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I’ll bet there is something that is holding you back from greatness in your online business… And if you eliminated this one thing, you’d get more accomplished in a week than you’re currently getting done in a month. And not only would you get more done, but you’d make more money, too. Maybe exponentially more…

I know, because I’ve experienced this myself. There was something holding me back, and at first I didn’t even realize what it was or why it was stopping me from earning as much as I wanted to make.

This thing is in your business, and while almost every online marketer has this same problem, the issue itself differs from one market to another. Goodness, that’s about as clear as mud, isn’t it?

Let me try to illustrate…

Imagine you have a giant hourglass filled with gold nuggets. Any nugget that falls to the bottom of the hourglass is yours to keep, and there is an unlimited supply of gold nuggets at the top.

But here’s the problem: Because an hourglass is skinny in the middle, the nuggets have a hard time falling to the bottom. In fact, those nuggets are continuously getting jammed in the middle, and when that happens, you’re not getting any gold nuggets at all.

The solution is obvious – eliminate the area that is slowing down the flow of gold nuggets. In the case of your business, identify and eliminate the bottleneck.

Let’s say you’re a whiz at creating content, making products and doing social media. But building landing pages, sales pages, websites and all of that is hard work for you. It can take you days or weeks to build a funnel.

There’s your bottleneck! Get a program such as Leadpages or ClickFunnels to allow you to quickly and easily build those pages and you’ve just eliminated your bottleneck.

Or maybe you’re an expert at building pages but you’re terrible at writing content. Hire someone to write content for you or find another way to get content such as curation or maybe recording your own videos.

Perhaps the only thing you do well is social media. Then the answer might be to do social media for other marketers, teaming up with them and even taking a percentage of profits.

The idea here is to determine what you’re good at, what you’re NOT good at, and then find a way to eliminate, outsource or expedite the thing(s) you’re not good at – your bottleneck.

In my case, I was great at creating content, getting product ideas, setting up JV’s and a host of other things, but I didn’t like the technical aspect of building websites, pages and so forth. When I found a way to make it easy for myself, I freed up an amazing amount of time and energy which I then used to focus on my strengths. And when I did that, I literally tripled my income, had more fun in my business and for the first time found the entire experience to be thoroughly enjoyable.

I’d removed the bottleneck, removed a lot of stress and frustration, and replaced it with many more opportunities to build my list, gain new JV partners and make more money.

Find your bottleneck and eliminate it so that you can concentrate on your strengths, and that hourglass of gold nuggets will be replaced by a firehose of income.

I want to clear something up right now. Too many aspiring online marketers have bought into this fairy tale that says all you need is ONE BIG hit and you’ll magically go from broke to six-figures. 95% of the time it just doesn’t work like that. Nor is your online income going to magically grow like “clockwork” on “auto-pilot” with “zero effort” or investments.

Have you heard the expression, “Two steps forward, one step back?” That’s how almost every business grows, including any and all forms of online marketing.

Building an online business isn’t like winning the lottery, nor is it a movie. You don’t get struck by lightning and fall into a pot of gold. Instead, you do an affiliate promotion that costs you $500 in advertising and makes you $400 in commissions.

This is where most people quit. “SEE?! ONLINE MARKETING DOESN’T WORK!”

Baloney.

You earned $400 in commission AND you learned something, too.

You use that new knowledge on your next promotion where you spend $500 again, but now you make $900. You repeat that for awhile and you’re making pretty good money, all because you didn’t quit when you lost that initial $100.

Then you’re feeling pretty confident so you decide to expand your list with a solo ad that costs you $300, but you only earn $50.

Nuts!

But now you’ve got a bigger list, and you nurture that list and eventually over the course of weeks or months you earn an additional $2,000 from it.

Yeah!

Then you hire someone to create a product for you, and it’s a terrific product but no one wants it, and you lose $700.

Darn!

But you still have the product, so you break it up into pieces and use those as posts and free reports and combining that with social media you further build your list while promoting a related affiliate product and now you’re earning a cool $300 a week just from that while also watching your list grow.

Wow!

But you need to invest in a better website or software or whatever and there are expenses and so you’ve got to pay those and…

Do you see how this works?

Two steps forward and one step back.

The trick, therefore, is to simply keep moving forward no matter how many steps you take backwards.

If you graph out the growth of online businesses, you’ll find that 95% of the time the line goes up, dips down, goes up, dips down and so forth. But the downward dips don’t mean a thing as long as the overall trend is up.

And if you’re prepared for this and expecting that it won’t be all smooth sailing and that you will have setbacks small and large, then you’ll know enough to weather those setbacks and keep plugging away.

You’ll be far less afraid, too, knowing that it’s normal to have these setbacks. And in my experience, it’s much easier to work when you’re not terrified that your income will suddenly dry up if you make one wrong move.

The vast majority of online marketers experience a series of small successes and small failures, too. They go hand in hand, and that’s okay. Just make sure you either have more successes than failures, or that your successes are bigger than your failures and you keep moving forward.

Really, that’s the only ‘trick’ to online marketing.

You know I love residual income. And you know I think membership sites and newsletters are both outstanding ways to earn residual income. You make the sale once and you get paid for as long as that person remains a member. But there is something different about investment memberships and newsletters.

You might say they are in a league of their own, because the bulk of their profits seldom come from subscription fees.

Have you ever wondered why a millionaire (or billionaire) investor would bother to publish an investment newsletter? It’s not like they need your $99 a year.

And why would any investment expert charge $99 or even $499 for a newsletter or membership if it can really 10x or 20x your investments in a relatively short time? We’re talking about you receiving million-dollar gains in a few short years. All for just 99 bucks? What’s the catch?

Here’s what I think: That publisher wants as many people as possible following his or her recommendations because when they do, that publisher makes money.

Let’s say I run an investment newsletter and you’re a subscriber. I tell you to buy XYZ stock because I think they’re about to get a billion dollar contract with Amazon.

And maybe XYZ will get the contract, and maybe that stock will go to the moon because of it. But even if what I predict doesn’t come true, here’s what happened for me:

Because I bought the stock before I told you and thousands of other subscribers to invest in it, and because all those investors drove the stock price up, I made money. If an investor has enough followers, they can and will influence stock prices simply through their recommendations.

It’s no wonder why that ‘million-dollar’ newsletter costs $99.

I’m not suggesting you don’t subscribe to these newsletters if you have faith in the person making the recommendations. You can still make money, as many people do. Just be aware that the newsletter author is likely making even more money with their recommendations because of you and all the other investors buying into the stock the author already holds.

And if you’re wondering what type of membership or newsletter to start, well… this bit of insight might just help you to decide. 😉