Yesterday I was having a think back to when we were really struggling to make a living online….and actually it wasn’t that long ago. And as I was thinking about it, I wondered why it took us so long to start making a decent income.

We had been working really hard on our websites on a daily basis for over two years but were nowhere near to making a living from it. In fact the only thing that kept us going was knowing in our minds and hearts that this would eventually work if we put in the hard yards.

As I thought about it, I realized that it wasn’t just one thing that finally did it for us – instead it was a series of actions that got us to where we are today. They are what I call ‘massive action’ tasks (you’ll know that phrase if you read or listen to Tony Robbins).

In other words, as we reached a stage where we could see that the amount of input wasn’t reaping the rewards, we changed our tactics and instead of continuing to do the same tasks everyday, we took massive action to take us to the next level. Now we are by no means experts at it, and really at the time we didn’t even equate what we did to taking massive action….we just arrived at the conclusion that we needed to do something extraordinary if we were going to make this work.

I love the saying – “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got.” This happens a lot with people trying to make money online. They continue to do the same things day after day and wonder why they aren’t getting the traffic levels they want or the income they are trying to achieve. If you really want to leap ahead of the rest, then you need to take massive action.

Here are just some of the things we have done in the past that have taken us to the next level in our internet business:

1. Added massive amounts of content – At the time, we had read about two guys online who were adding something like 20 posts a day. We knew 20 posts were just a little beyond our capacity so we decided on 8 posts a day for one of our product blogs. That meant we had to each write 4 blog posts each a day. I did all of mine over the weekend. I think Wanda staggered hers over the week. It gave us a lot of articles to write but we did it.

The effort paid off and the result was that it made a big difference in the amount of traffic to the blog and a huge difference in the amount of  our affiliate sales.

We didn’t end up doing it forever – from memory I think it was a couple of months and then we started to reduce the number of articles steadily over a period of time. The funny thing was that the traffic didn’t decrease – it stayed at a steady level and continues to increase as we add content at a more manageable pace.

2. Changed the Quality of Our Content – We have a lot of blogs and a lot of content, but I can say with all honesty that a good proportion of our blogs have a lot of rather inferior quality content. This is because at the time we weren’t really thinking about our readers but more about making a dollar. When we changed our focus to providing more value to our readers, we noticed a huge difference in our income levels….and I mean huge. This was a major turning point for us. You can read a little about how we write our product reviews here.

3. Concentrated on Less – What do I mean by this?  Well we focused on only one or two websites instead of 20. This made a big big big difference….I know that’s a lot of ‘bigs’ but I need to emphasise the importance of this one. When we were working on all our blogs, we were really spreading ourselves too thin. It just wasn’t effective for us. The trick is to focus on one thing until it starts making you money, then and only then do you move onto the next thing.

4. A Change in Thinking – I think this one was a key ingredient for us. We needed to change our attitude to things particularly in relation to making money online. I remember us having a discussion about why we weren’t making the income we wanted and we came to the conclusion that the only people who make money online are those that tell other people how to make money online.

Well we know that’s not the case now but that was our thinking back then. After all we were working ourselves to a frazzle and getting nowhere, so that must be the reason. We all know this is a fallacy and product sites work extremely well, thank you very much.

5. More Time for Ourselves – It was at this point that we also started to work on ourselves a bit more rather than just the business. This meant that we started to take time out to exercise and to spend part of our day listening to self improvement cds like that provided by Tony Robbins. Funnily enough, the more time we took for ourselves, the more productive we were in our internet business.

Don’t let anyone tell you that making money online is quick and easy. For the majority of us it’s a hard slog. But there is plenty of opportunity for everyone and that is why we want to share our story with you in the hope it will encourage you when it seems that things won’t ever improve, just hang in there it will get better.

Just remember to:

• provide quality information for your readers
• look after yourself, physically and mentally

…and really believe that you can do – because you know what – You Can!