It’s certainly a fair question. How do you know when you’ve failed? Well, with some things it’s pretty obvious. With others, it’s not so obvious. In this article, we’re going to try to show you how failure is rarer than you realize. It all depends on how you look at it. Hopefully, I can get you to look at failure in a more positive light.

Okay, how do you know when you’ve really failed? Well, let’s say you attempt to motorcycle jump over 15 trucks without breaking your neck. You make your jump, land on truck number 14, break your neck and a lot more parts of your body and you die. Well, we can safely assume that you’ve failed. You didn’t clear the 15 trucks and on top of that, you died so you don’t get another shot at it. This is failure in its purest form.

Okay, how about this example? You build your first website and your first ebook that you plan to sell on that site. You have a sales page and all the things that you need to promote your book. You then start to advertise. Days go by and then weeks. You haven’t made one sale. Finally, months go by and then a year or more. You still haven’t made one sale. Finally, after a year, you get 2 sales but both are refunded. No more sales come. Have you failed?

In my opinion, it’s all in the way you look at it and what you’ve learned from doing this. See, unlike the guy who tried to jump over the 15 trucks and didn’t make it, you’re not dead. You still have life in you and thus, you can learn something from this and move on.

For starters, you’ve created your first ebook so you know what the process is like. You also know that because you sold 2 books and they were both returned, given refunds are very rare, there is a good chance that your ebook is greatly lacking in content. But, you can learn from this.

Assuming your ebook is not so rare that there are no others on the subject, you can purchase one of those other ebooks, preferably one that is selling well, and see how it was put together. You might get some insight into why your 2 sales were returned. See what the differences between the 2 books are. Don’t just look at the content itself, but look at how the books were laid out. Note every difference between the 2 books that you can.

What about the sales page? Obviously if it took you over a year to get 2 sales, your sales page must not be interesting enough. So look at other sales pages for similar items. See how they were put together. Most likely you will see some major differences between those sales pages and your own.

The point I am trying to make is this. In online marketing, you never really fail unless you give up. Nobody hits a home run their first time up at bat unless they are very talented or very lucky or both. My first product did sell well right away. But I had been marketing 2 years before I ever created my first digital product, running an ecommerce site selling tangible goods.

So I had a lot of experience behind me. And even if my first product didn’t sell, I would have learned something from the experience. I would have known what not to do the next time. I would have gotten some ideas on how to improve the product or the presentation, or both.

That is the beauty of online marketing. Failure is only for those who stop trying because there is always tomorrow. There are so many resources and people online who can help you that once you really get your act together, it is almost impossible to fail.

When have you failed? If you’re asking the question and care enough about the answer, then you haven’t yet.

© Neil-Harvey.com