I don’t care how long you’ve been in the game, there are times when all of your online marketing tips fail, you get stuck in a rut, and you feel like you’re just banging your head against a wall. These times impact your mood, your income, and sometimes your relationships, as you strive to improve the outlook to no avail. One thing the internet marketing gurus say again and again is that the single most important quality you can have for online business success is persistence, even tenacity.
This is the ability to continue banging your head against the wall, even in the worst of times – even when it hurts the most – secure in your faith that something’s gonna have to give, and it damn well isn’t gonna be you. This tenacity and the judicious application of online marketing tips will eventually result in you punching through the wall and again making forward progress with your endeavors, but whether it takes days, weeks, or months is pretty tough to know. One way that you can accelerate the process is through the use of mastermind groups – groups of peers and other entrepreneurs, all taking on the world with their own experiences and perspectives, each offering a different bag of online marketing tips. Here’s how a mastermind group can help you:
New Perspectives: Sometimes all you need to do in order to get out of a rut is gain a new perspective on the problem. We often get so wrapped up in the issues surrounding our businesses and the online marketing tips that have worked well in the past that we lose sight of the big picture. The folks in your mastermind group will have no emotional baggage, no institutional memory, and no attachments to the way you’ve always approached your work. This being the case, they may be able to cast a stark light on your processes and procedures, and point out where things can be adjusted or even eliminated in order to produce more revenue for less effort. I find that this kind of insight from my peers can be a double-edged sword – the online marketing tips provided by the group almost always helps my business to take a little leap forward right away, but it also forces me to let go of some of the things that I built into the business for my own comfort and enjoyment. In the end, though, it’s always worth it.
Criticism: I love my mastermind group because they yell at me when I’m being dumb. I was recently preparing to launch a pay-per-click ad campaign in a very hot market with lots of competition. I’d put a lot of time and effort into the backend of the business, and felt that the immediate influx of traffic was absolutely critical to making good use of it. When I proudly announced my intentions to “go live,” through the use of PPC, my mastermind group, they attacked me – and pretty viciously. Though I didn’t want to hear it at the time, they pointed out that my motivations for the PPC campaign was personal – I was proud of my site, and I wanted very badly to see folks using it quickly. I was proposing a potentially VERY expensive campaign before I’d seen how well the site would convert and before running even a single small-scale test. They were right, of course. Listening to my mastermind group cost me some pride, but saved me a lot of money. They gave me excellent online marketing tips that kept me from making a costly mistake. The site did need to be tightened up a bit.
Competition: There’s no need to delve into this one too deeply, except to say that when we see one of our peers succeeding, it’s human nature to want to catch up. Watching the successes and failures of my group member has done more to teach and motivate me than a hundred hours of reading online marketing tips or forum posts. My group is personal – we know each other and we hold each other accountable. We also try to outperform one another every day of the week.
A mastermind group can be a valuable way to keep you moving forward, and to help you avoid costly and time consuming mistakes. Such a group will freely share online marketing tips that you rarely see elsewhere. If you don’t have a mastermind group already, I recommend you get one. One place to find like-minded people is in the Internet Marketing Money Club.
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