I have not been around much lately. Here or anywhere.
I try to keep a regular writing schedule. A post a week here, a couple of posts for my own site, and at least something written for the PLR site and to put up on Constant Content. I pretty much bailed on all of that last week. (Well, I did write a 653 word article for my blog, which I promptly deleted, but that is a whole other story.)
Did I do this so I could catch up on all the movies I’ve been missing? So I could take a long vacation on the motorcycle? Train for the Boston Marathon? No, no and…. no. I took a week to set up a list building funnel, as alluded to in Them as Can’t Do, Teach.
Now I mention that not so that you can rush out and pick up a copy of the report (feel free to do so if you wish) but to touch on another subject. One that 54 years of experience apparently has not equipped me to understand – it took a week. A week!
As a carpenter I know in my gut that things rarely go as fast as you expect them to. As a grown-up I understand that that is not true only in carpentry. The point is that everything I do in internet marketing takes more time than I think it will, and yet I seem not to get it. It still goes faster in my head than it ever does in real life.
In order to set up this funnel I had a relatively simple set of tasks to perform. Write a report on list building (not as easy to summarize as you might think), select a couple of squeeze pages and come up with headlines and a bit of copy, find a product to offer as an OTO and create a sales page for it, search for a PLR offering or two to use as a bonus, create a thank-you page, set up a new list and generate the subscription form, publish all of this to the web and make sure all the linking structure is solid, get PayPpal and DLGuard integrated and make sure the buttons and downloads work, and integrate Google Website Optimizer.
Okay. Now that I have written it all out, it is a lot.
What was I thinking? I was thinking two days, three tops!
I’m not writing this to complain (not merely to complain anyway), but to commiserate. I know that I am not the only one this happens to. Neither are you. It’s just the way things work. Sure, you and I should both know better, but it still can be disheartening. Internet marketing is hard enough anyway, without every strategy we want to try taking two or three times as long to implement as we expect.
But we just have to buck up. Try to realize before we start just how long it will take and give ourselves a bit of slack when we don’t. It’s like everything else in internet marketing.
Nose to the grindstone. Never say die. Keep on Keepin’ On.
