1) Trying to learn too much too fast, without applying what you learn.
It is easy to spend time reading and studying online, learning everything you can about internet marketing, and overloading your mind. When you begin to market, you are overwhelmed with the choices. Correction: Purchase one (1) book geared towards beginners and do everything it says to do, no matter how much sense it doesn’t make. Don’t cut any corners or leave anything out because it doesn’t seem logical. Just follow the steps, and once you have done that, you will have two things: 1) A internet foundation on which to build and 2) A basic understanding of how the internet works, from first hand knowledge.
2) Failing to simply get started with marketing.
When you first begin a task, for example, list building, you do not know exactly how to do it. And unless you learn the exact steps from someone who has done it, you will not know exactly what to do until you begin. Don’t know where to begin? Just start somewhere, in the middle, wherever. Once you have one piece of the pie, so to speak, you can build from there. But if you have nothing and start nothing, you will never have an online business.
3) Refusal to purchase products.
Some of you probably quit reading right then. That’s OK, they aren’t serious anyhow. And no, I’m not selling anything. You can always send me a donation via paypal (Just kidding!). Do you want to spend 1000 hours figuring it out or would you rather spend $100 and read it in a few hours? That should be a no brainer. Buy the manual. Worried it isn’t worth the PDF its uploaded into? Make sure there is a guarantee. By the way, don’t ask for a refund if you haven’t tried out the program and found it doesn’t work. Don’t just look at it and think it is too complicated, and decide you don’t want to market. Guess what? It is complicated. If it were easy, everybody would be working full time online. But its not. A few people get rich. The rest complain that it is too complicated. Go figure.
4) Refusal to buy tools and resources.
You may think that free traffic is free. But it is not. If it takes you 40 hours a week to generate 400 visitors to your site, you are wasting your time. Spend $100 a week and save yourself the time. If you are dead broke and cannot afford to buy traffic or advertise to get it, you must commit to reinvesting every penny you make back into advertising. So when you get 400 visitors from hard work and you make $100, invest that in next week’s traffic. Until you are making your monthly goal online, you cannot take money out, you must reinvest it.
5) Failing to trust.
This one probably gets me some flack. But that’s OK. I asked my list a few days ago what their biggest problems in internet marketing are. Some of my top responses were not knowing where to start and, get this, not knowing who to trust. My advice is this. Do everything in groups of 5. Buy 5 sources of traffic. Subscribe to 5 newsletters. Buy 5 manuals. The 1 or maybe 2 that are worthless you will figure out in a hurry. But you will know what traffic is good, which newsletters to promote, and where to buy the next manual. If you do nothing and are locked up in fear, you might as well just get offline. You see, the internet IS a scary place because you cannot shake hands as you do offline—but that is why it rewards those richly who take risks and win those risks. And you will lose a few. Remember, the most successful people in the world fail far more than the least successful. It is because they are willing to fail that they succeed.
6) Failure to track everything they do. If you do not track, you will never know what works. Everybody says their traffic is good, their list builder is the best, their web page is the best, their headline works the best. But if you do not test, you do not know. And if you do not know, you will surely fail. You will fail if you do not track. How to do it? Buy an adtracker. Or create multiple coded web pages. Or set up multiple auto responders in your auto responder account. But do something. Tracking is the difference between breaking even or losing money and making money.
By the way, do you want to add a coaching program to your business? If so, download my brand new free training here: coaching program training
Sean Mize is the author of Anyone Can Coach, the definitive guide to starting your own coaching program fast.