10 reasons why you will never be successful online (or the losers guide to overcoming adversity)
[thrive_text_block color=”orange” headline=”Introduction“] [/thrive_text_block]
Alright I am going to get mean with you for a minute. I’m talking “10 reasons why you will FAIL at being successful online” mean.
You want to know if you can make this online thing happen? You want to know if it’s possible for you to be successful online in business? Sure you’ve seen other people have success with online business but what about you specifically? Do you have what it takes? I have 10 reasons why you won’t succeed in your quest to make money online.
If you’re smarter than the average bear then maybe you can use this negativity to win…
[thrive_text_block color=”blue” headline=”What you will Learn:“]
- The 10 obstacles that you must overcome to insure success for your online business
- The first thing that will inevitably destroy your goals if you let it
- The one challenge that EVERY business faces and how to overcome it
- How to overcome something that you have been groomed to do since you were born that has conditioned you to fail
- And a bunch of other stuff that you are just going to have to read to figure out!
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1. You don’t pick a path
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One of the biggest problems people have is picking an initial “thing” to do. They know they want to do something online, create some kind of passive income, or an easier life for themselves. They want that laptop lifestyle.
But what is it exactly they want?
I mean, besides the freedom and money…what is it they want to pursue?
There are a lot of ways to make money online and generally the first thing that paralyzes people is picking a proven path and letting everything else fall away.
It’s easy to find yourself in a situation where you are indecisive because when you first get started you don’t know what you are doing and that gives way to a lack of confidence. That gives way to listening to a lot of confident people telling you what works, and they are all different. That gives way to confusion. And that give s way to you being paralyzed before you even get to the starting line.
You’re not even in the race yet.
At the end of the day though, you’re going to have to cowboy up and make a decision. Nobody can do it for you and they shouldn’t have to. You’re a grown man who is trying to be a boss.
First rule of being the boss: Be decisive in what you are doing. If you see the science and you have a strategy. Execute.

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2. You don’t commit to that path like your life depends on it
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Stop me if you have heard this before:
A guy tells me he is going to be really successful online and quit his job.
He says, “I’m going to do Kindle ebooks” and then he proceeds to lay out this elaborate plan for it. I see some problems with his plan but I know that every single plan I have ever executed had problems, so whatever.
He will figure it out as he goes and I tell him, “rock and roll, good luck bro!”
It never fails though, a few weeks later he hits me up on facebook, asking me about affiliate marketing, or blogging, or youtube.
My question is always the same every time this happens, “I thought you were doing Kindle eBooks…what happened?”
Then he proceeds to tell me, “I don’t know man, I’m thinking this affiliate stuff might be a better situation for me. I think the Kindle thing might take too long and plus I don’t have money to hire writers and blah blah blah…”
Same old story.
The fact is most of the things I have seen online work.
It takes practice to become a master of your craft though and it takes work to get there. You never truly get anywhere if you do not commit to just one thing and focus on becoming the master of it.

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3. You won’t change your mindset
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It is my belief that most people have been groomed by the public school system to take their parents jobs.
When I was a kid I grew up thinking if I wanted money I needed to get a job. If I wanted MORE money I need to work more hours or pick up a second job. That’s the life of a lower class kid in the USA.
I wasn’t raised to think if I want money, create a job. If I want MORE money then figure out how to make the job I created make more money…essentially…get better at it.
The school system didn’t teach me how to save money or invest money. It didn’t teach me how to start a business. It didn’t teach me about adjusting for problems or benchmarking.
I had to make the decision to change my mindset from that of a poor American employee to that of a man who truly believes that his destiny is in his own hands.
If anything I do succeeds, it’s not because I won the lottery or got lucky or picked the right course. It’s because I made it happen through sheer force of will and determination.
That is the truth you need to accept to succeed. It is not easy to change your mindset and the way you think is not necessarily your fault. None of that matters though.
You must change it to win.

