Is Fear of Criticism Blocking Your Success?

Last week I wrote about a post I read where Richard Lee discussed getting over the fear of promoting your first product.  This is such a HUGE deal that I felt compelled to throw together a quick post on that too.

See, there are tons of ideas out there and a zillion ways to make money - online or offline.  But there's so much inner game, YOU-stuff that we all have to get over that it seems like that's the thing that holds people back more than anything else.  It's certainly not a lack of ideas.  Case in point, this fear of criticism crap when it comes to rolling out products - specifically that very first one.

Here's the deal…

Just consider something like John Reese's Traffic Secrets (which is now off the market).  You're probably aware that this product launch resulted in John's "Million Dollar Day".  Would it surprise you that some people didn't like that product?  It's almost a sure thing, though I guess only John knows for sure.  But that didn't stop him, nor should it have.

You simply can't please everyone and have to assume that someone (or even a few) people aren't going to like your product, some jerks will even use it and then return it, etc.  That's okay as long as that's not the dominant trend.  It's just part of doing business.   In fact, I've heard some info publishers argue that if they're not at least getting SOME returns, they don't think they're selling hard enough on the front end.

Of course, all this talk of dealing with returns and possibly unhappy customers makes a pretty strong case for outsourcing stuff like customer service.  If you never know about people returning your stuff, complaining about it, etc. or at least have someone to act as a buffer between you and that sort of negative feedback, you can be much more objective rather than emotionally tied to how people respond to your product.  You can take that feedback and make any NECESSARY changes (keyword there is necessary) and do so from a more rational standpoint.

You know, I'm a pretty big fan of Dan Kennedy's stuff too and one of the things he talks about in a few of his products is the idea of "immunity to criticism"…that most successful people have a thick skin and that you REALLY have to consider the source of the criticism. 

• Is it a non-buyer that's complaining? 
• Is it a buyer that's complaining but not actually returning the product? 
• Is it a competitor that's just playing mind games or jealous of your product (seems sorta' like elementary school huh…)? 
• Is it all in your head, with no real complaints to speak of?

Just understand that not everyone is going to like ANY particular product, it doesn't matter what it is.  Just get something out there that provides value to your ideal customer, consider the source of any feedback you get, change what really needs to be improved and keep on rolling out more.

Popularity: 6% [?]

End of Week Roundup: Good Stuff From Around the Web

Here's a quick recap of some of the stuff I found on web this week…that you shouldn't have missed.  Enjoy!

Richard Lee:
Richard Lee wrote a great post on getting over the fear of creating your first product for your Internet business.  Plus he gives some awesome strategies for relaunching a product later on if you decide to update it or improve it.  But the main point is that you can't improve something until you have SOMETHING to improve.  Or to quote a title from one of my favorite authors - Nothing Happens Until Something Moves (title of a book by Robert Ringer).  There were so many things in this post that struck a cord with me that I can't fit it all in here…keep an eye out for an upcoming post.

James Brausch:
James Brausch has a post covering a really cool mail management service that allows you to get postal mail via email.  This is something I've been meaning to try for awhile and just never got around to it.  Imagine never having to worry about dealing with junk mail again and putting the rest of your mail handling on autopilot.  This is core 4-Hour Work Week kinda stuff.  Just one more thing to outsource and one less thing to eat up time.  Check out James Brausch's post for more info, including a great idea for securely archiving important documents so you can get access to them anywhere in the world.  Wish I had known about this when I was in the military, moving around so often.  Thanks James!

Terry Dean:
Terry Dean offered up an MP3 recording of a conference call he did on how to choose profitable markets online.  The call was with one of his coaching clients on - a guy who's in something like 17 different online markets!  Okay, two caveats.  First, the MP3 isn't free but it'll only set you back 7 bucks, including transcript…insanely cheap for the value provided on the call (and no, I'm not an affiliate or anything like that).  Two, don't let the 17 markets thing scare you away or excite you, because neither one of these guys really recommend spreading yourself that thin.  In fact, that's one of the things they discuss on the call, though by doing so, his coaching client has been able to hone the process of finding, researching and entering profitable markets.  I listened to the call and thought it was extremely useful.  I have to admit, I wonder how long it would take to get good enough data to get the "green light" but you could easily setup a handful of tests in different markets as they describe during the call (probably in less than a day), then go with what ends up working out best.  Also, better to take your time and spend a little money in testing rather than go full throttle into a market and end up thousands of dollars in the hole…already almost played that game once myself and it's NO FUN!

