I think we all want to take the fast money route. Doesn’t it always look so damn easy when someone else explains it? Unfortunately, fast money isn’t always so fast.

Don’t get me wrong. Fast money project DO exist. I’ve seen windfalls happen in the blink of an eye. But it’s more of the exception than the rule.

Ooooh, you actually gave me an idea for my next blog post. Not today (Thursday), but either tomorrow or Monday.

Alexis

P.S. – I’m glad you like my clock guy.

Let me share with you two of my “flops”:

The Firesale That Needed More…Fire:

I wanted to go see my dad. I was flat broke, and my 21st birthday was approaching. So I did what any sharp marketer would do – I built a quick product to sell. It was 7 niches that I did research into, plus a 7 day autoresponder for all of them.

Oh. My. God. I spent 105 hours on this project – building a blog for it, an autoresponder course, and doing daily (yes, I said daily) Ustream.tv shows that entire week. My roommate had to FORCE me into bed. It was horrible.

The salesletter was way, way, way too hypey without really talking a lot about the benefits – looking back, I gave *a lot of value* for just $27 – with a better salesletter, I could have easily charged $97 and still drove a very good bargain.

Another mistake of mine was waiting till the last minute for this style of marketing. While firesales can be really, really profitable, you gotta inspire a hungry crowd ahead of time. I like SEO, love article marketing. Those things need at least a few days to get some major traction.

I didn’t market it tnearly enough… so I wasn’t surprised when I had (surprise, surprise) – 5 sales.

I even had an affiliate contest. It would have been an amazing run if I had actually put some planning into it.

The IM Product That Was Broader Than an 8-Lane Highway (Flop #2):

Back when I first read DBO, I figured I was way too smart for it – boy, was I stubborn! I decided that I was going to do it the “guru” way again, and outsource the entire operation. Forget writing a salesletter – pffft. Oh, how smug we are when we don’t have a hope and a prayer of knowing how smug we really are…

It was for a ‘newbie guide’ to IM – something already done to death by …well, I’m not going to drop names here out of respect to the host but…you get the idea.

So what ended up happening, to make a long story short:

I went onto Elance.
I made a project that was horribly described. I wanted Adwords ads, a salesletter, an ebook, and some custom videos to go with it done in Camtasia.
I selected a guy that did all of these things for 1200 – but he was HORRIBLE. I didn’t realize how horrible he was until my editor DROWNED that book in enough red ink to create horror movie clips until 2090. Sheesh.

Lesson learned – if you don’t know how to control the entire process from start to finish, *don’t* give the entire farm and the fence to go with it to your outsourcer! Know *how* to make a project (described in DBO quite well, actually – take a gander)

These flops were devastating at the beginning, when they happened… but they taught me how to refine my process. They taught me how to sell better and sell consistently. Keep the pipeline full, in other words.

That’s all I got – that section on failure today sparked my yapper to flap

Isa