Internet Marketing Tips7138814

If there are any bowlers reading this article, I have no doubt that many of them will be up in arms over the title. Any bowler worth his salt knows that a spare isn't as good as a strike MOST of the time. Yes, there are those rare instances where either one will suffice given the score.

However, in the world of Internet marketing, a spare is always as good as a strike and I'm going to explain why. Once you understand this, you'll stop setting unrealistic expectations for yourself and begin to accept the reality of life on the Internet.

A strike is perfection. In the bowler's world, it's rolling the ball and knocking down all ten pens with one shot. The reason that's so much better than a spare is because you get not one but TWO bonus balls after that strike to add to your score. With a spare, you only get ONE bonus ball.

In bowling, that makes a big difference, unless it's the last frame of the game. In that case, an extra 10 pins probably won't mean that much unless it's a very close score. And of course a lot of this depends on what you rolled BEFORE the strike.

In Internet marketing, however, there are no bonus balls. You get your shot at something and that's it. You either get a strike or, what we like to call, a home run, or you get a single or you totally strike out and your marketing efforts produced no results. But regardless of how well you did, it's not going to have much impact on what comes next.

For example, you go through this major product launch. You pull out all the stops. You finally reach the day where you launch your product and sales are through the roof. You've told the public that only 1000 units would be sold at $1,997 per unit and sure enough, you sold all 1000. You made a whopping $1,997,000 for your launch.

Congratulations! You hit your home run, or, in bowling lingo, you rolled your strike.

And now it's time to start all over again on the next launch. It doesn't matter what you did before. You still have to go through all the motions and make sure that everything is in place just like the last time. And even if it is, you have to hope and pray that market conditions don't change too drastically for if they do, the next launch, even following all the same steps as the first one, might totally bomb out.

Past performance does NOT guarantee future performance. There are no bonus balls. You don't get a pass the next time around just because you rolled a strike the last time out.

Okay, but you're probably saying to yourself, and me as well, that a spare still isn't as good as a strike, assuming that in our "spare" scenario we only sold 500 units and only made about $1 million.

This is where most marketers are short sighted.

In our strike scenario, we sold out so there was no need to really dig into the numbers to see what, if anything, could have been improved. What do we care if our opt in for the initial buzz was only at 22%? What do we care if our sales page itself only converted at 1%? We sold out. That's all that matters. In raw dollars and cents, we couldn't have done any better.

But, if we only sell 500 units, we're more likely to start digging into the numbers to see where we fell short. Now, all of a sudden, our opt in rate and our conversion rate matter a lot. We're going to see where we can improve our process in order to get both of those numbers up.

As a result, the process itself becomes tighter. By paying more attention to the little details, we can improve our chances of future promotions being more of a success.

In short, in some ways, a spare is actually BETTER than a strike because we tend to learn more from it.

One of the WORST things that ever happened to me was having an incredibly successful first product launch back in 2006. This ended up making me overconfident. I didn't feel the need to look over the sales process to see where it could be improved. As a result, my next product launch was a failure in comparison.

Complacency is a TERRIBLE thing. I personally believe that every Internet marketer should experience failure at least ONCE in his life. Otherwise, he has no way of knowing when something isn't working the way it should. In actuality, sometimes a blown spare or even split, is better than a strike.

Would it have been nice to make more money on that launch right out of the gate? Sure, it would have been. But sometimes short term success kills long term growth. It took me years to learn that. In fact, the truth is, I've had very few failures in my Internet marketing life. And that's not good. It breeds complacency.

And let's be honest. Even at 500 sales for that initial product launch, $1 million is no small chunk of change. If that's a failure, I'll take that in a heartbeat. Yeah, I know, a lot of that money goes to affiliates and of course there will be some refunds, but when the smoke clears, you're still going to be left with about $200,000 at least. I don't know about you but for me, that's a nice day's work.

So do yourself a favor. Sure, shoot for the strikes. But always remember that it's the spares that help move you forward to becoming an even better Internet marketer AND a person. Your observation skills will improve and as a result, so will your business.

And that is always a good thing no matter how you roll it.

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