Succeed or Fail: It's Your Choice

Got your video ready? Writing new content? Tweeting like crazy? Running through SnapChat and Instagram? Still not succeeding?

If you are, great! Then you are lucky or wise enough not to need to read this post any further.... But, if things are not going according to plan, you may want to keep going. It may not solve your problems, but it will stop you wasting a lot of time expecting the "next big thing" to solve your problems.

You wont succeed unless you stop selling rubbish

Let's start with a harsh question. Are you selling rubbish? Is your product or service really not up to much? Is it just the same as everyone else's? If so, now is the time to stop blaming your marketers, your clients and your website. If you are selling crap, you are going to have a struggle on your hands. The best marketing in the world is not going to make that product good or get you good reviews. You are going to wallow at the bottom with the rest of them. If you are still not sure if your product is any good, then try taking the test of applying a well-known phrase to your product or service.

Does it look like a duck, waddle like a duck and quack like a duck?

If it does, your first step to climbing out from where you are is to look hard at your product or service and stare that duck straight in the eye. Can it be mended? Will its feathers ever look good? Will it fly? Will it grow into a swan?

If it wont, then dump it.

Is everyone else selling it?

Even if your product is ok, the next question has to be: "Is everyone else selling it?". So when you put your shop online and look lovingly at your great presentation, what happens if you search for the same thing. Do you throw up many examples of the same thing, but all being sold at a fraction of the price you are asking for on Amazon or Ebay? Apart from wondering how the others do it, you have to decide whether you can match the price of the competitors if you want to stand any chance of competing. You also have to work out whether the time and effort you put into making sure your SEO is perfect and your product can be found on page 1 in search is worth all the effort. Or if you are going to advertise it to make sure it can be found, are you still going to make enough money out of the sale to justify the work.

Are you talking rubbish too?

Now you are happy your product is great, the next question to ask yourself is whether you are presenting it properly. If you search online, you get to read a lot of badly written and badly presented nonsense. If you look yourself squarely in the eye and know that what you are doing is no better than everyone else, then you are not going to succeed. You really do need to do something different or better to raise yourself above the huge floating mass of flotsam that is the internet presentation.

It's all very well to have a video, but is it watchable? Would you sit in front of it yourself if it was not yours?

So often, clients think that just being on the latest thing will save their business. It wont, unless the latest thing is where your audience actually is.