The Misconceptions About Failing

Past failures – It’s Not Your fault – It Happens To Everyone

 

It is funny how we remember our failures of the past. Back when I was in my late teens, my friend David asked, Why don’t we clean carpets to earn some money.

To quote Forrest Gump’s answer to Bubba… I said, “OKAY, sounds like a fine idea”. 

So we went to the only people we knew, our friends parents. Our question was; would you like your rugs cleaned? We were getting close to running out of friends parents, but finally one mother said yes. So we set a date for the following Saturday morning.

Then we begged our parents for money needed to rent a carpet cleaner from our local supermarket.

I’ll never forget the big red Rug Doctor. There it was in a rack adjacent to the main door as we walked in. Sitting on the floor, a big heavy red Rug Doctor canister on wheels with a hose and long handle with some kind of cleaner spout.

Well, Saturday arrived, I called my friend David to arrange a pickup time to go to our first job.

But here is the kicker, David tells me he doesn’t want to go. He changed his mind. He didn’t want to do carpet cleaning. Are you kidding me? It was your idea to start this business! 

Well I thought… I have the Rug Doctor and this appointment. I’ll go alone and keep all of the money.

I get to the job and bring the cleaner inside. The mom pointed to the rug she wanted cleaned and left the room. I had no clue how to clean carpets.

And believe it or not there was no internet back then. There were no YouTube videos for me to watch. All I had was to read the instructions on a small label stuck on the side of Rug Doctor. All I could do was wing it, learn on the job sort of thing.

Because I didn’t know any better, I thought hot water would work best.

Things were going well when I noticed near completion that something was not wrong. It was an oriental type throw rug, not wall to wall, when I saw the rug seemed to be shrinking. I could see the whatchamacallit thing under the carpet to keep it from sliding, starting to stick out showing on all sides.

Lucky for me, the mom never said anything. Either she did not notice it (not possible because it was obvious). Or she did not care that much for the rug. Later I found out the carpet was a wool blend. And as we all know from washing a wool sweater using hot water, it shrinks badly.

That was the end of my carpet cleaning days. A shrinking Rug, no profit, a lost partner, but a lot learned.

My lesson learned is not to get into the carpet cleaning business. It is a good business for some, but it is not for me.

Now why do I share this story? As the saying goes, fail your way to success, Meaning as you fail, you learn not to make the same mistakes over and over again. It’s completely normal to make mistakes when first learning anything. Everybody runs into roadblocks and makes mistakes.

This is one of the reasons I like affiliate marketing. When I do something wrong, it’s okay. I don’t sweat the small stuff. I learn from it, then move on and try not to repeat the same mistake.

A second reason I think it’s a sweet business model is, you don’t need any of your own products to start. You are selling other people’s products.

So no inventory worries, no collecting credit card and PayPal information worries. No support worries, because the companies that provide the products are taking care of it for you. And most have done-for-you options that make it easier than doing it all yourself. 

Really your main focus is to drive traffic, the people (leads) that will be interested in your niche. 

You might be thinking, but how do I find these so-called products you’re alluding too?

There are quite a few ways; to name a few, Clickbank.com, JVzoo.com, WarriorPlus.com and even Amazon . You sign up and create a free account.

Clickbank.com is probably the largest and easiest to use because most affiliates won’t have to be approved by the product makers.You will likely have to be approved to be an affiliate company with JVzoo.com and WarriorPlus.com. But that’s not a big issue. Just be honest and say you’re new to affiliate marketing, just starting out and like the opportunity to market their product. You normally communicate it through email and you’ll have a good chance of getting their (joint venture) JV page and affiliate links for your marketing emails. 

What if I said there was a way to get going without worrying about failing? Like, it’s okay to write a terrible email or subject line.

I’ll tell you another failure/mistake story I recently encountered. I wrote an email with the subject line:💸 autonomous system to wipe out debt and a headline:From debt to peace of mind, But the main body of the email was about a friend who went from $60,000 in debt to making $3,700 a day by starting an online business. Well this subject line apparently upset some people and drove them to mark my email with a spam complaint. This is the absolute worst thing that can happen to an email marketer.

It’s the start of a bad sender’s reputation, and with the  possibility of being black-listed. At the same time, my ESP automatically deletes the email subscriber from my list with spam complaints. Now that’s bad and a mistake on my part, but it’s not the end of the world.

It’s all part of learning. My subject line was misleading for those subscribers and I can see their point after reading it a second time. My subscribers thought they would find out how to automatically eliminate their debt. Guess what? It is misleading, but it’s a lesson learned. Using curiosity as a subject line is one thing, but misleading people is another. Now I pay more attention to my subject lines and body text copy.

Conclusion: There are no failures, only lessons learned

There is no failure, only lessons learned. Remember failing at anything is good because you are at the very least taking action, and without action you stay in the same place. You’re on one side of the creek and you’ll never figure out how to reach the other side. Failing is learning what not to do. There’s no moving forward without failures.

The point is to take action and let mistakes or failures go, with the idea not to repeat them again. After failing enough, success will come because you’re getting rid of things not working for you. 

Check out this short video clip of my mentor and friend explaining his failure in a 50 second video clip.

Email marketing is what I discovered where making mistakes is okay. It’s easy to get started. If you’re curious to learn more about affiliate marketing, you might find some answers on the subsequent page.

Follow this link below for a short video clip my mentor and friend recorded for me that clearly defines Affiliate Marketing, and in only 25 seconds:

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Have you ever failed with business startups?

Are there any lessons you may have learned failing at something?

Leave comment below.

Until next time,

Ken Stronach