Keep trying no matter what. Because if you never stop trying, sooner or later you’re just about guaranteed success.

“Yeah, but failures get me down. I want massive success super-fast or I’m not gonna do it.”

That sentiment above is why all those make money overnight gurus do so well. They promise the moon and the stars for the cost of a nice meal at a restaurant. “Plug and play!” “Flip the switch!” “Check out my McMansion and 22 cars – this can all be yours!”

You already know to avoid those kinds of offers, right?

But there’s something much bigger and insidious that’s robbing people of their online success and we touched on it just a moment ago…

Giving up.

I see new online marketers racing at Mach 10 with their hair on fire. 

They are either building the ultimate product to end all products, or they’re posting and blogging 20 times a day.

They are unstoppable!

But inevitably, they burn themselves out and lose interest before achieving their goals.

Meanwhile, a handful of people chug along, posting to their blogs a couple of times a week for years, posting on social media a few times a day mostly on automation, finding what works and what doesn’t.

They build an email list bit by bit. They find the best affiliate products to promote for their audience. They focus on just one or two social media channels. They make money with their email list, maybe with Google ads, with affiliate products and eventually with their own products, too.

If they are creating products, they choose their topics based on response to their blogposts. One of their blogposts received 200 comments and 500 shares? Maybe there’s a product to made here, so they do a test to see if people buy. If they do, they create the product on the fly, with their beta buyers giving feedback on live calls. Pretty soon it’s an entire course and the price goes up. Or it fails and they only lost a couple of days of work.

No big deal. They didn’t burn themselves out on a failed idea; they just found something that didn’t work. I understand if you have the lottery mentality. You’re stuck somewhere in life where you don’t want to be. You want out. Making a fortune on the internet seems like the way to do that. But online marketing isn’t a lottery. Those overnight successes you read about? They were years in the making.

Think about college. You didn’t take Freshman English and think you were going to graduate. You had to take classes for four years or maybe even five before you got that sheepskin. You knew going in that it would take that long, so you stuck with it and eventually got it done.

Building your online business is no different. It’s going to take months to get some decent money coming in and most likely years before that money really ads up to something stupendous. Just keep at it. Keep plugging along, finding what works and what doesn’t, celebrating each small win and one day you’ll realize you’re putting in a lot less time on your business while making a lot more money.

I can tell you from experience that’s a really good day. When I was in school, I was told by my English teachers that my writing was lousy and I should look elsewhere to make my living.

I now built a very comfortable lifestyle with information marketing. I wonder what my old teachers would say if they knew what I’ve accomplished with time and persistence. Then again, they probably don’t remember the scrawny kid in the back of the class who spent his time doodling and daydreaming about making great money and doing whatever he wanted in life without working a 9 to 5 job.

If I were to talk to that kid at the back of class, I would tell him that it’s the little wins that keep you moving ahead. 

It’s consistency and doing the work day in and day out that creates the big wins. 

It’s making the right decisions – should I write that article or watch Netflix? – that leads to more wins.

If you do not give up and you keep moving forward, then you cannot fail.

One time in the U.S. I was just foolish enough to go hiking with a group of experienced hikers. We were taking a route with a 2,000 foot elevation climb. That’s 2,000 feet straight up, spread out over a five mile trail of rough rock, tree roots, ice and mud.

I wasn’t in great shape at the time. After just the first half mile my lungs were on fire and my legs were turning to jelly. I thought the pace set by the experienced hikers might kill me, so here’s what I did:

I focused on the next little win. I’d look up the trail a few yards and see an especially big tree. “I just have to get to that tree,” I told myself.

When I got to the tree, I silently cheered my success while I paused to gulp air and let my heart settle back down. Then I picked out the next goal, “I just have to get to the end of this switchback,” and I did the same thing.

I didn’t climb the mountain in one go. Instead, I made a long series of short treks to the very next goal in sight. While it’s true the experienced hikers beat me to the top, that didn’t matter. Because once I got there, I had the same million-dollar view they had, and it was worth every step of the journey. Little goals. Little wins. Consistency. One step in front of the other.

You got this.