How to Conquer Fear in Internet Marketing

How To Conquer FEAR In Internet Marketing

One of the most common reasons people don’t find the success they want in internet marketing is fear. They don’t always realize this, or may not want to admit it to themselves, but when they dig down deep and are really honest about why they’re not as successful as they’d like, the reasons are all fear-based.

They might be afraid of having their products or ideas criticized, they might not know how to do something technical and are afraid they’ll make a mistake, or their self-confidence may not be very high.

Whatever the reason, that fear will continue to hold them back until they confront it and find a way to overcome it. In this report, we’re going to look at some ways to conquer those fears and become more successful.

What Is Fear?

There are lots of acronyms for the word FEAR:

 False Expectations Appearing Real
 Finding Excuses And Reasons
 Frantic Effort to Avoid Reality
 Forget Everything And Run

They pretty much all have something to do with finding excuses or creating a mental image of some negative outcome that may not even come to pass.

If you study how to overcome fear, you’ll see a lot of platitudes. Just get over it. Work through it. Don’t let it stop you.

Those things are all easy to say for someone who has already overcome the fear that you’re facing, but they don’t give you any practical way to actually implement them. I’m sure anyone who has faced their fear has thought to themselves “This is crazy, just get over it.”

It doesn’t really help though, does it? The fear is still there, and it still stops you from reaching that level of success that you want so badly.

In this report, we’re going to go a little further than the usual “just get over it” type of advice. We’re going to create a new acronym – one that will hopefully help you bust through your fear and, in the immortal words of Nike, Just Do It:

F – Find a support group
E – Expand your reach
A – Aim for the next level
R – Repeat your successes

Find A Support Group

The main reason that most internet marketers let fear hold them back – whether they do it consciously or not – is because they create these images in their mind of all the bad things that could happen as a result of taking action.

If they’re creating a product of their own to sell, they worry about things like:

 Will people like it?
 Are they going to get complaints on forums or other public places?
 What if people want a refund?

If they’re building websites to promote affiliate products they might worry about other things:

 What if someone complains about a product they promoted?
 What if the affiliate program closes their account after putting all the work into setting up their site?

Even methods with little or no personal interaction required, such as building Adsense sites, have fear attached to them:

 What if Google shuts down their Adsense account?
 What if Google slaps their site in some algorithm update?

Most of the time these fears are based on stuff they’ve read in some internet marketing forum or another. Someone had a problem of some sort and posted about it, and a bunch of other people posted responses commiserating with them, saying how they had the same thing happen.

Suddenly these totally random occurrences seem like they’re happening a lot, and that just fuels the fear.

The best way to overcome this problem is to find a good “support group” that you can bounce ideas off of and even do some test marketing to.

If you’re launching a new product, you can turn to this group for feedback. Either offer them a review copy for free to get some feedback, or offer it at a great price that they would be crazy to pass up.

If you’re building affiliate or Adsense sites, get some people to give you some feedback on them.

Your support group can come in several forms. It could be a group of like-minded marketers who work together to help one another with things like this. Or you might join a forum, usually a paid forum where the people tend to be more serious about helping one another than they are in free forums.

It’s amazing how far a little positive feedback goes towards quelling the fear that you have about how people are going to react to what you’re offering. And even if you get some criticism, if you’re dealing with a supportive group of people it will be delivered constructively, not with guns blazing the way you sometimes see on public forums where most people are relatively anonymous.

Expand Your Reach

Once you do some test marketing to your support group, or get some feedback from them about what you’re planning to do, you can start to expand your reach beyond the confines of that group.

The feedback you get from the first stage of this process will help build your confidence and make it easier to step out into the “great unknown.” At this point, you can choose to take smaller steps, widening your reach a little bit at a time, or you can jump in with both feet.

In many cases, your support group can help you with this stage as well.

For example, let’s say you were launching a new product and everyone who bought it during your “test marketing” stage thought it was really good. They gave you some suggestions for improvements and you had implemented those ideas into it.

Some of those people who helped you with the test marketing might be interested in promoting your product in exchange for an affiliate commission. You could set up a Joint Venture (JV) arrangement with a couple of them to promote your offer to their email lists (or even just a sub-set of their lists).

This would let you widen your reach a little bit without completely putting your neck on the line by launching it more publicly.

If you’re still struggling to get over the fear of getting started, this might sound pretty overwhelming. But the fact is, when you’re working with a supportive group of people, they are a lot more likely to help each other out. It’s not always just about how much money they can make, they also remember what it was like when they were just getting started (and the fact is, some of them are probably still fighting the fear themselves).

Asking them for help isn’t like approaching potential JV partners “cold” – with no prior relationship and not a lot you can offer in return.

And launching a product of your own isn’t the only example where you can use this same basic strategy.

If your fear is based around the technical side of things – setting up your website, installing scripts, etc. – you can ask your support group questions and if they don’t know the answer, it’s quite possible they will know someone who does.

Or maybe you’re worried about Google shutting down your Adsense account. You could ask your support group to take a look at your website and give you feedback about any “red flags” that they see. If they’ve got more experience with that particular topic, it’s pretty likely that they’ll be able to give you some helpful insights.

The key is to find people who have more experience than you do, but aren’t so far beyond the point you’re at that they’re pretty much unreachable.

Which brings us to our next stage…

Aim For The Next Level

As you expand your marketing and step outside your comfort zone a little more, you need to continue to take those steps.

