowing and not doing is just as bad as not knowing and not doing. (You can check out the post Your Website Needs a Phychological Evaluation for tips on what you can concentrate on with limited time or budget)

A, B, C, D…What Comes Next

I guess this post is more of a quizz than a lesson, but I hope you understand that if you want to be successful on the internet, you have to get into it. You have to know it like the ABC’s. I can give you advice all day, but you have to do it. Your business can only execute successfully if you guide your business. If you don’t know at least a high level overview of what you should be doing, how can you expect your company to magically becaome successful. I am not saying that you have to be a geek, or go get an MBA, you don’t even have to be considered an expert at it. Some of the smartest people online don’t succeed, but you should be somewhat versed in many of the subjects the experts know. How much you should know is hard to define. I say learn as much as you can then learn some more. You can hire people to do a lot of things for you, but you still have to have a working knowledge of the skills your looking for in order to hire the best person for the job. If you need a web designer you should know that they should have skills in XHTML and CSS. If you don’t know this you will learn once you fail with your first web designer who doesn’t deliver what you are looking for. You have to know your ABC’s but you don’t have to know how to spell every word in the dictionary from memory. You should know how everything you are doing ties back to your strategy. You have to know where you are going, have a plan to get there, know what you need to get there and you have to know if you are going in the wrong direction so you can change course early before you are too invested.

The 3 P’s of Success

The way I see it, success is based on perception, perspective and persistence. What ever you perceive success to be will be what you have to achieve to be successful. Success is a mind game like the pursuit of happiness. It is a subjective topic that is defined by what’s floating around in your head. If all you want to do is live comfortable off of $3,000 per week and you want to do that with your website, you need to have a plan to do that. But, the $3,000 per week is your perception of success. Someone else might want to make $40,000 per year while someone else wants to sell their website for 20 million dollars.

Having a plan or perception of your end goal is good, but you have to give it perspective. You have to know how to plan and implement your plan and make your perception a reality. You have to know about the strategies, tactics, and tasks your plan dictates. Your perspective will tell you if your perception need adjustment or if you need to go back to the drawing board to meet your perception. If you can’t craft a plan to take you company public and raise millions of dollars, don’t think about it right now. Plan how to get to a point that you can hire some one to do it for you. I am not saying don’t dream, but you have to get past tomorrow first. Next month you have to pay the light bill. You can point your business in the direction of becoming a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, but you have to first make it a multi-thousand dollar success. So start with what you need to do to make expenses and payroll for every month this year while investing in your next phase of growth. If you are new to planning, don’t try to project 3 to 5 years down the road. If you are planning for a business loan, you have to go through the projection exercise they want you to do, but they really are usually wrong. 9 times out of 10 your projection will be wrong (not a hard fact, just something I have read a few times about small business financial projections). You can plan smaller bite sized steps.  Yes you may be wrong about the short term plan too, but at least it addresses the here and now and its a lot easier to change the plan when it is small. You can constantly adjust your perception or perspective to match reality and the more you do it the better you will get at it.

If you start failing to meet your goals, you can’t give up right away. You have to have some persistence. You have to have some faith and guts and you have to be able to make hard decisions based on your perceptions and perspective. You have to be able to fail,  change your plan, set a new course, and get back up the next day and start turning the ship.

Is that All You Got?

So, you have knowledge, you got a plan, you are watching and changing to adjust to reality, but you keep failing. You try everything you know to do, maybe even one of those get rich quick or a it’s so easy to do scams, and you keep crashing, what do you do? It’s getting harder and harder to find the next solution, money is tight, people are depending on you, and you are loosing faith in your ability to re-balance your balance sheet. Can you keep going? In the end, that is the question. Can you keep it up, can you face challenges like no other you have faced and keep going? How long can you wait for success? This is a question that no one can answer for you. No one can give you a magic quote or secret formula that will reach inside of you to see what you are made of. You can set a goal and a timeline. If you hit or miss the target, you can plan what to do next. You can have guts but if you drive yourself into bankruptcy or have to suddenly fire employees without a warning, then you are probably more insane than gutsy. All I can say is, I hope you find something you enjoy doing to latch on to in your chase for success, but make sure you plan a point to throw in the towel and move on to the next thing. You don’t have to persist at doing the same thing to be successful, you just have to keep going no matter how you go about it.

Let’s Talk About It

That’s it. If you want to be successful, say so, know what success means to you, know how you are going to go get it, learn what you need to do it, learn how to do it, and do it. Then you have to get ready to fail gracefully. Know what you need to change when you notice you aren’t doing it right, then keep doing it until you are successful or until you hit a wall that says jump ship and swim for shore and try something else.

OK, this post is all over the place and I hope its together enough for you to understand where I’m coming from and to get something out of it. I can talk about this subject all day and one day I will organize my thoughts into a more coherent book, but if you want to talk about this subject, leave me a comment. This is near and dear to me. I struggled and fought long and hard for my success and I don’t mind taking a little time to share my knowledge and experience in achieving it.

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