Why You Will Fail Part 2
In the eighth of our series of informative articles on the honest way to earn an income online, we look at more causes of failure to your online business.
In the previous instalment, we looked at some of the things newcomers to the internet marketing business do that will inevitably cause their business to fail. They included some real blunders with regard to websites, like using annoying pop-ups, crazy, irrelevant advertising banners, slow loading flash presentations, audio messages and music. In this article, we'll look at some more of the things that will harm your business and cause it to fail if you are hell bent on doing them.
A great mistake newcomers make is to set up their killer webpage and then to omit to ask their customers for their opinion. It can be something as simple as a short message saying:
"If you have any suggestions or comments, please email us at..."
That in itself can be a valuable way of learning what your customers want - or a glaring omission leaving you in the dark as to what will make your customers want to come back and visit your site often and eventually buy something.
It could be a suggestion box on your contacts page, or a "PS: Any questions, email me at..." in your emails or forum posts. Anything to get feedback from your visitors or potential customers. Remember, on average it takes someone seven visits to a site before they buy. By not giving them what they want, you are strangling your business.
Another glaring omission is the opt-in box. You need a list of people you can contact on a regular basis with your promotional offers or anything else that you think they might be interested in. You can't go blasting emails all over the place to total strangers. That is spam. Spam is illegal and worse, will get you shut down before you know it. Better to nurture a good list of people who are already interested in what you and your site has to offer and then keep in contact with them. It will make all the difference between sink or swim.
Another way of letting your business slip through your fingers is to waste time. We're all guilty of it - me as well. It's also known as procrastination, which means, for instance sitting at your computer with a partially written article in front of you that needs a bit of research. Off you go to Google to check out some information on your subject and partway through searching through the maze of sites you stumble across a really great forum. You like it, so you register and then spend the next two hours reading posts and replying to a few. What's happened to your article? It's sitting on your hard disk, forgotten and ignored.
By recognising when it is happening, you can stop yourself and return to what you were doing, in time to get back into that article before you lose all interest in it.
Ways of procrastinating are many and varied. One very common thing is getting to a point in your work when you brain just switches off and you find yourself staring into space. Well that's ok if you can stop yourself doing it after five minutes or so. In fact it has been scientifically proven that short daydream breaks are actually just our brains’ way of recharging throughout the day, so it's actually good for you. But if you let those five minute daydreams turn into half hour naps, then that’s half an hour of your working day wasted!
You need to instil some discipline into your working day. Working from home exposes you to all sorts of interruptions and drains on your time. Family members will keep looking in on you and ask you to do this or that. Well, you have to be a little hard and tell them that between such and such hours, your home office is off-limits. You have to be unavailable just like you would be if you went out to the office every day.
There is one last thing you need to know about procrastination. If you have any cool games installed on your computer…
GET RID OF THEM!
I speak from personal experience from a while ago. During my working day, I'd get bored and without even thinking about it would click on a game icon and before I knew it I was totally absorbed in it – hours were disappearing fast from my working day and things weren't getting done that should have been. Once I realised what was happening, I took drastic steps to ensure it wouldn't happen again. I simply booted all the games off my computer. Without the temptation sitting there staring at me in the form of a little icon on my desktop pleading with me to "click me..." I found I could get on with what's important – the business of making money, of course.
So there are some more useful tips concerning things that could cause your business to fail. By making sure you ask your customers what they want, then giving it to them, they will reward you with more visits to your website and more sales. By having an opt-in box in order to build your list, you will have a captive customer base at your fingertips. By recognising the symptoms of procrastination, you will be able to spend more time doing what is necessary for your business to succeed. Avoid the pitfalls from the word go and you will ensure that you do NOT fail!
NEXT ARTICLE #9 >> Why Work for Yourself
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