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4. You don’t publish consistently
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You can’t show up to work whenever you want. If you did that you would get fired. Instead, you show up everyday ready to rock, on time and with a positive attitude. This earns the respect of your coworkers.
Whether you are publishing a blog, doing a youtube channel, or anything else, it’s the same.
You don’t need to do it every single day necessarily but you do need to be consistent in your attack. You need to decide how often you are going to publish content and then you need to make that happen ON TIME like it’s your job.
If you said you were going to publish a new blog article once a week, then you need to make that happen like your life depends on it.
You can get a lot wrong online and consistent publishing will make up for it. Probably more powerful than most things you can do to help yourself online, publishing consistently on a blog, youtube channel or another platform builds authority, trust and builds an audience for your brand. A lot of dumb mistakes can be forgiven if you publish consistently.

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5. You don’t have a solid monetization strategy
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You don’t start this game vague. If your monetization strategy is, “I am going to do reviews on my blog and monetize with affiliate marketing,” then it’s too vague.
If you wanted to win at it you should have said, “I am going to plan out 20 articles in concept before I even start this damn blog. I am going to affiliate with products A, B, C, and D in those articles.”
Then you go over there and get yourself approved to promote those products.
That’s strategy 1.
Now you need a secondary because just one monetization strategy is not really enough. So you have an opt-in with a lead magnet. Now when people opt-in they will be taken through your sales funnel before they get the free lead magnet.
That’s strategy 2
Now when you publish a new article on your blog you will engage your list and let them know about it so that’s, re-engage strategy 1.
You’re going to do a youtube channel to support your blog and drive traffic to it. Those videos will be collecting google ad sense.
That’s strategy 3
What’s you have all this rolling and things are good and your comfortable, start a membership site on the back of your sales funnel.
That’s strategy 4.
My point…you will fail if you are not specific about what you are going to do.

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6. You are easily swayed by the next great thing
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Once you commit to something it’s exciting because you are on a path and your focused and you’re doing great. But then things happen. Maybe you didn’t make money as fast as you liked or maybe the path you are on is not what you thought it was going to be.
Whatever it is, you lose your momentum. Momentum is a fickle mistress. She comes and she goes. She will be back when you start making money or fix the problem.
So in this period it is important to buckle down and focus on problem solving within your business. However, because you have lost your momentum and your less confident about things, it’s easy to think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
You start looking at the next thing in your inbox. Now you have to realize the people in your inbox are very good at what they do. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be there. It’s their job to show you the positives of every cool thing that comes down the road.
…but you are married man. You have committed to a path and you need to see that through. If you cannot adopt this mentality you will fail.

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7. You don’t take relentless action
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You have a lot of great ideas. You have bought a lot of courses and get through half of them, many times you even feel like you are doing something…
…but you’re not.
You’re not doing anything until you actually get productive. Education mode is great but it’s different than production mode.
It’s very easy to get distracted with a thousand mindless tasks online that do not really further your goals. It’s up to you to pick the 3 to 5 main productive things that you want to get done today that will move you towards your goals as quickly as possible.
Ideas are worthless without relentless action and execution. Everybody has an idea.
If you cannot take relentless action you will fail.

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8. You don’t adjust for problems
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I don’t care what you decide to do to make money online, whether it’s releasing digital products or selling physical wholesale goods through Amazon FBA, you are going to experience problems…probably from day 1. You will constantly be tested and faced with challenges. Getting your business to start making money is just the beginning.
When you face them you have to adjust what you are doing. That means being a little flexible with your strategy and game plan.
When I first started my membership site it wasn’t a membership site at all it was a free site and I monetized it with google ad sense. Guess what…I wasn’t getting enough traffic to make that work out. I had a choice; get more traffic OR reposition my product to better maximize the traffic I had. I chose to reposition. I turned my free site into a membership site. It was very profitable.
Bottom line, recognize your problem areas quickly and adjust for them.
If you don’t do this you will fail.

