Yeah, I should probably have more than that.

But I don’t.

TGIF.

Seriously.

And that’s all.

Really.

You wanted more?

Sometimes you don’t get what you want.

Sad, isn’t it?

Deal with it.

Cause that’s all you’re getting today.

While you are working toward your goal, you may occasionally encounter distractions. However, these are not the typical distractions; these are paying distractions.

For example, someone may come to you with an offer for work. Maybe a buddy is willing to pay you a hundred bucks to help him move out of his apartment or something.

So, doing the work will keep you away from pursuing your goal for a few hours or even a couple days.

Should you do it?

Well, that’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself. The things to consider are how badly you need the money, how sure you are of success toward your goal, and how important a specific timetable is to you.

If you need the money, it may be a good idea to take your friend up on his offer. After all, $100 in pocket is better than however much amount of money that’s not in your pocket yet.

Of course, if you’re certain of your success or if you just don’t need the money, you might decline your friend’s offer. (Or, you may take him up on his offer just to help him out, but that’s a personal decision and the purpose of this post is to discuss financial decisions. Plus, your friend moving was only an example. It could, and likely may, be something else entirely.)

Or, if following a specific timetable on your goal isn’t a big deal, you might take your buddy’s hundred bucks and move some furniture.

Remember to keep your own personal track record in mind. Don’t decline $100 (or whatever) of cold, hard cash just because your certain your eBook (or whatever) is going to sell a gazillion copies.

Especially if you’ve never sold an eBook before or if you’ve had a string of what you thought to be sure things that didn’t pan out.

One thing that may interfere with your goal is getting distracted.

It’s easy to get distracted, and just as easy to justify the distraction as being something useful.

You might think you’re “learning” or “networking” or any myriad of other things.

And those things can be important, but it is easy for them to get out of control.

That is, you lose control as you lose all track of time. You start reading a forum and, the next thing you know, half the day has gone by already.

So, develop a schedule for yourself, and do those things within the allotted time on your schedule. Use a bell or some sort of interruptory aid to make sure you stay on schedule.

And, when the time is up, get back to your regular business!

So, you have a great idea, but you think there’s no way you can do it alone?

You don’t have to.

Too many times, people throw up barriers to their own success, thinking they cannot get very far.

For example, how are you going to write the book, edit the book, format the book, build the website, write the sales page, get a checkout system, and then market the book, all on your own?

Well, many people do. But, can they reach a million dollars that way? It’s not impossible, but most people never will. It is rare that a single product–especially your first product–will be an astounding hit. It happens, but a lot of times it is trial and error.

And, if you had a bunch of ideas, how could you ever get them all done?

Well, you can outsource it. You can have other people do the work for you and you give them direction and oversee them. Instead of you doing everything yourself, you manage everything and delegate to other people.

That way, you could put together not just one product to sell, but 10 or 100 or the sky’s the limit, depending on your budget, of course. Even if you want to write the book yourself, you can still delegate the other tasks. Or, maybe you like doing the website design, then you can do that and outsource everything else.

It’s up to you.

Instead of trying to be a one-person army, you can be the general in charge of the army.

If you had a product at this point, you could have offered a Labor Day Special.

People like saving money.

Anyway, so you’re bummed out because you missed out on doing a Labor Day special this year.

It’s okay. Just get some products done and you can have a special next Labor Day. In fact, if you have multiple products, you can have a big ol’ sale that’ll appeal to a lot of people.

Maybe.

At any rate, even if you missed something like this, there is always next year. So, make sure you don’t miss the next one. Just don’t give up.

Sometimes, it’s important to take a day off from your efforts.

Do something else.

Do other work around the house.

Take a break.

It’s okay.

Really. It is.

It’s also okay to phone in a post like this.

But it makes an important point.

It’s okay.

Relax.

So, you want to make a million dollars.

Well, no one else cares.

That’s right. They don’t care.

They don’t care about your dreams or your goals or whatever. They just don’t.

So, they’re not just going to give you money.

They have their own things to concern themselves with, and they don’t care about your million dollar goal.

