Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Avoiding Desperation Mode
Desperation mode can put the final nail in the coffin of a struggling business. It's that time when you realize you're at the end of the line, that if you don't turn things around RIGHT NOW, you're toast.

Maybe it's a self-imposed deadline you've set for yourself. Hopefully it's not that most dreaded of situations, one where you suddenly realize that you won't be able to pay your next bills unless your business jumps up in income overnight.

We like to think that desperation mode will inspire us to succeed. We like to think that when our backs are against the wall, we'll somehow find it in us to come through.

But that almost never works.

Why? Because successful businesses focus on what their customers need. Desperate businesses couldn't see a customer need if it bit them on the nose.

When you're desperate, your attention focuses squarely on that great big disaster breathing down your neck. Hey, it's kind of hard to throw your customers a lifesaver when you yourself are drowning.

You end up basing everything on a single roll of the dice. And usually, those kind of risks have a low chance of succeeding.

So what can we do if we hit desperation time? Take the pressure off yourself. No one says your business has to support you right now. If you need to pick up a second job to make ends meet, do it. Ensure yourself some financial stability.

Then go back and reassess your business from the perspective of your customers' needs. Look for how you can best serve them. Restructure your business accordingly.

It's a paradox. Your business grows best when your desperation to have it grow is least.
Jeff

Tweaking Your Business to Death
Did you know it's possible to tweak your business to death? That happens when you get so fixated on the little things that you lose sight of what you're in business to do.

You're in business to provide a service to your customers that they value enough to pay you handsomely in return.

That's it. It's that simple.

"Ah," but you say, "that doesn't sound simple at all. It means I have to (gasp) figure out what people need and how to provide it for them. Isn't there an easier way to do it?"

That's why we are often so susceptible to details. It's easy to focus on little things, on tweaking the wording of our site, or organizing elaborate plans that we never put into practice, or buying one info product after another to help us find more ways to tweak the details of our business.

Tweaking has its place. Don't get me wrong. Tweaking is essential when you have a solid business going, generating plenty of sales. Tweaking then takes the form of testing to improve your business.

But you never get to that point if all you ever do is tweak. Take what you know and seek to connect with your target market right now. So what if your knowledge isn't absolutely perfect yet? So what if you feel inadequate meet people's needs?

You can do better by putting your imperfect self out there than by waiting for a time when you have attained all knowledge and can proceed with absolute certainty. (Yeah, like that's gonna happen.)

You'll make mistakes. But you'll learn. And what you learn from your experience will benefit you far more than all the book learning you ever do.
Jeff

The Problem With Following the Crowd
One of the big problems with jumping at opportunities instead of plotting your own strategy for success is that everyone else is doing the same thing.

Jump on the bandwagon for the latest, can't-miss way of raising your search engine ranking and everybody else who buys that product is doing the exact same thing. At the same time. In the same way.

When you follow the crowd, it's like trying to run a race by staying at exactly the same speed as everybody else. You need something that gives you an advantage, not something that keeps you the same as everybody else!

Yet we often try to find reassurance smack dab in the middle of the pack. It's safe there. We don't have to worry that we're making the wrong decision, because everyone else is making the same one. If we're wrong, at least we have lots of company!

But that stinks. Do you really want to watch your business fail and be able to say, "At least a lot of other people failed, too"?

Following the crowd guarantees you'll always be near the bottom of the heap when it comes to success. It guarantees that you'll never make a right decision. And even if you did, it wouldn't do any good, because the crowd will make the same one. Only the first guy that made it will get ahead.

Successful businesses don't try to do everything the same as everybody else. They try to stand out from the crowd, not blend in. They seek to find a better way to do things. They seek to be unique.

I'll make you a guarantee. You will make mistakes. Accept that fact, don't try to hide from it. But even when you make a mistake, there's still something positive you can get out of it.

You can learn from those mistakes and use them to make your business more unique and better than the businesses that are stuck in the crowd.

Your biggest competitive advantage is something that most new business owners would never believe. Your biggest competitive advantage is YOU.

