How Safety First Can Spell The End

I read a post this morning from a marketer that very nicely put into words something that had been rattling around my head for some time.

To paraphrase him, most of us tend to do stupid stuff when we’re scared.

The norm is that we get into online marketing because we are short of a few bob and could do with more income…

…therefore every decision we make tends to be based on fear.

We concentrate on not losing, rather than winning.

We tend to play it safe…

…but playing it too safe we can ironically put our business in jeopardy.

As an example, when I first started out I knew I needed to create a sales funnel and get traffic to it to build my list.

So I built my funnel, with its free front end and its OTO.

All very exciting.

I knew the quickest way to get traffic was to invest in some solo ads to get clicks to my offer.

My fear based thinking was…

What if the funnel is no good?

What if no one subscribes?

What if no one buys my OTO?

So the solution was to find the cheapest solo possible and go for the least amount of clicks possible.

And guess what, the results weren’t great!

Even so I had subscribers and I think I might have even had a low ticket sale…

…but nowhere near enough to cover the cost of the solo.

If this had happened now, it wouldn’t have bothered me too much as I have a certain amount of success behind me.

I would logically do some investigation as to why I got the results, and tweak the funnel to optimise it as best I could…whilst marketing to the subscribers I did get.

Of course back then, it stopped me in my tracks.

No more ‘expensive’ solos for me; I was going to go down the ‘safe’ route of finding free traffic.

Of course the problem with ‘free’ traffic is that if you factor in your time and effort…

…it is BLOODY expensive.

The upshot of me making this decision is that I wasn’t seeing results, therefore wasn’t gaining in confidence and therefore my conservative mind-set just increased…

…a downward spiral that ALMOST drove me away before I started seeing success.

Can you relate to this?

I did stick with it…but many don’t.

So the answer?

Well in my case I just sort of bumbled through out of shear stubbornness.

As the successes came, the confidence increased and so did my ability to thing about winning, rather than not losing.

That’s the way I did it, however I do like the method used by the person writing the original post.

His answer was to put a sum of money in a separate account that he used as an absolute last resort if the sh*t really did hit the fan.

(and apparently the brown smelly stuff did hit on several occasions)

What this did do, is take the pressure off him.

To allow him NOT to come at things from a view point of fear.

With this mind set he was able to build his business until the backup money was no longer required.

(Apparently he used it to take his missus on a nice break to Paris)

The point is, once you stop operating from a position of fear (whatever allows you to do that) success is probably not going to be that far behind.