4 Things You’re Probably Doing Wrong and Don’t Even Realize, Part 4

In this fourth and final part, we’ll look at a mistake so serious I am convinced it is the single biggest reason why people fail in their Internet Marketing business (or in life).

Like the other mistakes we talked about, people don’t realize they are doing making it. In fact, they are very sure they aren’t making it and would argue almost violently that they are doing the exact opposite.

What convinces them, and others who see them, that they aren’t making this “biggest mistake” is that it appears on the surface they aren’t making it but when you look more deeply and without blinders, then you can see the truth.

What they, and maybe you, are not doing is…
taking Appropriate Action.

Yep, nothing earth shattering, you’ve probably heard it before.

But, you know what, it is still the biggest mistake people make so we all need to hear it again and again.

While I am not the most successful person in the world I’ve had more than my share of successes.

Looking back on my failures or where success was long in coming I can see that almost always lack of appropriate action was a cause, if not the primary cause, for failure.

Conversely, I look at my successes and I see that every single time I took quick, appropriate, massive action. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

And yet, sometimes, I still make this same stupid mistake.

Let’s look at some of the common ways people make this mistake and how you can stop making them and enjoy greater happiness and success.

How Can You Tell If You’re Doing It

As I said, it can be hard to see you’re not taking appropriate action, particularly when you are down in the trenches working your butt off.

Working Long and Hard

It looks like you taking lots of action and the 16-hour days “prove” the point.

Well, that’s plain wrong.

It is a mistake I used to make frequently and still do now and then if I am not careful.

The cause is the “brainwashing” from childhood I received about how the harder you work the more successful you’ll be.

Listen and remember, working long hours is not the same thing as appropriate action and, most of the time, is one of the reasons for failure.

If you are doing it and wondering why you aren’t successful it’s because it isn’t the right thing to do.

Please don’t misunderstand me, working hard is frequently required in a successful business.

But it isn’t how hard or how long that matters, it is what you do with that time that will define success or failure.

Working hard on things that are not really and truly advancing you forward or aren’t on your critical path to success will get you… well, no forward advancement and no success.

You will get exhaustion, frustration, confusion, feelings of failure and a whole bunch of other things you don’t want. What you won’t get is success.

If working long and hour without real success sounds familiar then you’re not taking appropriate action.

All Talk, No Action

I’m sure you know people who like to talk about what they are going to do, have big plans and “wonderful” ideas.

They also are bitter because they haven’t succeeded. Maybe they frequently complain about other people’s successes when they “had the idea first.”

Truthfully, I’ve done the same thing myself at times.

Also truthfully, I had nobody to blame but myself.

It’s an easy trap to fall into because, us entrepreneurs, we have lots of great ideas but day-to-day life and responsibilities can suck time until there is nothing left; making acting on those ideas seem impossible.

If this sounds familiar then you’re not taking appropriate action.

Not Enough Time in the Day

We’ve all used this excuse but, in really, it is just an excuse.

Everyone has the same number of hours so the problem isn’t the number of hours but how you are using those hours.

Look at how you spend your time.

Are you split testing or agonizing over how to word an e-mail?

Are you creating a Squidoo Lens’ EVERY day, like Matt Bacak’s 10 year old daughter, does before she does her homework or are you watching American Idol?

Are you spending days or weeks creating a Web site instead of just using a template that you can download for free or buy for close to nothing? (Check out http://www.8-8-8Sale.com if you need enough for years worth of projects)

(You might remember that person I told you about who had spent one year building a Web site and still wasn’t done, when she could have had something done in a few days and been out there selling and promoting and building on her success)

Are you spending your time on the 3 Pillars or are you mucking around doing other things? If you’re not focusing then you’re likely not taking appropriate action.

Just do the important stuff, stop worrying about the rest and, as Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer say, do it “good enough” – if you are trying for perfect you’re wasting that precious time and harming your success.

Good enough means different things in different situations but every time you do more than good enough you are just stealing time that could be better used to make you successful.

I tried to help that woman above see that she just needed “good enough” but she was so emotionally tied to her vision of this huge endeavor that she couldn’t separate herself from her dream.

I wasn’t able to get her to see that she could start with good enough and build her dream over time; she just couldn’t see it, it didn’t match with her vision, in fact, to her, it seemed a horrific corruption of her vision.

I found it sad for her and sad for all the people she was planning to help.

If this sounds familiar then you’re not taking appropriate action.

Never Take Any Vacations

This is a big mistake.

In fact, you should take lots of vacations.

You’re probably saying “What?!?!!???! I don’t have the time and money so how is “wasting” time on a vacation going to help?” and probably thinking “This David is full of it!”

Well, fortunately for me, there is a lot of research to support my claim

What I mean is that you need to take breaks during the days, breaks during the week and breaks during the year.

Each of those are for longer periods but each are very helpful to success and to achieving success more quickly.

You need to remember that your mind and your body need recovery time from any activity you do, particularly those you do intensely.

If you don’t take time for recovery you can actually be hurting your progress rather than helping it.

If you’re familiar with weightlifting, or just physical conditioning in general, you know that weightlifters work on different sets of muscles on different days.

