Monday, June 2, 2008

My Purpose

I have been online for aout 10 years now. I have experimented with online marketing, downloaded ebooks that promise me I will make loads of money if only I..., maxed out my credit cards to pay for this information, spent hours and hours downloading and reviewing "free" information from the many givewaways I participated in. I have felt guilty about the amount of time I have spent doing this, the time I have spent reading and sorting the many emails I have received, trying to decide what to keep and what to trash, who is offering what this week, how can I make some money from this.

I read something this week that really struck home with me. Funnily enough it was a book about MLM Marketing, but with a difference. One thing the author said was that you should never promote a product you haven't tried. If you don't know how it works, how can you tell anyone else about its benefits. I'm sure you, like me, have received multiple emails with the same heading and the same wording - affiliates who are promoting a product they know nothing about. I too have been guilty.

The other thing the author talked about was building relationships. That took me back to the reason I wanted to get involved online, to build relationships with people, to share the knowledge and skill that I had gained to help them in their daily lives. I had even taken a coaching course to allow me to do this and yet I wasted all this time running from one program to another, one traffic exchange to another, only to become exhausted and return to my real passion.

Now is the time to go back to the beginning. To get out the CD's that Mike provided me and listen to them again. To withdraw from the Traffic Exchanges until I have developed my focus and then target simply those that will support my goals. To develop my website with focus on providing the type of information that I know.

I have been a career counsellor for 20 years and have done training for most of those years. I joined Toastmasters in 2002 and so I have skills and experience in that area as well. I have taken coaching courses, learned about personalities with Myers Briggs and Personality Dimensions (True Colors)and completed a University Degree in Social Development Studies. All of these abilities and interests involve people and yet I am spending more and more of my time not helping people, but insread reading email that I don't need to read and surfing on traffic exchanges to build credits for my webpages.

It is definitely time to refocus and get back to the basics.

I invite you to comment and check back to see how I'm doing. If you have any advice for me, if you've gone through this yourself, I'd sure like to hear from you.

Fran

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