The Price Of In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing Success

From Willie Craw­ford.

Willie Crawford

One Sum­mer, back when I was a col­lege stu­dent, I sold ref­er­ence books door-to-door work­ing for a com­pany named „South­west­ern Pub­lish­ing Com­pany.” My ter­ri­tory was some fairly rough neigh­bor­hoods in Bal­ti­more and Philadelphia.

That Sum­mer taught me a lot about sales, and a lot about „the price of success.”

A re­cent trip to the Philip­pine, where we all took cold show­ers, brought back mem­o­ries of that Sum­mer job.

You see, one of the ex­pres­sions that I mem­o­rized, and lived by while sell­ing books door-to-door was „Suc­cess­ful Peo­ple Do Things That Un­suc­cess­ful Peo­ple Don’t Like To Do.” So to get our­selves ac­cus­tomed to do­ing things that many peo­ple did­n’t like to do, we forced our­selves to take cold show­ers every morning.

There is a lot of truth in that say­ing, so let’s look at it a lit­tle further.

First of all we have to ad­mit that many of the things that un­suc­cess­ful peo­ple don’t like do­ing are also things that suc­cess­ful peo­ple ini­tially don’t like to do. They Sim­ply force them­selves to do them over and over again un­til they be­come habit.

One such thing is risk­ing re­jec­tion. Most of us don’t like hav­ing our feel­ings hurt, so we don’t ask for things as of­ten as we should out of fear of rejection.

Suc­cess­ful peo­ple learn to risk re­jec­tion and not to take it per­son­ally. For ex­am­ple, an in­ter­net mar­keter may need to ask nu­mer­ous „big­ger named” mar­keters for a joint ven­ture, re­al­iz­ing that MOST of them will say no. He has to learn not to take that as a re­jec­tion of him, but as just a re­jec­tion of his offer.

Most of us don’t like be­ing ridiculed, yet suc­cess­ful peo­ple learn to at­tempt things that might lead to them be­ing ridiculed. They are less afraid of tak­ing cal­cu­lated risk, and re­al­ize that ridicule might be one of the prices of success.

I had a coach once who pointed out to me that most well-known au­thors first wrote sev­eral books that flopped. It was of­ten not un­til that third book that they had a best-seller.

He taught me that if you study many of the most suc­cess­ful peo­ple you can think of, you’ll dis­cover that they had sev­eral fail­ures along the way. When I did this, I saw how true that was. Many of them had bank­rupt­cies, failed projects, and of­ten even spent time home­less, on their way to success.

When you see these big suc­cesses’ pic­tures plas­tered all over tele­vi­sion and mag­a­zine cov­ers, most peo­ple have no idea what it took them to get there. They had to take nu­mer­ous big risks to get there, and not all of those risks turned out favorably!

My coach and men­tor taught me that since I know a fail­ure or two is likely on my way to mas­sive suc­cess, I may as well get those out of the way. He used the ex­pres­sion „fail for­ward fast.”

When I look at the cost of mega-suc­cess I see two requirements:

1) Mega- suc­cess­ful peo­ple are not sat­is­fied with be­ing av­er­age. Av­er­age peo­ple just get av­er­age results.

2) Suc­cess­ful peo­ple of­ten have to stretch their com­fort zone. Since this en­tails do­ing some­thing that is NOT com­fort­able, it also means that you have to learn this be­hav­ior. You learn it by tak­ing lit­tle, un­com­fort­able, cal­cu­lated risk time and time again.

You don’t take fool­ish risks, but you do have to force your­self to do things that av­er­age peo­ple won’t do. That is of­ten the price of be­ing above average.

Now, that you know the price of suc­cess, to in­clude In­ter­net mar­ket­ing mega-suc­cess, you have to ask your­self, „Are you will­ing to pay the price?”

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Willie Craw­ford is an in­ter­net mar­ket­ing and traf­fic gen­er­a­tion ex­pert. He of­ten dis­trib­utes con­tent (ar­ti­cles, videos, pod­casts, and press re­leases) to gen­er­ate highly tar­geted web­site traf­fic. To do that ef­fi­ciently he uses the au­to­mated sub­mis­sion ser­vice that you’ll find at https://ibmm.com/epbt

To help you suc­ceed Willie has cre­ated The In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing In­ner Cir­cle, a mem­ber­ship site where he fre­quently brain­storms so­lu­tions to prob­lems such as those dis­cussed in this ar­ti­cle. Join that dis­cus­sion for your suc­cess at TheIn­ter­net­Mar­ketingIn­ner­cir­cle.