The reason they do this is that when they stress one set of muscles, say the arms and shoulders, they’ve literally damaged them (made very small tears in the muscles). The next day they rest those muscles and work on something else, say their legs, to give their bodies time to repair the damage. It is the repair time, or recovery time, that builds the muscle and makes them stronger.

So they get stronger more quickly by using a “work then rest” recovery cycle.

Other athletes and people serious about physical conditioning do the same.

Sure, we aren’t talking about weightlifting or any physical conditioning, but the brain works the same way.

Think about when you are most productive. It’s when you are fresh, maybe after a good night’s sleep, not after you’ve worked 10 hours straight on the same thing and your head is pounding and you can barely think straight.

If you aren’t taking periodic “breaks” in what you do then you aren’t taking appropriate action.

How to Start Being a Success

The first thing, like lots of problems, it to be honest with yourself and admit you have a problem.

And, if you aren’t on the success path you want to be then you probably do have one of these problems.

Be brutally honest with yourself and find where your problems are because they can be changed and you can be more successful.

Are you guaranteed success if you stop your bad habits?

Certainly not.

But I can guarantee failure if you don’t do anything to change.

Working Long and Hard

The important thing to do if this is your problem is to stop.

Well, duh!

But what you need to stop doing is working on things that aren’t on the “critical path” because the critical path is the only real appropriate action.

Before you start a project of activity look at it and write down what things you MUST have and what things are nice to have and may help but if you didn’t have them you could still accomplish your goal.

Be honest and be ruthless; cut it down to the bare minimum.

Critical path means those items that are absolutely essential; anything else is just things that will slow you down.

After you’ve done that, have somebody look at it and have you justify every step to make sure it is critical and remove those that you can properly justify.

This is harder than it sounds like but can really make a difference in the level of success, the quickness of success, and many times, is the difference between success and failure.

If anything you are doing isn’t advancing you even a small step towards your goal then it probably isn’t on the critical path.

A side benefit is that you’ll work less hours while achieving more success (which is probably part of you definition of success in the first place

All Talk, No Action

This is a tricky one and a hard one to overcome.

You probably have LOTS of ideas and want to act on them; I know I do.

You can’t do that because there isn’t enough time and money and it can be frustrating.

And, a big danger is you’ll start a lot of different projects but accomplish nothing.

You need to strong and pick an idea that seems to be very promising and something you want to do and then focus all your action on it.

You must act, even if it means sacrifice elsewhere; you will never achieve anything without doing.

Don’t get sidetracked on other ideas or other projects, stay focused.

Let me give you a personal example.

Back in late July of 2008 I had this idea of doing an August 8, 2008 or 8-8-8 sale.

I thought it was a good idea but seemed a daunting task to find, acquire or create 64 quality products in 8 different categories and have them ready with the entire sales process (lists, payment processor, sales pages, e-mails, other Web pages, etc.) all ready in less than 2 weeks.

It was the equivalent of getting ready to do 8 separate sales of 8 products each in just 12 days (without knowing what products we were selling); after having done it I can tell you it is not for the faint hearted but…

My partner, my assistant and I stopped doing everything else we were doing and focused on this one project and took massive action.

As you probably know, we succeeded.

It was a long, hard 12 days but we got it all ready with very few problems and made thousands of dollars and added hundreds of people to our lists. We also made some great affiliate connections that have be lucrative to us since then.

Did I have other ideas and demands during that 12 days?

Sure, but instead of just having ideas and not acting on it, I took laser focused, massive action on the one idea and reaped the rewards.

Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably lamenting the lost ideas.

The two solutions I use are:

1. Remembering that 100 ideas with no action and no success is less gratifying than 1 success and 99 lost ideas
2. Get a business journal, even something as simple as a small spiral notebook, and write down those ideas as you get them. Later you can always go back and see if you want to do any of them. Sometimes you might find an idea you had years ago that was good then but great now!

Not Enough Time in the Day

Really this is just a time management problem, which is really just a personal management problem.

Steven Covey says “time management is a misnomer the challenge is managing ourselves”

The advantage I find in thinking of it this way is that if I think of managing time it feels like it is an external thing I need to deal with and try to control.

But if I think of it as managing myself then I can take full responsibility and controlling myself is something “easier” than controlling external forces.

So what to do. There are 2 key things you can do to give you more hours in a day.

Start by keeping a detailed list of what you do for a week, everything.

Sit down and look at it and you’ll be surprised at some of the things you are doing that sucks away your time.

Then take control of yourself and cut out the fat and replace it with appropriate action.

The second thing you can do to give yourself additional hours is to develop business processes and systems.

When I say business processes, I mean the various systems and steps to run an efficient business.

If you have any familiarity with manufacturing and assembly lines you’ll know that they have numerous, detailed process (much of it automated today) and a manufacturing plant fails or succeeds on the quality of their processes.

You need to be creating detailed processes in all parts of your business. You’ll do the work faster, you’ll have fewer (time sucking) mistakes and it’ll be easier to outsource parts of your business that would add even more hours to your day.