[thrive_text_block color=”orange” headline=”9. You don’t learn from your failures
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Everybody fails when they start trying to do things. It’s important to ask the question, “Why did that not work?”
Doing this will help you get valuable data from your failures and help you strategize your future moves. My youtube channel is called zerofatzreturns because the first one was called zerofatz and it got shut down. It was devastating to me at the time. I was sick to my stomach over it.
However, I asked that ever important question, “why did that happen?” The truth was I didn’t know. SO what did I decide?
I am going to rebuild it. This time I will back up all of my videos to protect against future loss. I will pay closer attention to youtube terms of service agreement. I will look for alternative sources to drive traffic to my website as well.
So I took the loss and I developed new strategies around it. In short I got better by learning from my failures.
If you are not doing this then you are destined to repeat the same mistakes and you will fail.

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10. You don’t set benchmarks to judge your progress
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I like to set benchmarks for any new venture that I am going to do. I do this because I can judge where I am at, what I am capable of, and how far I have to go to be where I want to be.
For example, if I were to start a youtube channel tomorrow, I would have the following benchmarks:
- 1,000 subscribers within 2 months
- Affiliate sales within 30 days
- At least 1 to 2 comments a day on my channel within 30 days
- 20 tightly wrapped videos on channel within 2 months (10 to start and then 10 more dripped)
In truth I would probably have a few more for things like networking and reach but I am not going to bore you with the idea of benchmarks, I just want you to know they matter.
SO look at my benchmarks. At the end of 1 month I am going to know if I have hit some of those benchmarks. What if I am not getting enough comments? Well I know I need to do a better job on my videos of asking my viewers to comment, or engaging them in some way.
What if I have NO affiliate commissions within 30 days? Something is wrong. Either I am not promoting the product in the right way or the sales page is messed up…something is wrong. I have to make a decision whether I want to switch products or change my approach.
If you are not setting benchmarks for yourself, you are flying blind and your probably going to hit a freaking mountain in a thunderstorm. IN other words, you’re probably going to fail and you won’t even know why.
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In Summary…
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I don’t give you much of a chance to be successful online. You’re a supreme underdog. More of an underdog than you probably even realize. Here are my main reasons why:
- You don’t pick a path
- You don’t commit to that path like your life depends on it
- You won’t change your mindset
- You don’t publish consistently
- You don’t have a solid monetization strategy
- You are easily swayed by the next great thing
- You don’t take relentless action
- You don’t adjust for problems
- You don’t learn from your failures
- You don’t set benchmarks to judge your progress
[thrive_text_block color=”orange” headline=”Conclusion“] [/thrive_text_block]
First off, I want to hear from you guys! Did this article make you mad? How does it feel to know that people doubt you? In truth I want you to succeed but the things I said were true.
The world doesn’t care if you succeed or fail. The rich don’t need you at the top with them. It is quite true that you are more of an underdog than you realize. Just go check out the Great Gatsby Curve.
If you’re pissed…good. Hold onto that fire and prove me wrong man. To be docile and still is to be broke and uninspired.
That’s all I got.
My name’s Kam, some people call me ZeroFatz, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Kam
This would make a great e-book. I made it into one for me to follow. Sending a copy to you… check your e-mail. Thanks for your help and keep the articles coming.
alright cool thanks Dick. Appreciate the feedback man!
Thanks so much for this. This is so me! Especially the next best thing and benchmarks. need to print this out and follow it to finally get off my are and start doing seriously! I will let you know how it goes.
Hey thanks Ann! Appreciate you checking it out!
Great post! I have suffered from all of these at one time or another. I could still improve. The most important skill, in my opinion, is to never quit. I am so glad that I never gave up. I had my YouTube channel shut down once. I can understand how devastating that can be. I am glad you were able to recover. Thanks for the tips and Best Wishes!
Hey thanks Barbara! 150% agree about never quitting. Awesome feedback!