Million Dollar Portfolio

Starting a blog is easy isn’t it? I mean, you register a domain based on a topic or keyword on the subject you are going to blog about, install your favorite blogging platform and off you go right?

Within a very short period of time you are blogging. Traffic is flooding to your site and you are making money hand over fist…or are you? If this doesn’t sound like you or your blog, you aren’t alone.

John Chow has an article today about the importance of following up with affiliate programs and actually implementing the code you were so eager about monetizing with in the first place. The problem he notes, is a large percentage of bloggers “…stop updating it after a week because they’re not seeing the expected results. They did the follow up, but they didn’t follow through.”

This is true not only with blogging but in many businesses online or off.

It has to do with comfort. We tend not to want to leave our comfort zone. You know, that zone where as long as you don’t put forth much effort and actually talk to people you don’t know about whatever it is you are marketing or selling, you don’t have to worry about failing. After all, what if the guy says “no!”. I mean, can I face that kind of rejection?

The fact is yes, you can and you must. I just finished reading a book called The Millionaire Mentor: A Simple Way to Get Ahead in Your Work and in Life by Greg S. Reed. The story is about a young man learning how to be good in sales and how to cope with rejection without getting discouraged. The lessons learned allow the young man to become very successful and eventually the vice president of the company he works for.

Ideally, we all would love to become rich without really doing anything but it just doesn’t work that way. Whether you are in multi level marketing or blogging or the president of a world-wide bank, at some point you are going to have to make tough decisions and get out of your own way so that you can succeed.

What do I mean by getting out of your own way? You see, we have the amazing ability as human beings to rationalize every decision, good or bad, that we make. You can talk yourself into or out of any situation you encounter. Sometimes it means the difference between success and failure. Ultimately you should learn from your failures so that in the future you can recognize that situation once again and hopefully make the right decision that will lead to your eventual success.

So yes, many of the problems we experience as bloggers are because we don’t follow through, but more often than not it’s fear of success that keeps us from actually succeeding. I know you are saying to yourself, “I am not afraid of success”. While that may be true, you may just not recognize it. When we talk about making money online, it’s not as simple as putting up a blog and ads and the money comes rolling in. You have to do the work to reap the reward and that means networking, advertising yourself and getting out of that comfort zone so that you can be successful. It’s easier online than off line because we don’t have to look people in the eye and talk to them face to face but this part of networking shouldn’t be ignored either. Word of mouth is the best marketing you can get because it’s free and trustworthy.

Thursday night my wife invited me to a barbecue one of the mothers in a group she attends weekly was putting on. Now I knew nobody there and hadn’t met any of the mothers or the dads or even the babies my wife knows so well. Did that keep me from having a good time and mingling? Of course not. The first thing I did was introduce myself and ask the host and hostess if there was anything I could help with. Not only was this an immediate icebreaker but it also got me out of that comfort zone and talking to strangers without hesitation.

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