So, if you want a million dollars, you need to figure out a way to deliver a million dollars’ worth of value to people. Now, if you can provide more than a million dollars of value for a million bucks, so much the better. People will think they’re getting a great deal and it’ll make it easier for you to reach your million dollar goal.

Rather than figuring out how to make a million dollars, you need to adjust your thinking to figure out how to provide at least a million dollars’ worth of value.

I’ve long felt that a marketer/salesperson performs a valuable service for society.

If you have a problem, they’ll connect you with a solution. Suffer from headaches? Here, take this and it’ll go away. Cat got fleas? Try this and the fleas will be gone! And so on.

When I was a kid, for a while my parents were distributors for a line of products. There was one product demonstration that I liked to do. It was for a stain remover. To demonstrate, you’d have a bowl with water. Then, you’d stain the water. You’d show how it was stained. It was a clear glass bowl or maybe just a glass jar. At any rate, you could clearly see that the water was stained. Then, you would stir in this stain remover, and the water turned clear.

It was like magic!

But, there were no tricks to the demonstration. I wasn’t sneaking anything else in or using sleight of hand to switch glasses or anything. It was a simple, straightforward demonstration.

And people would see how it works and buy the stuff.

You showed people how you had a solution to their problems which, in this case, was stains. Certainly, that’s a valuable service, no?

The problem is when you have a dishonest salesperson–someone who is simply after a sale without regard for whether they solve your problem or not. They just want to convince you they have the solution long enough to separate you from your money and be in the next town, conning the next group of prospects.

It’s people like that that give marketers a bad name.

I think this is true for online marketing–perhaps especially true. I’m on several online marketing forums and, in a couple of these, “marketers” will talk about how they quickly put a “product” together and offer it for sale. Sometimes in as little as an afternoon.

One of the tricks is to use PLR articles. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, PLR stands for Private Label Rights. These are typically articles (but sometimes also books, graphics, etc.) that you can resell as your own. Kind of like a store brand. Your local grocery store may have their own brand of canned green beans or whatever, but, in many cases, these are canned by someone else who simply brands the cans with the store’s brand name and packaging. That’s private labeling. And that’s what PLR is.

The problem is that sometimes these articles are thrown together with little editing and little cohesion. If writing styles between articles vary slightly, you can sometimes tell and it may break your concentration from the reading material. Also, some people put these together rather quickly, so they use whatever articles they can find, rather than creating an outline and an orderly plan for how the book should go together.

Sometimes, especially in cases where a whole book is offered as PLR, that can result in a buyer purchasing multiple eBooks, looking for a solution, only to discover that the book they just bought from Jane Smith is eerily similar to the book they bought from John Doe.

And that can leave a bad impression of “eBooks” in the buyer’s mind.

A couple years ago, I bought resale rights to an eBook. Something like only 10 packages were sold, so there would only be 9 other people selling the same eBook I was. Ultimately, I never put it up for sale. I never felt comfortable with the included sales letter. The sales letter talked about how I went to lunch with this group of experts and picked their brains in order to put the book together.

Well, that never happened. It may have happened to the original author of the book–the one who was selling the rights (hopefully!)–but it didn’t happen to me. So, it just didn’t feel right. I could have changed the sales letter, of course, but I never got around to it and moved on to other things.

A week or two ago, I was looking for some information on a certain thing. Then, I remembered that I had purchased resale rights to a book on that topic! So, I dug out that eBook from my electronic files and took a look.

Now, mind you, at this point I am basically coming at the book from a buyer’s perspective. That is, I am looking for information. I am turning to that book because I remembered the sales letter talking about how much information was packed into that book.

So, I look to the book. This great book. This book that had a suggested retail price of $27-$37 or something.

Guess what?

This book is next to useless. It just rehashes the basics, but never addresses the how which is what I’m really looking for. I know the other information, or at least some of it, but what I really want to know is the how of it. I don’t know that. The book doesn’t address that.

I’m glad I never tried to sell it, because people would not have found what they are looking for in the book.

It’s true that you can’t please everyone and you will have disappointed buyers no matter how good your book is, but at the very least, the book should cover what the book is supposed to be about. If I’m looking for how to do something, I want to know how to do it! I don’t want to buy a book telling me all about it, but leaving out the how that I am looking for.