Holiday Wishlists:
And finally, just in time for the holidays, a good friend of mine clued me in to a great little freebie online service (that I really wish I had thought of) that allows you to build your own wishlists for gifts and such.  Think of it sort of like what you can do on amazon.com but a service that works internet-wide.  You just sign up for an account, save a bookmark, then find stuff online you'd like to add to your list.  Click the bookmark you saved and it opens a quick little form where you can save an image of the thing, the description and the price.  You can share your list with others and they can choose items from there without you knowing who's getting you what.  I think it also keeps multiple people from getting you the same gift.  Anyway, seems appropriate since we're rolling into the holidays.

Here's the link:  www.wishlist.com

On to the weekend…

Popularity: 8% [?]

Opportunity or Scarcity? You Decide

This post is somewhat in keeping with the last one about planning for your business for the next year, but covers much broader questions.

Do you see a world full of opportunity or scarcity?

I find it amazing how many choices people have these days, although sometimes too many choices only creates inaction.  Sort of like the old joke that if there's a fire in a movie theater, you better hope there are only one or two exits, otherwise people won't know which way to go. 

But if you can narrow down what it is that you'd really like to do, there's probably no better time than right now to step up to the challenge.  Sure, you need to make sure there's a market for whatever your "thing" is, but that goes without saying.  I'm not totally convinced you can just "do what you love" without some practical business analysis backing it up, unless you just want to do it as a hobby.  That being said, if there truly is a market for what you're hoping to do, you're on the right track.

It amazes me how many tools are available now, either for free or for only a small fee, that allow the "little guy" to setup a successful business.  Things that we all take for granted now, like being able to accept credit cards via Paypal or using something like 1ShoppingCart.  Or how incredibly easy it is to get a toll-free number that forwards to your voicemail.  All of those little business infrastructure things are readily available and I bet if I made an exhaustive list of "stuff" I use, it would only come out to a few hundred dollars per month…if that much.

So it's really just a question of what you want to do.  If you have a little bit of computer skill (and if you made it here, then you do), a half way decent idea, and the drive to see it through, there are an ENORMOUS amount of options available.

Do you want to be a…

• writer
• movie creator
• animator
• game designer
• consultant
• retailer
• software developer
• online store owner
• copywriter
• musician
• graphic designer
• web designer
• teacher/trainer
• newsletter publisher
• photographer

The list goes on and on, but it amazes me sometimes how much is out there.  Now granted, I'm not saying that doing any of these is EASY per se.  But when has something worth doing ever been EASY? 

The point is that all of us (thanks in large part to the Internet) have a mountain of information and resources available to us to find out HOW to get going with any of the above, or whatever it is you want to do.  It's also much easier for the individual to have a voice, to speak their mind, show their talents and skills, etc.  Imagine how difficult it would have been to get started with one of the above ideas 30, 40, or 50 years ago (if these types of things even existed back then).

So as we round the bend and finish out 2007, maybe it's a good time to figure out where you'd like to be heading next.  No, don't quit your job or do something crazy.  Just realize that there are many, MANY more options available to all of us to build the life we truly desire.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Got Any Big Plans for Next Year?

Well, here we are at mid-November 2007.  At least here in the U.S., it's about time to break out the good dishes and pig out on turkey, stuffing and all the good stuff for Thanksgiving.  Then starts the lull between Thanksgiving and the Holidays.  It seems like it's easy to get sidetracked with Holiday fever, gift shopping, decorating and such as we get close to the Holidays.  And afterwards, between then and the New Year, well…not a whole lot getting done then either for sure. 

So now is the perfect time to start thinking about your goals for your business during the next year.  No, not New Year's resolutions.  We know how those rarely work out.  Instead, it's time to come up with some achievable, yet challenging goals that you're shooting for in your business.  Then, tie those goals to specific actions you need to take.

For instance, say you want to build your list over the next year.  Well, by this time next year, what do you want your list to look like?  Let's say you want 5,000 subscribers to your list (you ARE building a list, right?).  Okay, so

5,000/12 = 416 (you'll need roughly 416 signups per month to hit your target)

416/30 = 14 (so you'll need 14 signups per day, on average, to hit your target)

Well, how much traffic is your site getting each day right now?  If you're not tracking this, log in to your website's control panel and look at your log files.  Even better, get Google Analytics installed on your site so you can track website visits and much, MUCH more.  You need to know how people respond when they hit your site, but that's a topic for another post.

