Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Do You Have the Mindset to Succeed?
Last night I talked about marketers who are giving away amazing information for free. I warned you not to think that this -- giving stuff away -- was thus the "magic wand" that you can wave for easy millions.

I spoke of these marketers being able to do this successfully because of something they have that most new business owners never find. I'm talking about a success mindset.

Now, all of us go into our first business thinking we'll succeed. At least we go in hoping we'll succeed. But our mindset usually goes no farther than to hope.

You don't go from earning a couple thousand dollars a month as an employee to suddenly earning ten thousand dollars a month simply because you adopted a couple of simple marketing tricks. It takes a whole different way of thinking.

As an employee, I used to put in my scheduled hours and I received a predictable amount of pay in return. It was a simple cause and effect system. My employer assigned me what she wanted done, I did it, and I got paid. Everything was clearcut.

When you're your own boss, nobody tells you what to do and nobody pays you for doing what they assign.

You first have to figure out who your bosses (your customers) are.

Then you have to learn how to figure out what those bosses want.

And, if that isn't enough, you also have to figure out how to communicate with those bosses that you have what they're looking for.

You can't just lean back and pontificate, "I will sell X because I think X is cool and everyone will want to buy all their Xs from me because I am now a business owner!" Yeah, dream on.

That's the equivalent of saying to your boss, "I will do whatever I want and you will take whatever I give you and you will pay me more than you ever did before!" Try that in the business world and see how far it gets you!

No, it takes an entirely different mindset. It takes a mindset that is totally foreign to most of us when we first step out of the ranks of employees and make our first moves toward being self-employed. It takes a mindset that recognizes that the hours we spend will not be automatically rewarded with a predictable paycheck.

Ultimately, it takes a mindset that recognizes that our reward comes not from the number of hours we work. It comes instead from the productivity of those hours in identifying who our customers are, understanding and offering them what they seek, and leading them to recognize the value of what we offer them.

That's a big shift in thinking. But I'll cover more on changing that mindset tomorrow.
Jeff