Three Things You Can Do to Jeopardize Your Chance of Success

There are a lot of offers in way of "steps" or "things" we can do to achieve certain promises, like "5 things you can do to increase your sales", or, "7 Steps to a better sales letter", but doing them doesn't mean we will get rid of our bad habits.

You may be following these steps, however, if you are holding on to "not doing" the things that can lead to achieving success, then you are sabotaging your efforts.

For example, here are three things you can do to "jeopardize" your chance of success:

1) Not taking massive enough action on your ideas.

2) Not putting into action what you read or learn.

3) Not experiencing enough failures.

Let us examine each one of these.

1) Not taking massive enough action on your ideas:

So many advertising campaigns have not been successful because of not having taken massive enough action. Example, you send out 100 flyers and expect to receive results. But in direct marketing, the average response is from.001 to 10%, depending on how popular the product or service you offer is or how great or low the demand. And, believe me I have seen some campaigns bringing in.001% results in certain industry sectors.

That's when you know what people think of a particular product or service. That's why you do tests, to find out what the consumer wants or doesn't want. If you have a service that not many people are interested in, such as anything that requires a lot of work for example, or anything that is not pleasant to do, your expected response will be at the lower end.

On the other hand if you have a product or service that is in great demand, your result will be higher on the scale. And if you have an offer that is irresistible -- like free beer for instance:) -- you'll be at the very high end.

So let's look at the math:

So with a product that has shown to bring in a 10% response, if you want to get 100 responses, you will have to send out 1,000 and not 100 flyers. You see, some people will send out 100 flyers and wait for the response, then send another 100 flyers and wait, etc... While all along, they should send 1,000 at once. And if you want 1,000 response, you will have to send out 10,000 flyers.

In the Internet business, with PPC (Pay-per-click) for instance, it's basically the same thing. Your offerings fall into one of the above categories of percent response (some could be higher than 10% too).

So you have to do your research ahead of time to find out what people are looking for. There's no sense doing a campaign on something that only 0.001% of the market wants - unless of course the sales gain of the product is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit. In other words if you reach a large amount but only 1 responds but the sales is $100,000, well then a 0.001% is ok -- providing it didn't cost you a lot of money to promote it.

Along the same line there's no sense doing a campaign for one or two days. You have to keep it there for one or two weeks in order to see results of your tests.

The same thing applies with working, for a different example. If you start a business and only put in 2 hours a day, you'll get very low results. But if you put in 10 hours a day - you'll get vastly different results. Another example is tinting a gallon of paint. If you only put a drop of blue color pigment into the white base, it won't turn blue, but if you put in the whole tube, it will do what you expect.

That's taking the massive enough action. The point is if you only take trickling actions, you will only get trickling results.

2) Not putting into action what you read or learn:

This one is pretty self-explanatory. If you read a book on how to start a business and you don't put into action the instructions or advice given, well, nothing will happen -- you won't start the business. It's as simple as that. If you read about how to set-up a web site and don't put what you read about into action, you still won't have a web site next week. If you read about improving communication but don't do what it says, you'll still have the same communication problems.

3) Not experiencing enough failures:

This one is simply that you have to make mistakes, you have to fail in order to get the odds required to succeed. If you try something and fail, then try and try again until you succeed, then you'll have a good success rate. Who does not know the failures of many a successful company or individual that kept at it until it got it. I can think of Hershey, Woolworth, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, Thomas Edison, etc., etc., all of them failed in different areas and at different times while achieving successes. The best of athletes, sports figures, golfers fail a lot to be the best at what they do.

In other words we will all fail at many things before we get it right. So the idea is don't be afraid to start something because of the possibility of failure. Success comes out of failures. And it doesn't mean you will fail on a grand scale, you might fail at certain areas of life or business along your journey to success. That's when you make the corrections for the changes that will lead to a better outcome./dmh

Diane M. Hoffmann is president of Hoffmann-Rondeau Communications, which offers ONline and OFFline business services and resources. She is the founder and creator of http://www.build-your-internet-business-now.com and author of several books, e-books and articles, including "Contextual Communication, Organization and Training". Diane has recently shifted her primary focus to helping entrepreneurs start and grow their own Internet business. Copyright(c)2009 Diane M. Hoffmann. You may reprint this article without any changes, making sure to include this bio.