You Don't Have To Be Perfect To Succeed At Marketing Online

by Bonnie Boots

Not a month goes by without my making some sort of screw-up. A while back, I was setting up the affiliate sales section of my shopping cart for a new product and accidentally listed the full purchase price of the product as the amount to be paid to affiliates.

At the end of that month, when I sat down to pay my affiliates, I discovered I had to pay each person that sold that product the full purchase price of each sale. That meant I didn't make a dime on any of those sales for myself.

What did I do? I paid my affiliates the amount entered in error and thanked them for making sales for me.

Then I went into my shopping cart and checked each and every item to make sure I hadn't made other mistakes.

I was pleased to send payments to those good affiliates that made sales for me. But as you can imagine, I was not very pleased with myself. That screw-up cost me a good chunk of change.

But making mistakes is part of business. It's part of life! The challenge is to learn from your mistakes and move on, always striving to do better.

I work with so many coaching clients who've prepared and prepared and prepared to get started on the internet. They've invested untold amounts of money buying books and going to seminars. They've mapped out dozens of ideas for what they'll do and how they'll do it.

But they haven't taken that first step onto the internet and into the real role of "entrepreneur."

What holds them back?

They're waiting until they can do everything perfectly.

Striving for perfection is a noble goal. But waiting until you can do everything perfectly is nothing more than a disguise for feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.

Feelings of insecurity afflict every human being on the face of the planet. No one feels 100% confident and in control 100% of the time. No one, no matter what sort of a mask they wear in public, looks in the mirror, alone at home, and feels perfect.

You'll never get started if you wait to be perfect. You'll never last of you can't make mistakes and roll with them.

The internet changes at the speed of light. While you're busy studying "how to do it perfectly," the way it's done is being transformed and one day all you'll know is how to do perfectly something that is no longer done.

And when you're on the internet, it's a sure bet that you will make mistakes, if for no other reason that that you're trying to handle so many things all at once.

That's the nature of being a small business. You're responsible for everything, both the things you're good at and the things you're not so good at. And in that balance between your strengths and weaknesses, you will make mistakes.

But it's a thousand times better to make mistakes in an active, challenging business than to have a perfect dream rusting away, locked in the attic of your imagination.



About the Author

Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine and the companion The Internet Wizards Blog to teach self-employed people and small businesses owners how to leverage the internet for advertising, marketing and promoting their business. To stay in touch with her, type your name and email into the subscriber box in the left column of this page. You'll be glad you did!

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