Once you have a couple of JV promotions under your belt, you can start trying for some larger ones with marketers who have bigger email lists and larger networks.

Once you start getting some traffic to your Adsense site, you can start to implement some new methods of generating backlinks to increase your traffic even more.

The thing to remember is that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your internet marketing business probably won’t be either.

When you’re looking for ways to grow your business, it’s a good idea to aim a level or two up from where you are currently. Don’t aim for the stars right out of the gate, or some of those fears that are holding you back could be a little more likely to come to pass.

After you’ve done a couple of JV deals on a smaller level, move up a level or two. Maybe some of the people in your support group are further along than others and you can approach them for help. Or maybe some of those people know marketers with bigger lists or networks and can connect you with them.

But don’t expect to land deals with the all-stars of your market too soon. For example, if you’re selling a product in the internet marketing niche it’s going to be tough to land a JV deal with the Frank Kerns and John Reeses when you’re still working at a lower level of the market.

The same thing applies to other business models, such as building Adsense sites. If your site reaches 100 visitors a day, the next step you should shoot for is 200-500 visitors a day, not 1,000 or more. Setting your expectations too high will leave you open to getting discouraged before you reach that point.

Take it a step at a time, and you’re a lot less likely to run into the kinds of problems that your fears are making you worry about.

Set Realistic Expectations

It’s easy to get caught up in all the hype that comes through your inbox, promising thousands of visitors to your website every day, a huge email list and commissions coming in faster than you can imagine.

Even if you don’t actually believe the hype, it can have a negative effect on what you’re doing in the way of fear or unrealistic expectations.

All those claims of success work together to create a sense of “Why haven’t I reached that success yet?” which just fuels the fear that is holding you back.

If you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend unsubscribing from as many email lists as you can, if they don’t provide value to you.

Some marketers do nothing but send offers, often without concern for your well being, while some give good content, honest reviews, and alert you to products that can give you great value for the money invested. Stick with those marketers, they’re looking out for you, and get rid of the rest.

This will give you several benefits:

 Less temptation to buy the latest “shiny object”
 Less time spent sorting through junk mail
 More time for the important stuff
 Lets you set your goals and expectations based on reality, not some unknown marketer’s (probably embellished) results

Repeat Your Success

The final stage of our plan for overcoming fear is to repeat your success. This is really the point where the fear starts to seem a lot less intimidating, because you’ve already tasted success in some form or another.

A big part of fear is worrying about the things that “could” happen – most of which never do. Or if they do, they’re not nearly as bad as you build them up to be ahead of time.

Once you’ve seen some success, you start to realize that this is the case and taking the next step is a lot less difficult than taking the first one.

An important part of this process is to document what you’re doing as you’re doing it. That way when something works well, you have a record of exactly how you did it and you can go back and repeat it again and again, without having to think about it too much.

Having a system to follow will also help reduce fear because you don’t have to think about what to do next – you just follow your system.

This is actually what drives a lot of people to keep buying products that teach them how to make money with internet marketing. They’re looking for a system they can follow so they don’t have to think about all the details themselves. This helps reduce their fear, because they’re not putting their own neck on the line – the author of the “how-to” product is the one they transfer all that pressure to.

If it doesn’t work, it’s not their fault – it’s the author’s.

Developing your own system to follow has this same effect to some degree. Yes, it’s still your own system that’s on the line but when it has already been proven to work, you can suspend the fear of whether it’s going to work the next time and just implement it.

Every time you repeat the process and are successful with it, you reinforce your confidence and gradually the fear becomes less overwhelming. It may never disappear completely (in fact it probably won’t) but you’ll find it easier to set it aside and do what you need to do.

What happens when something fails, you might be wondering?

The fact is you’re not going to be successful with every single product you release or project you take on. Some products won’t sell as well as you’d like (or maybe hardly at all). Some websites just won’t get traffic and clicks no matter how hard you work at it.

As strange as it sounds, these failures will also help you to overcome the fear that you feel. Sure, some of those fears might come to fruition when you face a failure – but you’ll also see that failure is hardly ever as bad in reality as you build it up to be in your mind.

Maybe you spent several days or even weeks creating a new product and it fell flat when you launched it. You probably aren’t getting lambasted all over the forums in your market and you’re probably not getting angry phone calls all hours of the day and night, complaining about how bad it was.

Maybe you learned that you need to do some smaller scale testing before investing too much time in a new product. And at the very least, you’ve got a product that you can use as a bonus for another product you create, or maybe for an affiliate promotion of some type.

Or it might be a new Adsense website that just falls flat. You might have learned that you should start small before writing several hundred pages of content, to test the niche first. And you’ve got a site that will age over time and you can use for other purposes – selling ads, linking to other sites you build, etc.

There is always something positive to take from a failure, and the fear you feel about it before it actually happens is almost always a lot worse than reality.

Conclusion

Overcoming fear is a difficult thing for most internet marketers, and it’s probably the biggest thing holding most people back from the success they want. Most of the excuses you come up with – I don’t know enough about topic xyz, I can’t pick a good niche, etc. – all come down to fear, when you get to the root of it.

Much of what you read about overcoming fear is really little more than platitudes, and while it may help some people there are lots more that are looking for a practical plan to implement.

If that’s you, hopefully the plan we’ve discussed in this report is going to set you on the path to overcoming that fear. I look forward to hearing your success story!

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