The One Factor That Most Determines Success
I am immersed daily in the community of people who are trying to make money online. And besides trying to carve out my out little piece of the pie, I like to occasionally sit back and observe the lay of the land.
If you asked me what the one thing is that separates the big earners from the ones who struggle to get a monthly $100 AdSense check, it’s strategy. Big earner have and follow one, strugglers don’t.
Goals, ??? & a Plan
You’ll hear a lot about goals (The Secret) and planning (Goal Mapping) when it comes to manifesting dreams in your life, but the one thing that I see overlooked, neglected and undervalued is a strategy.
The three points of the success triangle as I see it:
- goal
- strategy
- plan
All three are essential.
Let’s take an example. Now I don’t know Darren Rowse personally so I can’t claim to know what went on in his head, but here’s my best guess at the process of a successful Blogger:
Darren started blogging as a hobby but I remember reading that at some point he made a deal with his wife that he would take 6 months to create a full-time income from blogging.
Goal: Create a full-time income from blogging.
Plan: Post 20 stories a day of valuable content to various blogs.
The part that is so often overlooked…
Strategy: Online advertising and commerce were just beginning to mature when he went pro, blogs were exploding in popularity and search engines were in love with blogs as a constantly updated sources of information. Therefore each blog post would have a present and residual value. Put enough little flakes of value online and the sum total would amount to a passive income system equal to a full time job.
The Easiest Strategy is To Follow Long Term Trends
The easiest way to make money or succeed at anything is to make a plan based on a long term trend.
Darren identified a trend and built his plan on top of that trend. If he had the same goal and the same plan 3 years earlier, he wouldn’t have made his full-time income goal in 6 months.
BTW, it is my belief that the same trend is still in effect. Meaning that someone with the same goal, strategy and plan could produce the same results as Darren did. However, since competition is higher, secondary factors like market research (choosing a profitable topic), communication ability and quality, and technical factors (search engine optimization) are now more important.
Take at Look at the game Monopoly
Who’s going to win most often in a game of Monopoly? The person with the best strategy. Typically you can win most of the time, just by having any type of strategy. For example: buy one high quality matching set of properties and develop them fully to hotels.
Monopoly is perfect for learning strategy since it rewards the grouping of properties of the same color.
A good strategy has a compounding effect on your efforts.
In the real world buying any property, over a long enough period of time and you are likely to make money. But buying a property in a great neighborhood or a city about to boom and you’ll make a lot more money.
If Darren had written 20 articles a day and submitted them to traditional publications rather than posting them on his blog, he’d probably still be a starving artist rather than a 6 Figure Blogger.
3 Reasons Why Strategy Matters so Much
1.) A well chosen strategy allows you to leverage the trend. An expression from my Grandfather, “when the tide comes in, all the boats rise.”
In short, it is easier to have success if you have a trend working in your direction. Identifying major trends is important.
2.) Strategy takes guessing and, more importantly, emotion out of the working of your plan. When you have built your plan on a strategy that aligns with a long term trend, all you have to do is to work your plan and pay attention to the macro events which may cause a change in fundamentals.
Your hunches and the day to day emotions should never influence decisions in your plan.
3.) Takes the guesswork out of it.
In my investment club, macro trends are always used to base decisions on. For example, about 2 years ago we asked the question…”how can you make money from the shortage of fossil fuels?”
The leaders of the club passed the question to a team of analysts who concluded, by proper research, that Nuclear, given the restraints of time and money and global warming concerns, is the most viable alternative to highly polluting fuels currently used to produce energy.
The best play on the solution to global warming trends = Uranium. Here’s a look at the chart of a typical junior uranium stock from the last year or so.
Some Trends that You Can Use to Build Wealth
- Near my city (Edmonton) there is $115 billion committed for expansion of an Oil Sands project over the next 5 years, which is driving housing prices up and up due to a huge demand for labor.
- See the uranium example above, as a response to global warming.
- More and more commerce is moving online, but if you look around, especially locally and in smaller businesses, you’ll see that there is a long way to go before e-commerce reaches its full potential.
- While approximately 1 billion people world wide have Internet access, that still leaves 5 billion plus, who are yet to get online.
- The middle class in China and India is expanding rapidly, causing huge demand side pressure on everything from concrete to autos to designer clothes.
- The United States government continues to be fiscally irresponsible, piling up a huge and possibly irreconcilable debt. Hedgers have reacted to this by driving up the price of gold from $290 in 2000, to $648 an ounce in 2007.
There are probably many others that I haven’t listed, especially in smaller niches. Leave any you can think of in a comment!
Summing Up
Strategy is the key to big and easy wealth. Most people don’t stick to their plans because the plan is not built on a solid strategy, therefore once the emotion of hope and greed or discomfort come into the picture, they doubt, question or abandon the plan.
Every blog post is a little piece of revenue potential, feed them into the right strategy and they will compound to meet and exceed your goals.
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Comments ( 2 )
Donald added these pithy words on Apr 24 07 at 4:12 pmJon,
Great post. In my offline world strategy really is key. This post comes at a time when I am trying to key in to my online strategy. Thanks for the input.
markinjapan added these pithy words on Apr 24 07 at 6:41 pm…Aye, those three and a wee bit of “Labouring Under Correct Knowledge”
