Essential SEO Tools & Resources

In my previous post, How To Think Like A Successful Entrepreneur, we discussed the essential traits all successful entrepreneurs possess. The list included:

1. Entrepreneurs take risks
2. Entrepreneurs are not afraid of failing
3. Entrepreneurs take action

So can you teach yourself these traits?

To some degree I believe you can over time. To what degree will depend on your current mindset and how conservative you currently are! If you’ve been risk averse for the whole of your life, changing won’t happen overnight!

With that in mind, how do you teach yourself to think and behave more like a successful entrepreneur?

Well, I believe the simplest way to start, is to begin “consciously” thinking about everything you do on a daily basis. The easiest way to do that is to write a list of all the tasks you need to complete, and then “prioritise” them.

And here’s why …

The tasks we put off until another day are the tasks that take us out of our “comfort” or “safety” zones. By physically prioritising these tasks and completing them, you’re effectively facing your fears every day.

Why do some tasks take you out of your comfort zone? Simply because they involve unknown outcomes.

The “unknown” brings with it the possibility of failure or rejection becoming a reality.

We all naturally fear rejection and failure! So we complete the safe tasks and put off the “riskier” tasks until later.

If you want to develop the traits of successful entrepreneurs, you need to complete the tasks you normally put off. Do them first, overcome your subconscious fears. Every time you complete a task that you don’t enjoy or feel uncomfortable doing, your confidence will grow. As your confidence grows you’ll simultaneously become less risk averse as you start to believe that you can actually control the outcome of events you previously feared.

For example, let’s apply this theory to Internet Marketing …

Let’s assume you’ve created an ebook to sell and you’re developing a web site to promote it. You have the following scenarios for pulling in traffic (customers):

- write content to pull in search engine traffic
- contact potential Joint Venture partners to exploit their traffic
- do some article marketing
- place some paid adverts in high readership ezines

Most “newbies” will approach the tasks in the following order:

1. write content to pull in search engine traffic
2. do some article marketing
3. place some paid adverts in high readership ezines
4. contact potential Joint Venture partners to exploit their traffic

Why?

Well, let’s examine the tasks …

Writing content for your own site is very safe. Hardly anyone will read it as it’s a new site, so it doesn’t matter if it’s not very good as no one will criticise it. Also results are longer term, so you won’t “fail” immediately!

Article marketing is a little riskier as more “eyes” will see your work.

Placing paid adverts is more risky still, because you stand to lose money and you’ll definitely know quickly if you fail because no sales will occur … how scary is that!

Finally, contacting real people, particularly successful people for help is the scariest of all, and likely to be something a newbie will continually put off! Being rejected by a real person is a real fear for most people!

Taking these safe options is why most would be internet marketers don’t succeed, or at least why they fail to succeed quickly! Does this sound like your approach and thought process?

Now to the thought process of the real entrepreneur …

A true entrepreneur will prioritise the above tasks as follows:

1. contact potential Joint Venture partners to exploit their traffic
2. place some paid adverts in high readership ezines
3. do some article marketing
4. write content to pull in search engine traffic

You guessed it, the true entrepreneur will attack the tasks in totally the reverse order, and here’s their logic.

The fasted way to get free visitors to a site is to leverage the “lists” and “traffic” of established webmasters. If you can get just one webmaster with a large subscriber list to promote your product you’ll be made overnight!

Next, speculate to accumulate. An entrepreneur will recognise that with very little effort, one paid ad in the right ezine can generate a lot of traffic, again overnight.

Article Marketing would be their next choice of task as it creates lots of avenues for traffic to find your site, whereas adding content to your own site creates just one avenue and takes a lot of time and effort, and would therefore be last in line (and then they’d pay someone else to do it for them!).

Entrepreneurs evaluate risk and effort versus rewards. They chase the biggest rewards that can be achieved in the shortest space of time, providing the risks are not too high.

If you want to be really successful, you need to do the same. Evaluate all the methods possible to achieve a target, then prioritise based on potential rewards. Start on the task at the top of your list, and only attempt the second task when you’ve completed the first! However scary, force yourself to attempt it. The buzz you’ll get from achieving tough tasks will be infectious, and fill you full of confidence.

As another example I used to be afraid of heights, but you can see in the photo above, by continually challenging my fear I’ve been able to overcome it!

As you take this approach on a daily basis, you’ll start to think and act like a successful entrepreneur!

Anyway, I’m off to find some JV Partners!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!