A Profitable Internet Marketing Business – What’s Your Problem?

Posted in Admin. & Organization, Business Strategy, My Business Development

The question: What is stopping you from creating and operating a profitable internet marketing business? A deceptively simple question - but the the answer could be transforming to your business if you are honest enough with yourself, and act on the answer! I have some ideas about what the most common answer will be - but rather than presume and assume, I'd like to ask and inquire!

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This last week I had some exchanges with two subscribers, and without any prompting from me, they revealed that their biggest issues was.... Not traffic... Not lack of know-how... Not product development... Not social marketing... Not traffic conversions; not tracking; not launching a product; not website design ... not ANY of the things about which we all get promoted to multiple times a day. And it wasn't even "how to organize my hard drive"!! No. The common theme was FOCUS. Just sticking to one thing and seeing it through to completion: that was what these two subscribers found the hardest. Now, you probably know that I've already identified this as a huge problem for just about every internet marketer, and I created a small, low-cost product to help in this area - the Laser-Focus Shield But it's clear that the problem is far too big to be solved by a single, small product. In fact, Focus is just one of a range of related issues that can't be picked out and solved in isolation. I've spent some hours sketching out my ideas on this, and I have some (in my opinion) very exciting options. But before saying anything about them, I'd really like to hear from YOU. Put aside issues around traffic and conversion and product development and so on. Just focussing on strategy and planning and operations - what are YOUR biggest issues? Please post your answers below. Here are the sort of things to think about:

Defining your personal goals
Defining your business goals
Deciding on a business model
Learning new skills
Building a team
Finding a "master mind" group
Not having anyone to be accountable to
Feeling isolated
Having to do everything yourself
Not being able to collaborate online (e.g. in a shared team space)
Not having a mentor
Having no deadlines
Having no-one to brainstorm with / bounce ideas off
Not being able to create a project plan
Perfectionism
Time management
Distractions from email etc.
Staying focussed on one project
Having a disorganized filing system
anything else!!

So - give me your thoughts on this below: tell me your top THREE issues - either from those above, or anything else. I am VERY interested in what you have to say. (But please - DON'T put down "finding JV partners", "getting traffic", "finding a niche" etc. : you can get information about that in many different places.) Regards Alex

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of how our ideas develop. (You won't get lots of extraneous 
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10 comments

mitchpowell on November 26, 2008 at 9:23 am

You’re spot on.

What I tried to do here, because I couldn’t choose all of the excuses, was to be as honest with myself as I possibly could, and select the three most pertinent ones.

1.) Defining your business goals
2.) Learning new skills
3.) Staying focussed on one project

I’m engaged in a program now I feel is going to help me tremendously, but defining a business goal still remains a hurdle.

Learning new skills and staying focused are taken care of with the lessons I’m studying, and there’s an element of accountability here too.

Thanks for the chance to reflect on my self-imposed constraints.

Mitch
lauren on November 26, 2008 at 9:43 am

Hi,

This is a good idea. There are usually underlying reasons for the difficulties in achieving success in certain areas.

I think feeling isolated and having to do everything myself would come high on the list. I also feel overwhelmed with all the various ways to market my business.

Since I had no internet knowledge nor technical skills before starting my business, it is difficult to choice the best methods for my business, my market and my budget.

Thanks,

Lauren Kennedy
eebee on November 26, 2008 at 2:04 pm

So I am not the only one that feels like that! I think I said “yes” to just about all of them. I was pretty efficient and focused when I had a boss and a team around me. Working alone isn’t working well for me at all. What I miss most is someone to talk ideas and plans over with.
Vince on November 26, 2008 at 6:06 pm

Hi, Alex

Like others here my problem is staying focused on one project. Time is also a big issue as i have so many other daily tasks that take up my time. Also like the majority of people i have little funds for all that outsourcing etc so have to do it all myself.

No one else in my household have any interest in marketing, so i do feel sometimes isolated in what i try to do.
dynalt on November 26, 2008 at 11:28 pm

I am working to synthesize a plan from the vast amount of material I have accumulated.

While part of the issue can be characterized as “focus” I am confronted by issues that David Allen addresses, partially, in GTD (Getting Things Done).

1) I need to be able to capture ideas and things that need to be done sometime to get them out of my head, but just having them in a huge list doesn’t help a lot. I am looking for ways to allow me to see only those items that I am actively doing something about and that don’t need something else to be done first — those things that I can be productive doing now.

In terms of focus, I am enrolled in Eben Pagan’s Wake Up Productive program. He addresses primarily the formation of good habits oriented around strengths and goals. This is very good for establishing work patterns that work.

2) Where GTD addresses tasks, nothing really addresses information organization. I have the IM-Index, and it is a very neat idea, but with only a static index, no matter how good, remembering where you put something is an ongoing problem. If Windows supported symbolic links well, it wouldn’t be necessary to file things in only one place and that would help.