That's right, it's YOU. Your unique experience, your unique insights on your niche. There is no one who can duplicate what you bring to your niche. Use it as a strength. Don't try to hide it as a weakness.

That's not to say you should never try to learn more about marketing, more about sales, more about your customers' needs. But your learning should always factor in the YOU factor. Use what you learn to improve what you already are instead of trying to replace the uniqueness you bring to your business.
Jeff

Accomplishing More by Doing Less
Yesterday we saw how easy it is to work frantically on an online business, but accomplish nothing. If that's a problem with you, how can you get your business out of that rut?

You can start out by shutting it down.

I don't mean you should close your business. Just shut down the projects for a bit so you have time to figure out what what in blazes your business does.

You already know what your business does? Maybe not.

If yours is like many underachieving businesses on the Web, it's run on a popup basis. Whatever idea or supposed opportunity pops up, that's what you focus on—until something else newer and more exciting pops up. Then the first popup slides to the background while the new popup gets most of your attention.

I know. I constantly fight against that tendency myself.

It takes courage and self-discipline to say no to the next "can't-miss" opportunity, but it's the only way you can get the perspective you need to figure out where you want your business to go. And if you don't even know where you want to go, chances are good that you ain't never gonna get there.

Shut down your email if that's the only way you can keep yourself from picking up more projects to start. Delete those newsletters before you have a chance to read them if you need to. You don't need more ideas. You don't need more things to do. You need focus.

What did you want your business to be before it started hopping from one thing to another? What parts of it have brought you the most success? What strengths do you bring to your business that your customers can't find elsewhere? What gaps have you discovered in what your competitors offer?

Consider these questions carefully. The answers to them show you where what you have intersects what people want.

And that intersection is right where your business belongs. But we'll get into that more next time.
Jeff

Are You Doing Too Much or Too Little to Succeed?
Ask one hundred business owners whether they think they're doing too much to make their online businesss succeed or too little. You'll probably get a nearly unanimous answer that they must be doing too little.

The reality of why your business isn't living up to expectations, though, might surprise you.

It's not a matter of doing too little. Nor is it a matter of doing too much. The answer is that you're likely doing both!

Now, how can you be doing both too much and too little at the same time? The reason this puzzles us is because we usually look at all work activities the same way and don't judge them on what they accomplish.

Let's say your day went something like this:

You spend an hour checking email. After filtering out the spam, you find most of them either want to sell you something or want you to do something for them. Not a single one puts a dollar in your pocket, but they take an hour to get through.

Among the non-spam emails you read, there are three that tout new, can't-miss marketing products. You read the sales letter for each one (another half-hour) and find one that really grabs you. The product will force you to learn an entirely new marketing technique that you have no experience with.

The sales letter sounds so compelling, though. Why not learn it now? You buy the product, download it, look it over for a half hour or so. It's everything you hoped it would be!

But you've been putting off creating that new set of pages for your website for weeks. You promised yourself you'd do something about it today.

So you set the can't-miss product aside and make a mental note to get back to it as soon as you can. You prepare to create those long-delayed pages.

But just as you're about to start, you figure you'd better check your email before you dig in. Among the new emails is a newsletter you subscribe to. You find some great tips in it on Google AdWords. It reminds you that you haven't checked your AdWords ads for a couple of weeks.

You log in to Google and browse your ads for a half hour. You hadn't realized how poorly they were doing.

You spot a couple of places where the tips you just read could improve them. You consider changing them, but decide it's better to make the changes when you really have the time to do it right instead of doing a quick patch job.

You really need to get those pages up. So you go back to that. But you suddenly remember that...

Sound familiar? If your day at all resembles this one, are you doing too much or too little? Now do you see that the problem is that you're doing both too much and too little?

The day I described is filled with activity. There's no lack of things to do.

But it's a day that is also guilty of doing too little—too little that actually puts money in your pocket.

It's a day spent jumping from one half-completed project to another, interrupted only by starting a few more.

Is it any wonder that a business run this way gets nowhere?

So what's the solution to this management style? Do more by doing less. But I'll get into that next time.
Jeff