Failure Is A Learning Curve Part One

By Kevin J Wise

Before I started my internet marketing business I was involved in several other business opportunities many years ago and there were reasons why I didn't see them through to the end. Now these opportunities were genuine and had excellent potential to make me a huge profit!

So what happened and why didn't they work for me? Well I'll tell you what they were all about and why I failed at them.

Back in 1999 I was introduced to a fantastic opportunity to sell website packages to businesses. These were sites that the owners could update themselves and back then this was a relatively new thing.

I would earn £350 for the lowest priced package and could earn up to £850 on the highest priced package. This was an opportunity not to be missed. However, there were other fees that I had to pay.

I had to pay £100 per month for this opportunity but still could be highly profitable as just one sale per month would easily cover this.

What I didn't really think about was how to market this product. The best way would've been to approach businesses, but I was in a full time job and found that this would be very difficult to do.

I have never been involved in sales before either so the thought of walking into a business and trying to sell them something was extremely daunting!

So being naïve I thought that I could just place ads in a magazine and sales would poor in. After placing my ad in a magazine which cost me a small fortune I waited for a response. I waited and waited and guess what... nothing.

My money may as well have been flushed down the toilet! I then took out another ad in a business start up magazine. This gave me some response and a sale. The sale covered the cost of the ad but no profit.

So in the end I didn't want to risk anymore money, I just didn't have the time to visit companies or the confidence to walk into their premises to sell them something and so I decided to give it up.

But then another opportunity rolled up. One which could make me lots of money again and instantly I could see the massive potential.

This was getting businesses to use email marketing promotions which I handled for them. I would give them a box with forms attached which would sit on their counter. Their customers would fill in the form with their name and email and place it in the box if they wanted to receive promotional offers from the company via email.

I would collect the forms and send the emails to their customers with their promotional offer. I got everything I needed to run the business but then it came to selling it again. I realised that I was in the same boat as before... I would need to go out selling!

I just couldn't imagine myself going out and selling and I was not going to spend lots of money on advertising again! So I gave up again without even trying to promote it.

Some time later another business opportunity came my way. This time it was an offline marketing business. How this worked was I would put up boards in pubs, community centres, gyms, libraries etc where many local people go.

These boards were not just plain boards, they had a centre part where local people could put personal ads in it and the businesses would have professional looking ads around the edge.

It was a great idea and this time I was going to go out and sell it. I decided to face my fear and approach companies!

I managed to get my local pub to sign up for a board which was free to them. He gave me a couple of businesses to visit to see if they would like a space on my board. I was feeling great at this point I could actually make some progress.

So, feeling good that things were looking up and I had some referrals from the landlord I decided I'm going to go for it and approach these businesses.

I sat at home rehearsing my sales pitch. After a lot of thinking and anxiety building up I could've easily just stayed home and shut myself in... but... this was it... I gave myself I kick up the rear end and went for it!

I got in my car and rolled up to the first business on my list. It was a bed and breakfast. I sat in my car for a bit thinking about what I was going to say and anxiety started building up again... I could've easily have just turned round and gone home!

Part 2 of this article can be found on Kevin's blog at http://www.yourinternetbusinessadvisor.com

Kevin Wise works with one of the UK's leading internet marketers to help others start and grow their own online businesses by providing quality information and useful products and services.

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