Part of what why I was able to successfully complete the entire 8-8-8 in 12 days is because I had defined processes that are proven to work and I followed them.

If you don’t know what business processes are think of it as steps needed to reach some goal and the order those steps need to be in.

Here is a very high level process diagram/flow chart of an 8-8-8 Sale process.

Now for each of those steps I have additional sub-process documents spelling out, in great detail, how to accomplish what’s needed.

For example, I have a multi-page process document on how to take a Web page template, sales copy, product information, payment link and other things and come up with a sales page.

I literally have hundreds of process documents that tell me, my partner, my assistant and anyone else I outsource to, how to do exactly what I want for a particular process or sub-process.

This saves time, produces better quality products, minimizes mistakes (and the time and agony of correcting them either before or after it becomes a problem) and lets me get help when I need it without the time it takes for training and learning; they just follow the step by step process.

Let me show you a part of a sub-process document titled “Installing Word Press”.

They do take a bit of work to create but they save lots more time later so it is definitely worth it.

And they aren’t that difficult to create, just write down the steps as you do them or use a program like Camtasia or CamStudio to capture the steps you are doing into a video. Keep the video and, if you wish, have them transcribed into a process document.

Never Take Any Vacations

The point of taking breaks is to allow that recovery time.

So breaks aren’t necessarily non-business related but they need to be completely different.

Just write down the tasks you need to do each day and separate them into different groups then put them together into a schedule where you alternate different types of things.

Don’t forget to put in some personal time also but all the “breaks” don’t need to be “goofing off” breaks.

An important thing to remember though is when you are in a particular task you need to focus completely on that task so if you are, say, writing a blog post then don’t answer the telephone, don’t check e-mail and don’t take the dog for a walk.

Put all those things in the schedule but don’t mix them up or you will be wasting time and not taking appropriate action.

Here is a part of my schedule to give you and idea of what I mean:

1. 8:30-10:00 – Priority Time (do the MOST important thing of the day)
2. 10:00-11:30 – Meetings (with JV partners, assistants, etc.) and miscellaneous
3. 11:30-1:00 – Priority Time (finish the MOST important thing or do the 2nd most important thing)
4. 1:00-2:30 – Have lunch, answer e-mail, return telephone calls, do “office work”, etc.
5. 2:30-4:00 – Exercise
6. Other things I do during the day are: some more work; some training; some e-mail; some planning; etc. all in alternating blocks of time.

Notice how I have intense alone time to do the thing that will most advance my business; this may be traffic generation, copywriting, idea research or whatever but it is the one thing, on the critical path, I MUST do each day to get me closer to one of my important goals.

Then I do something completely different, I talk to people, make deals, assign tasks, discuss project status, etc.; all very different than what I was doing before to allow the part of my brain that was being stressed to recover and refresh.

Then I go back, with a refreshed brain, to my intense and important tasks, which are usually done alone with no distractions. It also lets me recover from the calls and the other things.

Then I answer my e-mail, do “office” stuff, have lunch, etc. all things very different from the last block of time.

Then I do something completely different by exercising to really refresh and recover from the 6 hours of work.

What this lets me do is be fresher throughout the day so my productivity and quality is higher and I get more done in the same amount of time.

I will admit, it sounded wrong to me before I first tried it but it really did make a big difference in what I can do and how I feel while doing it – more work done and happier, hard to beat that

Now I am using the work I have and my schedule to make sure I take more of the appropriate action and improve my success.

You should do that too.

Conclusion

The underlying theme of this unrealized mistake is not taking the appropriate action.

We looked at making sure the work we are doing is actual moving forward to our goals, that is, that the time we’re spending and the time we’re having our help spending is on the “critical path” and not just wasting a lot of hours on needless things or on “nice to have” but not critical things.

The appropriate action to success here is to focus on the important stuff even if nothing else gets done.

Second we looked at the problem of having ideas but not taking action to implement them.

I think it goes without saying that the appropriate action to success in this case is to actually act; good ideas, like information, are worthless if you don’t do anything with them.

We then looked at the problem of having too few hours in the day.

We looked at some ways to get more hours in your day by “time management” or more properly “managing ourselves”, and by using processes to streamline your business getting things done more quickly and saving more time by making fewer mistakes.

The appropriate action here is to make sure you and your assistants are managing themselves (and their time) properly and are following well-defined, proven processes.

Finally, we looked at the mistake of never taking vacations.

By vacations I meant even just taking a break to take a walk in the park after a long writing session.

Take small “vacations” of an hour throughout the day to do something different, take longer ones of a day or a weekend every week to refresh yourself and take longer ones every month or quarter to “reset” and rejuvenate.

Doing that will make the time you do work much more productive and you’ll find you are actually accomplishing more by working less.

So the appropriate action is to structure your day and your life so you are alternating what you do throughout the day so you don’t get burnt out doing any one thing and that you stay fresh.

That’s it for the unrealized mistakes, if you do even one of them you’ll see improvement in your income and you happiness and when you start doing all of then, well… watch out!

I’d love to know what you think so add a comments below and get a free back link to one of your Web properties.

Talk soon,

David
The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com

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