The Difference Between Failure and Success

Do you know what the difference between a business owner and a blogger is? A business owner expects to exchange value for value (usually in the form of money for services, information, or products, and I mean both as buyer and seller). Bloggers, on the other hand, seem to expect to just get everything for free. As soon as you want to charge them for something, you’re a “sell-out” and a “scummy marketer.” An offer presented in an email is suddenly “spam” (and never mind they voluntarily signed up to be on your list).

If something is cheap or free, the business owner questions its worth. If something requires a financial investment, bloggers complain and go elsewhere.

I realize I’m painting with a broad brush here. Yes, I’m deliberately over-simplifying. I’m doing it to keep the discussion manageable. We can work with stereotypes without losing sight that they’re stereotypes.

But why do you think me and every other serious blog marketer out there keeps saying: “think of your blog as a business?” I don’t have to tell that to a business person, do I? But people don’t hear what they don’t understand.

All that free information online is not enough to give you everything you need to succeed in online business. That information exists as marketing material for people who have products and services to sell. It will never be complete enough for you. There is a wall stopping you. On the other side of that wall is information which is not free, because it is too valuable to give away or it is impossible to give away because it cannot apply equally well to everyone (that’s why there’s one-on-one coaching and consulting). You don’t get that valuable information, product, or service until you exchange something of value for it—usually money.

And this is where we come to the real problem. No, the problem is not money. It’s your perception. It’s your faith in yourself. Let me explain what I mean.

Let’s say I present you with an offer for something, like Skellie’s book The Blog Business Funnel, which is an affiliate link. If you purchase through my link, I get a commission for referring you. If you use this resource correctly, you will make back the money you spent on it by hundreds or even thousands of times over. In other words, you spend the measly $29 to get Skellie’s book, and you implement what you learn in it and make $3,500 from your new freelance business in just one month (no, that’s not unrealistic at all and if you think it is, you have yet another problem). You took a paltry $29 and turned it into $3,500. That’s a return of 12,069%!

Now, here’s where the perception problem comes in: did you look at that $29 as a cost or as an investment? The difference is far more than semantic. A cost is something you will never recoup. When you buy consumables like food or toilet paper, you don’t make money from that. That money is just gone.

But the $29 you spend on The Blog Business Funnel is not a cost. It is not money down the drain unless you personally fail to act. It is an investment from which you expect a return. You will use the information in that book to make more money than it took to buy the book. When people say “it takes money to make money,” what they’re talking about (on a small scale). That’s the difference between a cost and an investment. It’s not “marketing-speak” to try and slip the price in under your radar. Far from it.

So, what’s more ridiculous: that an ebook costs $29, $39, $47, or even $97? or that you can’t learn from it and make your money back a hundred times over?

Don’t think I don’t know what it’s like to be broke. I do. Been there, done that. Not doing it ever again. Most people aren’t broke. They will say, “I don’t have the money for this ebook right now,” and that day they bought a $4-something drink at Starbucks. Or they spent $6-something on a six-pack of beer. And they spend this much every day on these items, which add up to $120/mo. and $180/mo., respectively. That’s $1,440/year and $2,160/year. Or they spent $80 every single month on their monster cable TV package (and not the internet part, either).

They’re not broke. Anybody spending $1,440/year on fraps isn’t broke. They’re just not interested in breaking out of their current self-created patterns (and that’s what they are—they are not “circumstances”). This kind of continued thinking and behavior ensures failure.

You may be wondering, “Yes, but how do I know I will make my investment back a hundred times over? What if the information is wrong? What if the seller is a scammer?” Here’s how you know:

• If the information is factually incorrect and the seller is reputable, you can ask for—and expect to get—your money back, and you’re not out one single cent.
• If you don’t know the reputation of the seller, investigate. That’s what Google is for. Add the keywords “review” or “scam” or “problem” to your search terms.

Now I’m really going to crawl inside your head. It’s my belief—based on my own prior experience and the behavior I see from others online constantly–that something else is going on, here. I believe most people expressing doubts about a clearly described and reputable product or balking at the price are covering up for their lack of faith in themselves. They don’t believe they will succeed. They don’t believe enough in themselves.

It’s easy to take that fear of failure, that lack of faith in yourself, and turn it around and project it outwardly onto the seller or the product or even an entire industry. It’s understandable, but once you recognize that you’re doing it, it gets harder and harder to lie to yourself. And soon you can’t do it anymore, and that leaves you with a scary decision: sooner or later, you’re going to have to believe in yourself.

If you begin to believe in yourself, you will also begin to have faith in yourself. If you have enough faith in yourself, you will be able to make the leap of faith required of you to truly begin moving towards success (however you define it, but for most of us it includes being able to feed and shelter ourselves and our families at least). You can’t make a leap of faith unless you have enough faith, sort of like charging up a battery. Belief in yourself and tiny successes along the way help to charge up your “faith battery.” Which leads to bigger successes.

Investing in that training product or that ebook requires you to have enough faith in yourself that you will see a return of many times the investment amount. That’s a leap of faith you have to make. When you focus the risk on the product, you’re fooling yourself. The risk is inside you. There are other leaps of faith to make along the way. For example, the first time you ever sell something to someone online requires a leap of faith. Starting your business and/or blog in the first place requires a leap of faith, though a lesser one.

You cannot succeed if you don’t believe in yourself enough to make these leaps of faith. You just can’t. It’s risky and scary and necessary. You can love the idea of being a diver but you’ll never be one until you get up on that diving platform and jump for the first time. You can jump or you can chicken out and crawl back down in shame and humiliation. Your choice. I find it sad that most people actually choose the latter and then rationalize and justify and blame.

Consider also the hypocrisy: here you are trying to start a business or make money from your blog. That means you have to sell something and someone else has to buy it (the rest is details). How can you expect others to invest in you if you can’t invest in yourself? If you’re too afraid of failure, how can others possibly have faith in you or see you as a success? You will give yourself away or, more likely, never even get off the ground. But when you have enough faith in yourself that you can get a good return on a training investment, the hypocrisy just evaporates. Your self-confidence is real and others will feel it. It will inspire them to buy from you in a dozen invisible ways.

So, am I saying the difference between failure and success is only $29 and and a little faith?

I’m saying that’s where it can start. Where you take it after that is up to you. Life on the other side of that moment is infinitely better.