3) While getting started, there is a seemingly endless number of areas that need to be aligned. There are numerous activities that must be done even if they don’t appear to contribute all that much to the goal. For example, this morning I am finishing formatting a number of articles to be put on my website as fodder for blog posts, and I have some maintenance to be done on several blogs. These aren’t high value activities, but, at the moment, I am my only resource, so they need to be done along with any other goal setting or “loftier” activities I should be engaging in.

4) It is nice to be able to work on one thing until it is complete, and multi-tasking is notoriously inefficient, but there needs to be some way of insuring that everything that needs to get energy flowed to it gets it. Driving traffic to a site before there is a site is pointless, but starting on traffic only after the site is done means that the site is idle much longer than it should be, so the activities need some amount of parallel evolution.

As I see my issues, they are increasingly knowledge management issues, whether the knowledge being managed is information of various sorts, or project plans and tasks.

Hope this helps.
Alex Goodall on November 27, 2008 at 1:05 am

Thanks for the input to date, everyone. This is exactly the type of response I was hoping for.

And I’d love to see more of it, so keep the responses coming!

mitch – you said:

“defining a business goal still remains a hurdle”

Actually, you can’t perform ANY action with a goal/intent, so the real issue is, to begin with at least, becoming aware of what your goal is. It may be very fuzzy and vague, but it must be there. Try articulating it as best you to make it explicit, then you can start refining and focussing it.

lauren, ebee, Vince -

“Work from home and fire your boss” : the theory is great, except that we’ve learned, over the last few million years, to be social creatures and work in a social context. We do have to fix that.

dynalt – you said:

“If Windows supported symbolic links well, it wouldn’t be necessary to file things in only one place and that would help.”

For another time, I have an arguement for making that limitation into something positive (where the person doing the filing is the same person doing the retrieving).

You also said:

“As I see my issues, they are increasingly knowledge management issues, whether the knowledge being managed is information of various sorts, or project plans and tasks.”

I have to agree, of course! I tend to look at everything through a “knowledge lense”, given my background. And having done that for many years, I find that there’s very little that is NOT a knowledge management issue!

Thanks, and keep them coming.

Alex
Kathy on November 27, 2008 at 6:37 am

I must admit that staying focused is my main problem. I get bogged down in the details instead of looking at the big picture. I am a perfectionist and this slows me down.

Like others have already written, I am my only employee and at the moment, I don’t get paid. I have my plan and my written goals, but am not anywhere near achieving them yet.

I have a hard drive full of ebooks and mini courses but don’t know how or where to upload them so I can sell them. Or how to set up my paypal button to accept payments. I’ve done more courses than I can count but not one has taught me these basic techniques.

I need to be able to work in my business instead of on it. At the moment I spend too much time on it.

Kathy
Alex Goodall on November 27, 2008 at 2:10 pm

Hi Kathy

You’ve raised two more key points – both of which I have in my “issues to be covered” list:

1) Selecting an appropriate business model (almost no-one recommends taking time and effort to do this: the usual advice is “I have THE BEST blueprint to success – just follow what I did”). Part of looking at the Big Picture is examining your business model. Is it right for you? How will you compete?

2) Understanding the skills and experience needed to be successful in any given business model

BTW – I am VERY sceptical of the value of step-by-step guides: they have SOME value, but not much. One of the many problems with such guides is the muddle between “training” and “doing”. Another is that they have to make assumptions about the level of experience of the reader, and for 80% of the readers, that assumption is going to be wrong!

There are some very fundamental truths about internet marketing (actually, about all forms of business) that very, very few people talk about because they are afraid it will scare people off – and then they won’t be able to sell anything to them! Better to keep people ignorant, eager and hopeful so they can be sold yet more stuff.

Alex
johnreed on November 27, 2008 at 4:10 pm

Hi Alex and Blog Readers – a quick hello from Ancient York whilst I recover from a nasty bout of Gastro-somethingorother!

CLANG – how these comments struck a chord with me, especially from eebee and Vince but the others too! I have too many excellent memberships, available PLR, Web Site Templates, software galore – and have been “Collecting” for over 3 years but not operating anything to a conclusion.

I’ve had sites set up for me, bought 5 others, got a couple of Blogs, MOUNTAINS of sites ready to install but I have not been able to force myself to concentrate on one scheme and get it bringing in income. I’ve wasted a fortune on PPC, ebooks on how to do it better, and I could surely have massacred Google many times over if I’d been able to implement what I bought. I don’t really understand the site structure and technicalites of coding so I’ve messed up a couple of sites and that disheartened me.

I’m going to butt out now as I realise this is becoming a rant against my own stupidity…. it can’t be that difficult to set an aim and stick to the execution of a simple mission, I did it for nearly 30 years in the Army, and in the roles/careers that followed!!!
My main problem is that the whole online field is just too darned interesting and full of such great sales pitches that I just can’t help roaming around it feeling as though I’m in some huge Amusement Arcade or a Giant Theme Park!!

However, we’re in our 60s now and need to retire from the physical strain of Off-Line retail. So, I need an ongoing income to provide a living – this is the place, I just have to find a way, AND STICK TO IT
lormek on April 27, 2009 at 12:44 am

Sounds like me! I could have wrote that.