Associate Programs Newsletter #346

Confession time. I reckon this is one of the worst decisions I ever made online.

Who knows? Maybe you can learn from it.

CONTENTS:

1. One of the dumbest things I ever did
2. Ah, but what CAUSED the failure?
3. Thought for today: Quitting

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1. One of the dumbest things I ever did
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I'm going to tell you about one of the dumbest things I ever did online.

Way back 10 years ago, I did research, tracked down and interviewed website owners and wrote an ebook called "Internet Success Stories - 15 winners reveal their secrets".

Ho hum, you may be thinking. So what?

Well, back in 1997 an ebook about Internet success stories was a rather rare product. Writing the book wasn't the dumb thing I did. That came later.

The book included chapters on Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Matt Drudge, eBay, and some lesser known characters.

I wrote half the book on Notepad and the second half on TextPad. I'd never heard of Adobe Acrobat or PDF files. Yep, I still had a lot to learn.

I'd talked my local bank into giving me a merchant account. I used to take credit card orders by email or fax, process them manually with a zip-zap machine, and then email the ebook, zipped in two sections, to the buyer. ClickBank didn't exist in those days.

My home office was near my bedroom and sometimes an order arriving on the fax machine would wake me in the middle of the night.

After about a year, the book was in urgent need of updating. However, by then, as well as still having a part-time job, I'd launched AssociatePrograms.com and was frantically busy on this new interest.

Updating the success stories book would have been fairly simple. So I asked a colleague at work if I could hire her to do it.

Here's the dumb thing I did...

When just ONE person turned me down, I abandoned the book and concentrated on my newest project.

It's silly to waste time on regrets, but every now and again I can't help regretting that ill considered decision.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if I'd persisted. I might have ended up creating an online publishing empire, years before the ebook craze.

After all, I'd done all the hardest work, done the research, chosen a good topic, struggled to learn new skills (although obviously I needed more), and I'd reached the stage where I was making sales.

At that time, the market was wide open for my book - and I gave up! I still shake my head in disgust when I think of it.

It reminds me of this quotation...

"Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown." - H. Ross Perot.

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2. Ah, but what CAUSED the failure?
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Talking about mistakes, there's an interesting conversation on our affiliate forum.

It starts out discussing online failures and mistakes, and then morphs into a discussion on the importance of figuring out what CAUSED a failure, and learning from it.

It also suggests that there are times when giving up is the right thing to do.

Have you made any colossal mistakes online? What have you learned from them?

Maybe you've been thinking of giving up on a current project although you haven't done enough to find out if it will work?

Fortunately for me, when I get a good idea I usually doggedly persist with a project, refusing to give up no matter what bumps I hit along the road.

How about you? Do you want to own up to some serious mistakes? If so, have you learned anything from them?

How about sharing your thoughts on our forum?

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/discus/ftopic25538.html

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3. Thought for today: Quitting
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"No man is ever whipped until he quits in his own mind." - Napoleon Hill.

All the best

Allan Gardyne