Dare To Fail Strategy

This is my latest discovery. You shouldn't wasting time and delay your own success. It's like this, though you'll most likely to make mistakes, but hey – the more and the faster mistakes you make, the faster you will more likely to make it. It's a DARE TO FAIL strategy.

Though we always know this, but somehow, we never learn, at least for me until recently. Let me tell you my story, my latest new endeavor with internet marketing.

Now, here's the thing.

I have this idea on how I can make money the easy way on the internet. So I want to experiment on it.

OK ... so there's this idea and I want to experiment on how I can make more money quickly and I will need an autoresponder for that.

It cannot be just any autoreponsder. It has to be an autoresponder where people can subscribe by simply sending an email. Ah, you know ... like the one that SiteSell is doing ... Send email to tams@sitesell.net to get 10-day ecourse, the Affiliate Masters.

The one that I have at my website is AWAKE, and it does not do what I want. But it's the simplest autoresponder script that I have ever found and I for that, I like it a lot. Because of its simplicity, it's easy to do customizations like integrating it with a secure download system like I have on my site ... but that's a different story.

So ... I searched around for a script which I can buy cheap or get for free. I found Active-1-2, SendStudio, MailWorkz, etc ... which are great scripts but these don't support my requirement. People can't subscribe by sending an email.

Then there's AutoResponse Plus and Follw-Up Autoresponder from SellWide ... which do fulfill my requirements ... but then again, about $180?! Geez, that's a lot of money and yes, I am a cheapskate. And where I come from, that's RM 684, enough to feed myself for a month.

OK ... as many of you might have known, I am a web programmer. But I am a lazy web programmer. So the programmer inside me made me look around for free or open source solutions. Yes, I found one ... Email Go Getter System (EGGS). You can set it up and then schedule a few scripts in the crontab on your server.

One of the scripts that you will run on crontab will check the email address that you specify and see if there's any new subscription requests. If there are new emails in the mailbox, the script will just add the sender into the subscription database.

I thought everything was going fine and I was even started to work on my sequential email messages a bit. But during my first few testing, the script which is supposed to read the subscription email address is not working very well. At times, the script manages to move new subscriptions into the database and another time, it fails.

OK ... I was starting to lose patience. I was thinking about what I can do. Hmmm ... maybe I could write that part of the script myself. I would write my own simple script that will login to my specified email address and then puts the sender of new emails into the subscription database.

Because I have not done that before, I went back searching at open source script directories for a set of ready-to-use programming functions. And yes, I found one. But that's when it struck me.

I need to setup everything by tomorrow. I still don't have an autoresponder email address and I still haven't write my sequential email messages.

I was wasting TOO MUCH TIME. And not to mention that I am a lazy, lazy, lazy person. Doing things at my pace, I could have written that script and put it in crontab on my server, but I may need 2 or 3 days more.

Oh yeah, I didn't tell you about my discovery with my webhost's server. OK, maybe I should tell you that I have a reseller account and I put my little, little websites under that reseller account. We'll refer those as my client accounts.

The thing is – I can't do crontab on my client accounts. I can only do crontab if I am a reseller. And what's more is that my web hosting has PHP run on safe mode. With safe mode, one of the things that you cannot do is override ‘set time out limit'. With that, if I have a huge mailing list and my autoresponder is in the middle of sending out the emails, the process may die out because of time out limit.

And because of this new discovery, I will be changing hosts in a few weeks. Again ... that's a different story.

OK, back to the lazy web programmer story.

So I could do it myself, and because I am a lazy web programmer, it will take more time than most web programmer would, and most likely more heartaches and frustrations. I can buy a ready script but I am a cheapskate. And again, I would have to go through the hassle of installations and setup all over again.

But at some point, I was thinking, if I don't put this up quickly, the longer I delay, the later that I will become rich. The more I delay, the longer I am delaying my success. All that I am doing right now is PROLONGING MY SUFFERINGS.

Then, I said to myself ...

"ENOUGH. JUST GET IT OVER WITH AND MOVE ON!"

So for faster solution, less heartache, less headache, less frustrations and minimal investment, I chose a web-based autoresponder. Actually, I have always known that such a thing existed. But because that I am such a cheapskate, I want to do everything myself and save money at everyway possible. But at the same time, I am just wasting time – and prolonging my suffering and delaying my success.

So I settled for GetResponse. Well, I guess the two top players on the internet right now are GetResponse and Aweber. Frankly, I have no experience with both. But let me put it simple to you why I go for GetResponse – it's cheaper. And I actually tested their free version before deciding on subscribing to their service.

And heck, I get a 30 money back guarantee. If I don't like, I can just ask for a refund and switch to another provider. 30 days should give me enough time to conclude my experiment.

And when I am inside, instead of going through all the trouble, the hassle, the heartache, headache, frustrations and waste 5 days of my life – I got my autoresponder up and running in just 15 minutes. After that, it's just about writing the sequential and promoting it.

Though I have been inside for only two days now, but I like what I see. Like most autoresponder service, you can build as many autoresponder as you like. Just one flat monthly fee, you can have myproduct@getresponse.com, mycompany@getresponse.com, freereport@getresponse.com or what ever else that may come to mind. You can also do email broadcast, import and export and more. And I also get advertising to recruit my first 1,000 subscriber for free as subscription bonus. In two days, I already get 4 subscribers for free. And I am also waiting for my DVD bonus to arrive.

OK, OK ... those are just to sweetened the deal to get me to purchase. Let me continue with the rest of the story.

Just one thing about GetResponse though. I can only send up to 10,000 emails per day. If I exceed that, they would increase my monthly fee. Well, I guess that's fine. When the time comes when I have more than 5,000 subscribers, I should be able to afford Autoresponse Plus or Follow-Up Autoresponder.

And even then, it should not be a trouble because with GetResponse, I can use myown@emailaddress.com to redirect the emails to my GetResponse autoresponder. When I am ready to host my own autoresponder script, I can still send people to myown@emailaddress like I used to before when I was using GetResponse.

But until then, what's more important is about getting my business running at an affordable monthly overhead.

So ... that's my story. There are lessons to be learned here. Don't be such a cheapskate. Yes, you can find ways to save money. Do your homework and compare your options, but also don't waste time on unnecessary things. The solution is ready all the time ... yet, I was wasting too much time. What's important is get things running and start making money, FAST!

Another most important lesson is stop wasting time and just do it. Even if you make mistakes you will learn from it. I love this quote – "Dare To Fail" with my own addition, "... And You Will Succeed". There also this formula – The more and the faster you make mistakes, you faster you will succeed.

And it is fact. Successful people actually fail more times than failures. They made more attempts. Thomas Edison, Orville and Wilbur, Colonel Sanders are just to name a few. You know who they are. Just consider this a reminder and a refresher. I am writing this as my own reminder and refresher as well.

I am not at a place where I consider myself successful, but I am holding on this the Dare To Fail strategy.

Anybody else with me ... ??