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.
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June 20, 2009 at 4:45 pm
i go poopy in my pants
December 8, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Kind of a drastic measure over a thing as simple as a toilet.
December 8, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Haunted Toilet? Huh? What? Geeze..
December 8, 2007 at 5:54 am
You got a haunted toilet? HuHu. Anyway, nice post for newbie and to experienced entrepreneur
December 7, 2007 at 11:03 am
Haunted toilet? Classic Shoemoney… After all the best time is spent on the haunter…
December 6, 2007 at 7:02 am
You would think someone had died in my toilet after I use it. That’s where the ghost come from I guess.
December 5, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Arrghh! Yes, it’s hard to listen to people like that that just want to give up. There’s so much opportunity out there. I hate to have to see someone go back to that office grind after having broken away from it. Yuck!
December 5, 2007 at 2:28 pm
I have just come home after having a conversation with a friend of mine where she said “Should I pack it in and get a job” What a dreadful prospect.
December 5, 2007 at 7:05 am
It’s my goal one day to be Adsense free. But for now I just can’t turn down free money.
December 5, 2007 at 4:23 am
Great post though that you keep tryin’ different things until it works. Definitely, that’s the way to go.
December 5, 2007 at 4:22 am
Wow, just get another house, that’s my little advice. Move out of a house with a toilet that can’t be fixed. It’s as simple as that. Unless, you want to keep messin’ with a toilet?!?
December 5, 2007 at 1:41 am
Isn’t that an understatement ?!
December 5, 2007 at 1:27 am
LOL … haunted toilet
December 5, 2007 at 1:16 am
Good read… f*ck Adsense though.
December 4, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Good Post
Though I thought I was reading a Home DIY blog in the first paragraph. Just joking
December 4, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Interesting post.
December 4, 2007 at 2:21 pm
This is a good post. Almost every successful business person fails initially at least once and many of them fail several times before they succeed. The secret is to learn from the failures and keep going.
December 4, 2007 at 2:09 pm
This is a pretty impressive post.
I really enjoyed reading that.
December 4, 2007 at 2:00 pm
You have to keep fixing and keep moving because the world keeps changing and keeps moving. In business, if you stop moving, your dead.
December 4, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Yes, learning from our failures and continuing to tweak eventually means success.
December 4, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Sound advice. I’ve failed more than I’ve succeeded, but I’ve learned with every new thing I’ve tried.
December 4, 2007 at 11:45 am
and to keep updating, you don’t want to have something work halfway when a little tweak could mean lots of money.
December 4, 2007 at 11:18 am
That’s the message. I didn’t mean it as a joke. Persevere by taking action.
December 4, 2007 at 11:04 am
interesting post. i think untilmately the key is do something!
December 4, 2007 at 10:53 am
Message understood. Perseverence and adaptability evidently make the difference between watching your efforts go down the pan or being flushed with success ; )
December 4, 2007 at 10:35 am
One other thing to learn from this post is sometimes you just gotta get rid of what’s not working and get a new one, a good plumber can fix that up for under a thousand easy.
December 4, 2007 at 10:30 am
hehe so you finally did this post , i thought u were joking at the beginning lool
December 4, 2007 at 9:03 am
I thought there might be something in this post like, “If you sh*t on your toilet it will be like having to many affiliate links and google will sh*t on your page rank. you have to respect your toilet and keep it tweaked so it works well. you can start over with a new one but there are no gaurantees” But I guess my mind is just in the toilet.