The Secret to Achieving Your Goals Online: Perseverance

How do people succeed when building their brands online? That’s a question I’ve been researching. And I have to say, when I found the answer, it surprised me.

Regardless of your goals, there is one overarching secret to success. This is the secret talked about in the early part of the 20th century by Napoleon Hill, and it is the same secret that I keep hearing again and again from successful entrepreneurs and those who have build powerful personal or business brands online.

Dan BlankIn fact, it is so well proven, that it can hardly be called a secret.

So what is the secret to success? Perseverance.

I know, you were hoping I’d say something else. Something that was easier, something you could buy or obtain to ensure success. But that thing doesn’t exist. There is no get rich quick scheme or miracle diet. There is no SEO tactic, no newsletter list building secret, no WordPress plugin that delivers the value you are looking for. There is only perseverance.

So today, I want to talk a bit about what that means when considering how to succeed online while you are building your brand, creating great content, and connecting with your community.

The Difference Between Being Successful and Failing

If I had to explain the background of most successful people, it would go like this:

Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Succeed.

It’s funny, this is why the phrase ‘fail early and fail often’ has become so popular. Ironically, Jason Fried of 37 Signals has a rant about how much he hates that saying, yet attributes the huge success of his Signal vs. Noise blog to perseverance. Inherently, perseverance implies that you kept going, long after all signs pointed to failure.

So what separates those who succeed from those who don’t? Well, this is the background of most people who don’t succeed at their goals:

Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.

Most people stop trying just short of reaching their goal. They get burned out, they refuse to innovate, they listen to all the voices around them that say “Why are you bothering, you are just embarrassing yourself.”

The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get

I am a huge fan of the website Mixergy.com, where Andrew Warner interviews entrepreneurs 5 days a week. When explaining his own experiences in building his website, he said that if you go from posting 1 video a week to posting 5 videos a week, the gain in traffic and influence is not a five-fold increase. It is exponentially more.

Why is that? One reason is that when people know you are there every day, they make it a part of their routine to check you out. Another is that it increases the chances of serendipity – of luck – by at least 5 fold.

On the web, this can manifest itself in a number of ways: SEO, getting picked up in social media, having the right person see one of your videos, impressing a key influencer, etc. The chances of a 100 good things happening just increased exponentially.

How to Have Perseverance

So how do you ‘get’ perseverance? What’s the secret to the secret? There are lots of ways to describe it, but I will try to sum it up this way: a strong belief in a goal. That’s the secret to perseverance.

So why do people try, try, try and fail?

Lots of reasons. But oftentimes, it is because they didn’t believe strongly enough in the goal. Maybe it was a banana company who saw a market-opportunity by extending their brand into banana flavored gum, but found it difficult to succeed in that market, so they fail.

I’d bet that they failed a lot faster and a lot harder than say Billy Bob’s Gum Company – where Billy Bob is the owner and LOVES gum – thinks about gum every day, and is a third generation gum manufacturer. I would bet that Billy Bob would find a way to make banana flavored gum a success.

So, inherent in this is to not just have a goal, but truly CARE about it. What this often means is that it has to be about more than money.

Often, the goal needs to be so compelling, that it even supersedes basic human emotions. Consider how many of us approached a sport we weren’t good at when we were in elementary school. Let’s just say it was kickball, and you were bad at it. Chances are, you got up to the plate, all the other kids were staring at you, you gave it a good shot, and couldn’t even kick the ball. It was just embarrassing. In all likelihood, as much as you wanted to be good at kickball, you just shied away from it because it was so embarrassing.

Those who succeed, don’t shy away, they don’t stop.

Perseverance in Building Your Brand Online

If you are wondering why your blog is getting no traffic, why no one is following you on Twitter, why your ‘personal brand’ is failing to gain attention online, don’t look in the mirror and think that it’s just not in the cards for you. It is.

You can succeed in your goals of building your brand, product or service online. But only if you want it more than the next person. Only if you keep posting those blog entries even when it feels stupid. Only when you say to your self “I am failing so badly that it’s embarrassing, but you know what, I’m going to keep trying anyway.”

Thanks!

-Dan

Learning By Listening: The Lessons of Mixergy.com

I have recently become obsessed with the website Mixergy.com. Day after day, the site’s creator Andrew Warner interviews people who are working to build online businesses. Some are fully in startup mode, moving from struggle to failure to struggle to failure – and others have had a great deal of success. Each shares their story.

What Andrew has created is compelling for a number of reasons:

  • His interviews are long and detailed, and he commonly slows people down to ask questions about every aspect of how a business evolved. When someone says, “I partnered with my friend Bob,” Andrew will ask a series of questions about that decision, about trust, about how it worked, and how it didn’t. These are the nitty gritty things that fill the lives of those in business, the anguished decisions of who to work with and the day to day challenges and opportunities of doing so.
  • Andrew finds lessons where others don’t. I will read a story about a business, and it will gloss over the details and create a simple story around why they are great or horrible. But Andrew paints a much better picture – one that is nuanced and full of lessons. While many of us would read a story in BusinessWeek about why MySpace is a flop or Facebook a success, Andrew creates a more realistic picture through his interview style, sharing the evolution, phases, successes and failures within every company.
  • The interviews are inherently positive, with the goal of teaching and mentoring. Even when discussing scandals, Andrew has zero interest in the sound bite or striking anything but a tone of “what really happened, what can we learn from this.”
  • There is something to learn nearly every day. His schedule of interviews is packed, and I see he is ALWAYS looking for someone new to interview. He uses Twitter to get in touch specific people he wants to speak with, and will even put out an open call for folks to come on his show. During the interviews, you see he constantly creates a list of new people to speak with.
  • He involves his audience. This really does seem to be a community he is creating, and Andrew is open about sharing what he is learning as it happens. If he wants to try out a new webcasting tool, he brings us along for the ride and asks us what we think.
  • Andrew has strong beliefs about the many ways a startup can operate, but he doesn’t preach, he simply finds example of example via the real-world experiences of those he speaks with. For instance, the value of partnering in order to realize your dream. This seems to be very important to Andrew, and you see how he asks people about how and why they chose to partner and the effect it had on their business. In general, he focuses on things that empower people to achieve large dreams, avoiding cliche’s that you need venture capital or a trendy idea. He seems to relish speaking with people who build strong but unsexy businesses that are somehow off the radar screens of other writers covering startups and the online space.

To be honest, I feel as though I am just getting into Mixergy, I still have a lot of his videos to watch, and am now planning out my month based on his interview schedule. If you are looking to grow your business online, Mixergy is an uncommon and incredible place to help you achieve your goals.