Over three hours I’ve spent this afternoon trying to get a link to work in a report I’m creating. It’s normally a simple thing and something I’ve done many times before - create the PDF document, open up the editor, and insert the links. But for whatever reason this one particular link just doesn’t want to work. The other ones work fine, but all in all I’ve ended up spending almost an entire afternoon on ONE link…

All this got me thinking about how little things can stop you dead, and about the amount of time you end up wasting in IM. This is particularly the case when you’re just starting out. You’re trying to learn the techniques and strategies that you want to use, AND you’re trying to battle with the technology to actually make it work. I’m sure that my problem is easily solved, but unless you know HOW to solve it then it can hold you back for a very long time (much longer than my one afternoon….)

I consider myself to be quite good with computers, but as an internet marketer you have to be conscious of the fact that even an experienced user faces problems with technology from time to time. At the end of the day we’re internet marketers not IT technicians.

A subscriber emailed me recently and said that the reason he hadn’t written his own eBook was because he didn’t understand how to create a PDF. He’d actually got a pretty good idea for a book, and he was wonderful with the written word. But he didn’t understand the concept of a PDF at all, and had no idea how to create one.

When I explained how to do it I think he was pretty amazed at how simple it was. This one little thing had held him back for years. It had stopped him writing his book, and had been a mental barrier to taking action.

And sometimes in internet marketing you have to take a step back and think about what your customers might NOT KNOW. It’s easy for some guru to sit there writing about a new technique to make money online and then assume that their customers already have the knowledge to put it into action. I’ve read many many eBooks on how to write and sell an eBook, but only one or two actually explained the process of creating a PDF.

Now you might be thinking - ‘yea, but if you don’t know how to do something then it’s easy to find out through the internet’ - and that IS perfectly true, but sometimes something can seem so alien to you that it discourages you from even trying to find out.

If you’re trying to build a business in the internet marketing niche then you have to remember that amongst your subscribers there might well be 80 year old’s who have only recently found the internet, not just 18 year old whizz kids who (annoyingly) know everything.

It’s very easy to spend all your time doing things that aren’t actually building your business. I could theoretically spend the next 7 days solidly trying to solve my link problem, but would that help me to sell my eBook? Nope!

It’s a strange thing with computers too. Internet marketing has the power to change your life (of that I have no doubt,) but at the same time it has the ability to totally frustrate and turn you away from IM completely. I’m not talking about deeply technical things either. Most of the skills you need to build an online business are quite simple, but sometimes it’s the little things that hold you back the most.

Ps. If anyone knows about links in PDF’s, or you’ve got something else you’d like to say, then drop me a comment : -) I always like to know if people are identifying with my posts.