The point is, you should have an idea of how much traffic you're getting each day.  Are you getting less than 14 visitors per day?  If so, you've got some work to do in the way of traffic generation and converting them to optins.  Possible actions:

• submit an article a day for a month, measure change in traffic, then readjust the plan accordingly or continue as-is
• blog comment posts on related blogs (daily, weekly or whatever you decide, then measure and adjust)
• submit press releases (preferably if you have a product to sell since there's a cost involved, but same as above - do it, measure results, adjust)

Do you already have at least 14 visitors per day to your site?  Do you have a lot more?  Are you already getting optins, and if so, what's the conversion rate?  For conversion rate, we're talking about "signups per day versus visitors per day", not "signups versus how many times your signup form is shown". 

Once you have a rough idea of what your conversion rate is, you'll know how much traffic you need to get to your site in order to have a decent chance of hitting your goal of 5,000 subscribers by year's end.  Just take the daily number of optins you're shooting for and divide it by the conversion rate you're already getting.  So something like:

14 signups per day / .01 daily conversion rate = 1400 visitor per day needed to hit that goal

By measuring and doing some quick math, you can figure out how close you are to your target and how aggressive you'll need to be with the actions you decide to take.  And you can always go back and look at these figures again as you improve your conversion rate, traffic, etc.

(Sidebar: This is an excellent example of why it's often times a LOT easier to improve the conversions on a site rather than get more traffic in order to achieve the same goal.  In the example above, if we were able to improve the optin conversion rate from 1% to 2%, we'd only need 700 visitors per day instead of 1400.  How much would it cost to get more traffic compared to adding something to the optin offer to help increase it's conversion rate?  These are things to think about…)

Okay, so that's just one example, but I bet you have some other ideas for goals for your business over the next year, right?  Now is the time to think about these things and come up with your plan of attack.  That way, when Jan 1st rolls around, you can hit the ground running!

Popularity: 4% [?]

That's it, I Quit! (And Why You Should Too Before It's Too Late)

Lately I’ve been talking a lot with friends and family about my online business. The good part is that I have everyone’s support, which is great. But I still get the sense sometimes that they don’t really “get it”…that they think it’s some sort of hobby or thing I’m doing on the side. And almost no one I’m close to has an understanding of leverage, that time is the one thing you can’t get back, and that there’s an abundance of money and success out there for just about anyone to grab onto. So as of today, I’ve decided:

…trying to explain why I don’t want to be an engineer (even though I have an electrical engineering degree) 

…trying to get across the point that it’s not just about “being my own boss” or “working from home” and that it’s more expansive than that…that it’s really about building a business that gives me FREEDOM. 

…attempting to get across the fact that it’s absolute INSANITY to trade time for money – to trade something absolutely FINITE (time) for something INFINITE in the number of other ways in which it can be obtained (MONEY) 

…explaining over and over and OVER again, ad nauseum, the idea of leverage, of doing work once and continuing to be paid for it over and over again as opposed to “an hour’s pay for an hour’s work” which limits your income by default 

…trying to get people to understand why I still feel like my engineering degree was one of the worst choices I EVER made – potentially stovepiping me into the rat race had I not seen the light 

…constantly explaining that taking a job in order to be able to afford an expensive mortgage is a flat out STUPID idea…it’s just a house for crying out loud. Not that you shouldn’t buy a house, but here in the Maryland/DC Metro area, we have houses in the $400,000 - $500,000 ballpark – CRAZY by any measure unless you have a ridiculous downpayment. 

…trying to explain why I don’t want to play mother-may-I with anyone when it comes to how and where I spend my time, especially when it comes to my family. 

…trying to get people to realize the hard, cold fact that out time here is limited by definition and that giving control of it to someone else is giving away the only thing of real value 

…that having a J-O-B really is being “just over broke” like the joke says…that they’re just going to pay you enough to keep you around 

…explaining how the 40 hour work week is a myth…how is it that it takes everyone EXACTLY 40 hours a week to get done whatever it is that they need to get done? 

…explaining that no matter how efficient you are at your job or how fast you get done whatever it was that you were hired to do, you won’t be rewarded for your efficiency by having to spend less time at work, you’ll just get more work to fill out the 40 hours (e.g., other duties as assigned). But weren’t you hired to take care of “x” that you just got done in half the time? Seems just as reasonable to work slow and inefficient and that’s a problem. 

…trying to get them to see that our educational system is built on the foundation of cranking out employees, followers in large part. Wasn’t American was founded on initiative and individual drive? They didn’t come all the way across the pond looking for a job…sheesh! 

I’m not sure if you’ve got people in your corner, people betting against you or somewhere in between. Just realize that most people are never going to “get” this stuff, so my advice is don’t even bother trying to explain it (other than as a means of keeping the peace with your spouse I suppose). 

Instead, just keep plugging along doing what you know works.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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