The book also included free bonuses. You can probably guess how wonderful those bonuses were.

I have access to a number of books and materials I could resell. (I don’t resell them, in case you’re wondering.) I looked at one today. It looked promising. Again, I’m looking at this from a buyer perspective. I am looking at it from the perspective of wanting a solution. I’m not looking at the book thinking, hey, can I sell this? Rather, I am looking at it from the perspective of Will this solve this problem?

Again, I am disappointed.

There is another truth and that is that not everyone knows as much as you about a given topic. So, you might be disappointed in the content of a book, because you already know most of the content. As such, you might think it’s garbage whereas someone who knows less than you will think it’s gold. Thus, it is important that your sales copy reach the right audience.

But, at the same time, a book that doesn’t provide the information that you expect is not good. I mean, if the book says it’s about X, it should be about X. It shouldn’t merely introduce you to X and wish you good luck figuring out what X really is. It’s like paying thirty-seven bucks to go out on a blind date, only to discover that she’s not there. Instead, you’re eating alone at a table with a copy of her resume, and you’ll have to pay for another date at another place and time if you want to meet her.

That’s a bad date, and that’s a bad book.

Traditional book publishing has a number of gatekeepers. This doesn’t assure that every book is great, but it does help to cut back on the junk.

Now, some good works may get rejected. It’s not because they’re bad, but maybe because there is too few people interested in that niche to make it profitable for the publisher. Or, perhaps because it’s too similar to another book being released by the publisher. Or for any number of other reasons that aren’t related to the quality of the book itself.

So, that author could make an eBook and sell it himself. And it could be a very good eBook.

On the flip side, someone else who got rejected might think they have a pile of gold in their stack of papers when really what they have is a whole lot of dead trees killed for nothing because their content is garbage.

The sad thing is that there are too many people that don’t know good content from a whole in the wall and think that just because they can sucker a number of people into buying it that they actually have something good.

I can’t do that. I can’t sell something I think is bad, especially if it’s got my name on it. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to agree with me. But, I just can’t take something that I think is a piece of garbage and try to pawn it off on someone as the greatest thing since sliced bacon.

Who knows? Maybe I’d be rich if I could bring myself to sell eCrud-on-a-Stick. But, I have a hard time trying to sell something I just don’t believe in.

If it doesn’t turn the water clear, I can’t stand there saying, Look! It’s not as dirty as it was before!

In order to meet your goal of making $1,000,000 in thirty days, you’re going to need a plan.

A good plan is to promote something.

Or sell something.

Of course, once you’ve worked that out, you need to figure out something to promote or sell.

I have decided on creating an eBook (another one…).

I will create it, then sell it. If I price it at ten bucks, I only need to sell 100,000 copies to meet the million dollar mark. Actually, a few more than that considering suppliers and such will take their cut. So, at ten bucks, I may only make $8.50 or so a book.

I’ve already begun research, so I best get back to it.

The other day, I did a post on “How Would You Make $1,000,000 in 30 Days?” where the challenge was to come up with ideas for making a million dollars in 30 days.

So, how about we give it a go?

Actually, it will have to be in under 30 days, because today is the first day of September and this will be signup day. So, leave your comment in the, um, comments and get ready to rumble, er, make some money!

Don’t worry. I’m not selling anything here. Feel free to buy any of my eBooks listed in the sidebar though (there are two of them–the squares at the top of the sidebar). But, no purchase is necessary.

Just sign up by leaving a comment if you want to participate. You don’t need to buy anything. It will be helpful if you already have a website or blog. If you don’t, you may need to buy a domain name and hosting, but this is a challenge not a guarantee. So, don’t spend your last twenty bucks in the hopes that you’ll be a millionaire by the end of the month. Okay?

While you sign up, I’ll figure out a plan. Yeah, we’re really starting from scratch here. No plan yet.

Anyway, perhaps none of us will make a million bucks. (Maybe collectively we can?) The idea here is to get the creative juices flowing and earn some extra money above and beyond anything you may already make online.