Hope is not a Strategy

Do you have a plan for success? Do you have a marketing strategy, a strategy to get new clients or sell services?

Most online marketers, and many work at home entrepreneurs do not have a strategy to succeed. The entire plan in a lot of cases seems to be we built a web site and hope people buy it, or we sent emails to a list of people and hope to get responses. The strategy goes on and on, but does it work?

Most online businesses fail because they lack a clear plan of how to succeed. We all have heard the age old adage that there is lots of money to be made in this niche or that niche, and it is easy to succeed. Well I have good news and bad news for you, the adage is true, in virtually every niche online and offline there is a lot of money to be made, but the bad news is 98% of the people who set out to capitalize on that market fail.

Why do they fail? They fail to set up a good plan, and failing to plan is planning to fail.

How many times have people said this opportunity didn’t work or that is a scam because I set up the website, or I placed an ad and got no response so the whole system is bad, it must be a bad system, because you did your 30 minutes of reading about how to do it, and placed the ad, or put up a web site, told your friends about it, and waited 2 weeks, or a month and nothing happened so obviously the system doesn’t work…or does it.

Was Hope your strategy? Did you place the ad or web site up in hopes of someone purchasing something, well the obvious answer is of course. But if you look at the successful people online or offline, they are not using hope as a strategy, they are constantly marketing their service or site, they are redirecting the approach, if this approach doesn’t give me the desired result, I will do another, and keep trying until I succeed. Never is hope a strategy for the successful, the successful are constantly re-evaluating and re-directing the approach to meet their objective, they don’t try, they don’t hope. Life is a series of challenges, and the successful people are the ones who constantly adjust their approach to achieve their goals.

Did Abraham Lincoln hope he would get elected, he had failed many times in politics, but I will bet he never hoped to get elected, I’ll bet he planned to get elected and through a constant eye on his goal and ever re-directing his approach he succeeded, the same is true of Col Sanders, he failed many times to sell his now famous recipe for chicken, but finally after hundreds of failures he found the right investor and the rest is history.

Both of these examples illustrate situations where hope was not a strategy, and just as importantly failure was not an option. They constantly adjusted their approach and methods to achieve their goals, but neither were relying on divine intervention, or the universe would shine on them, they both acted very proactively to achieve their goals and succeeded.