What do you value the most?
Many (too many) wannabe marketers come to me, saying they need to generate (fill in the blanks) income in a short period of time.
At that point they’re desperate.
They think they have no real asset to offer in exchange for the income they seek.
I ask them what they’re willing to do to generate that income, and there’s no ready answer in most of the cases.
I usually remind them that I’m not someone who promises a get rich quick formula, in fact my first book was more of a get rich slow strategy.
Even then, many readers tried to make it something it wasn’t, looking for home runs instead of consistent small wins that would be recurring and passive.
So let’s say that you came to me with that question, or demand, that you had to make a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time. Let’s say that amount is $1000, or $1000 per month, within 30 days.
What are you willing to invest? Two obvious choices are time and money.
So so many say they can devote an hour or two a day to building their online business…
Whoa! Wow! Really?
And investing money? In advance? With no guarantees?
The more timid among us are not willing to do that either.
Those who have marketable skills can offer their time for money on a site like Fiverr, but that involves time.
Others can spend money to get set up, spending money for hosting and an autoresponder service and maybe a shopping cart service and more.
But that involves money and faith because the costs are usually on a monthly basis.
When I was setting up a retail business in my home town, pre-Internet, I had to sign a lease, pay 2 months in advance, a security deposit, get insurance and signs and shelves and a register and display cases and so much more. Plus of course the inventory to sell. With no guarantee that I’d ever have a single customer, ever.
Going online is so much easier, isn’t it?
But it isn’t devoid of the necessity to spend time and money to start and grow and keep up with or ahead of the competition.
So where am I going with this rambling anyway today?
Back to the “failure is your friend” idea that I’ve mentioned before.
It is, but if you are desperate and giving it one shot, you aren’t wired internally to accept the possibility of a failure.
When I concocted my 5 Bucks a Day strategy, before it was named, it was an idea that I had that just HAD to work because I was desperate.
If it wouldn’t have worked, I might have given up, because I had tried so many other things previously.
I invested time and I committed a lot of money. It worked out very well indeed. It changed my life, obviously.
Since then, I’ve tried to practice what I preach in several ways.
One if focus. I wrote about that. I do that. I don’t multi-task important tasks. Instead I time box them, giving focused attention to one thing at a time for a specified amount of time. Like writing this post, for example. I’m not watching YouTube videos or reading sales pages or checking emails while I type.
Another is being willing to spend money to get things done by someone else. In other words, outsourcing. Why should I spend 8 hours of my time doing a task when someone else will do it for $10 or $50, and do it better?
And traffic-getting? Free traffic is great, but can you turn it on when you need to, and is it plentiful, and it is reliable to continue? Inside 5 Bucks a Day I showed how I was able to spend money on Google Ads and scale up as much as I wanted. When I proved to myself that I could spend .10 for a visitor and get an average return of .20 or more, it was just plain magic.
But I had to have confidence. It was scary. Very scary.
I could have spent a million hours getting free traffic, that still wouldn’t have been as abundant and certainly not as targeted as I spend the money for.
I would have failed. My life would not have changed.
So bottom line, I guess this post is about the value of your time.