Online Business Success Through Failure

I started practicing Aikido years ago. When I walked onto the mat, I felt awkward and confused. I was horrible. Bad. Terrible. Nothing ended up in the right place. I couldn't fall, roll, turn, attack or keep my balance. My techniques resembled a bad stop motion film with strobe effects.
In Aikido, all of your instinctive reactions are wrong. It takes a lot of practice to overcome the basic instincts of avoiding punches and kicks, instead stepping into them. Instead of a strong hold being a loss, it becomes an opportunity to introduce your attacker to the ground, suddenly.
An internet business is much the same. You're going to start out doing everything badly. The first product will squeak and whine and you'll say too little in some parts and cover too much in others. The conversion rate on your first sales page will probably be less than 1%. Benefits instead of features? Not likely in a first draft! When you start blogging, the posts will be short and me tooish or too long and cumbersome. Articles will be hard to come by and lack lustre. You'll struggle for traffic and sales will be dismal.
So what if you suck, it's just important they get done and released. What you're looking for at this time is feedback. Did the sales page convert? Am I getting a lot of returns? Where is the traffic coming from? How can I get more? What could I have done better? You'll be embarrassed by some of the things you do in these early days. You'll survive and hopefully apply the lesson the next time. And the time after and the time after... Focus on getting better, not how terrible you are today.
Here's 3 reasons why being bad at something is good:
1. For the ideas. Any problems you have is an opportunity to create a product, blog post or article. Did you find an effective way to generate traffic? Create an e-book. Don't understand what FTP is? Create a blog post. Can't do something in WordPress? Build the plugin yourself and sell it on to others. My suggestion: WRITE DOWN YOUR PROBLEMS. Keep it in a journal or a simple txt document. Log everything and someday when you're stuck for ideas, open it up and viola, no more research needed!
2. You get better at it by doing. Everyone was once a beginner. Leonardo Da Vinci probably once drew in stick figures but he went on to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But, you don't get better at something by reading about it, you only get better by doing. My suggestion: Consider everything between now and when you consider yourself a master to be nothing more than practice. If it's just practice, then there's no pressure, right? Now get out there and practice.
3. It's fun. Perhaps it's just me, but I find learning fun. I've learned you can't learn about things your already a master of, so if you're learning, you're going to be doing it badly. There isn't a single person who is good at everything. So make learning fun. My suggestion: Kids find most everything interesting. Adopt a child like attitude towards all the tasks you're faced with. When you learn something let out a big AHA! Then do a little dance.
So get out there and be horrible at something. If you keep at it, in a couple of months/years, you'll actually be good at it. That's how the masters got to be masters.

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