What Internet Marketers Can Learn From My Haunted Toilet

This is a guest post from Alan LeStourgeon We have a haunted toilet in our home and one of these days I'm going to smash it with a sledge hammer. I'll probably wait however, till we replace it since destroying it inside the house would cause quite a mess. The toilet has never worked properly even though I've been replacing parts, dunking my arms in the tank, jiggling the handle and various other remedies for nearly 15 years now. We still can't leave the house without waiting to see if this beast will shut off. We call it haunted because no matter what we do to it, two months later it's broken again. I don't even know if replacing it would fix the problem. What I've learned about enduring with the toilet is that we can't just let it go. No matter what, we have to fix it, there really aren't any other choices. We could just let it run when the handle gets stuck and have an enormous water bill or we could let the hose leading to the tank continue to leak and flood the house, but those aren't very viable options. You have to fix the toilet. It simply has to work. Translate that into internet marketing and you separate those that make money and those that continue to get their $43.18 monthly checks from Commission Junction or Adsense like they've been getting for the last 5 years. Perseverance is the name of the game when it comes to being an affiliate marketer, blogging or having any business on the net. If you aren't trying new things and always looking for new opportunities or fixing things that just don't do all that well, then just like the toilet not getting fixed, you end up with problems. As an example I have a travel related site that has been going for more than 3 years now and back in 2005 it was my biggest Adsense earner. But sometime in 2006 Google did one of their famous updates and my earnings dropped by a significant amount. Then my rankings dropped in the other two big search engines and I was getting maybe 10 people a day to the site. After doing some research and removing or redirecting more than 250 affiliate links throughout the site, traffic slowly started to return and it is now beginning to provide a decent income again. During the last 3 years as an affiliate marketer I've had many more experiences such as this and just like the toilet, I couldn't let them go unfixed. My internet marketing career over the last couple of years was compounded by a bad real estate investment and I was faced with either persevering and fixing these issues and discovering new opportunities or going back to work again which was a horrible option. The trick to being successful with your internet businesses isn't to just try a couple of things, give up because they don't work and say that you can't make any money on the net. Have you failed at 10 or more stupid things like Shoemoney has, yet kept going despite the failures? Have you read every money making blog from successful internet entrepreneurs, spent time in forums and researched every recommended opportunity until you're blue in the face? Decide ahead of time that you have to keep going regardless of what happens because your alternatives just aren't viable options. If you have a leaky toilet in your house the only way to deal with it is to continue to fix it or replace it. Think about the disgusting options if you just let it go.