The Turning Point: When You Start to Become Successful

A while back I wrote a post about staying motivated when you seem to be failing.

That was an important post for me personally because I had gone through the roller coaster of emotions that we all do when starting out on a new venture, and I’d nearly walked away from it.

Thankfully I didn’t. But that close brush with becoming one of the 95% of Internet business start-ups that fail made me consider how I could offer support to others in the same position.

In other posts I’ve made suggestions on how to deal with the negative effects of over-hyped claims, and steps to make sure your business is properly set up.

Today I’m going to focus on a couple of things that I’ve personally done that are starting to get me some traction. This is not to say that I’m hugely successful. I’m not. Yet. But things are beginning to go my way.

These are things that, in addition to the content of my other posts, I hope will provide some support to people who are in the down period – when you’ve discovered that you don’t just put up a site and make millions.

Here we go:

Listen to your gut feel.

One of the things that attracted me to the business I joined was the promise of a pre-written email sequence to follow up with my opt-ins. In order to understand what people who opted in to my site were experiencing I opted in to my own site. And I was thoroughly dismayed.

The emails that came out were the epitome of ‘interruption marketing’ (hat tip to Seth Godin). They were full of SCREAMING and orders to DO THIS RIGHT NOW.

Most people who received those emails didn’t much like them, so they hit the ‘Spam’ button pretty regularly. As a result, the delivery rate, which was low a year ago, became so low that by this year it was zero. And the pre-written emails were scrapped.

Luckily (and much to the disapproval of my sponsor at the time) I set up my own lead capture page, edited and wrote my own follow up emails, set up my own Aweber account and kept my optins well away from the ‘official’ email sequence. And my delivery rate has been consistently over 98%.

This is not intended as a brag. My point is this: there was a lot of pressure for me to use the company system, and that would have been the easy option. But I was very uncomfortable at the thought of emails like that going out in my name, and using my email address as the reply to address. So I did my own thing, as much to protect my reputation as anything.

It’s not easy to do your own thing when you’re new in a business and your sponsor is encouraging you in the direction of the company system.

But, when your gut feel tells you otherwise, you should listen very carefully. And, as long as you’re not breaking the terms of your affiliate agreement, following your gut feel is usually not going to take you too far wrong.

Use your own personal experiences (and what you’ve learnt) for the benefit of others.

When I first set up this blog I thought that it had to be a marketing channel for my business. I was still finding my feet in the business and most of the benefits that I wrote about were simply re-stated from the company conference calls, emails and website. (If you check back on some of my posts from early last year you’ll see what I mean)

Nothing I wrote at that time described my own experience. And when I read those early posts now I am, frankly, embarrassed.

Some months back I slowly came to realise that this blog could be turned into a resource for other people who were dealing with the same struggles that I was. Including people in my down-line.

So I stopped writing about my businesses and started writing about my own personal experiences. The difficulties and successes I’d had and how I’d dealt with them.

Since then, my readership has gone up steadily and I actually enjoy writing my weekly post now, whereas before it was one of those tasks that loomed over me.

If you write about your own personal experiences it’s much easier to draw people into your circle because, strange as it may seem, people can ‘hear’ that what you’re writing is real.

And once you begin to build a relationship with people it’s seriously easier to persuade them to buy whatever it is you’re selling! (Seth Godin again: Permission Marketing)

So, two things that have helped to get things going my way: listening to my gut feel and using my experiences to offer support to others.

What about you..? What were some of the things that you did that started to move things your way? Leave a comment to let us know what the turning point was in your IM business.

Other Articles You Might Like:

1. Online Businesses You Can Start and Ways to Promote Them
2. How to Stay Motivated When You Seem to be Failing.
3. 5 Ways to Turn Recessions into Opportunities
4. Making Money Part 2
5. Are You Ready For This?

Tagged as: How to Create Success, make money from home