It’s okay to have inspirational ideas. In fact, it is critical that you do, but don’t let them distract you for long or you will have nothing but loads of good ideas and not much else!

When you get that big idea, the inspirational gong goes off in your head, the exclamation mark hovers above you, or however it comes to you, stop what you are doing, immediately.

Then, very carefully and quickly, write it down with pen and paper or by using any one of a dozen note-taking apps you can load on your computer for free. Then, get back to working on building your business. Take no more than 3 minutes to do this.

Sure, great ideas are very often what makes great businesses, but nothing much ever gets accomplished if you spend all day flitting about exploring the next big idea.

When do good ideas become bad?

When you do let ideas distract you chronically, something like this happens. As you are exploring the first inspirational gem of an idea, you will find yourself opening and reading two or three blog posts, a sales site, an article and maybe even leaving a comment or two on those blogs.

By then you will have had two or three more inspirational ideas pop into your head. Things like “Hey, I could do that to increase my traffic!” or “Now, that’s a great idea”.

You then proceed to explore the first of those new inspirational ideas and visit more blogs, articles, sales testimonial pages, video interviews and more ideas come in, and by now they are coming at you at a mighty fast rate.

By now you feel overwhelmed and exhausted. You have all these ideas pinging around in your head, you have 27 tabs open in your browser, in fact, you’ve opened a second browser window for fear of crashing your first one with so many tabs.

Your email is going off because the first of the comments you left just got published, you bought one of the gimmicks you saw advertised … somewhere … and it has just arrived by electronic delivery, and now, you’ve just thought of something else you can do to make money.

Ring a bell yet?

Does any of this ring true with you? It was how I operated for the first 12 months or so of my online life. I was putting in so many hours yet I had so little to show for it.

I was making a few cents each month and wondering why the cash wasn’t just rolling in. I had visited so many blogs and posted comments, I had a good selection of PLR and MRR articles and products and had signed up for a dozen affiliate programs or was it 20 or 30, I can’t remember, and on it went.

I was working on my IM empire every single spare moment I had. Yet, it was costing me money to run my “IM empire” rather than being able to retire from full-time work after 12 months of such manic effort.

The magic bullet.

Then I discovered the critical ingredient, the magic bullet, the panacea to all my internet marketing problems. I was so close to the solution on so many occasions that, looking back, I wish I had read a post like this a couple of years ago.

The answer to all my problems was … ME.

I was playing, wasting my time, building up content on other people’s blogs, putting money into other people’s pockets, in fact, almost anything except spending time building my business.

The end result was that I had a folder full of great ideas but they were no good to me, or anyone else while they were stashed away on my hard drive.

The plan.

I decided to take action but, more importantly, I chose ONE THING to act on. I started by sorting through the mess to find the big-ticket ideas, the ones that fit these categories, in no real order:

• Good income potential
• I knew something about the topic
• There wasn’t a huge amount of quality content written about it
• There was a need for solutions to real problems
• I could get it up and running in under 3 months

After more than 12 months of fluffing around chasing the next big idea I had a lot of material to sort through. After a couple of days work I was able to use the above filtering process on the massive stack of material to identify … two (2) really good ideas.

1. Build a highly targeted niche website, focusing on a chosen, reasonably narrow topic and make money using the typical range of online methods (ads, affiliate, offline referals, real and digital products).
2. Create my own set of products and build a web of sites linked to a hub site then cross-promote each product through the web.

I chose (1). The result, after 3 months was Total Self Improvement. It is now being run via a different management structure with a ghost writer, but it went from almost zero to 15,000 monthly page views in 3 months and I broke even, paid a few other bills and started making real money.

What happened differently in those 3 three months compared to the previous 12? What had I done, or more importantly, not done, that made all the difference?

The one and only idea.

I picked an idea, one idea, developed a plan around that idea, then implemented the plan. Nothing more, nothing less. That, in itself, it the best idea. Stay focused.

That site now enjoys an Alexa rank of around 250,000. It is not making $1,000 a month (yet) but it is the result of remaining focused on a goal, having a plan and sticking to the plan as much as possible.

Sure, all during those 3 months I had dozens of ideas on what “else” I could do. The difference is, I wanted to complete this one project first, and I did.

So, by all means, let those inspirational ideas flow, but write them down for later examination and thought.

Right now, get back on track with that ONE thing you know is your big idea, your big chance to make it online. That ONE thing you are truly passionate about seeing succeed. Put all your time, resources and effort into it and do not let those dozens of other distractions take any more of your time.

So, in a sense, the biggest and best internet marketing idea that you can ever have is to remain focused on completing the current task you have set as your goal.

If you can relate to any of my experiences, drop me a note below about how you have, or plan to, overcome your distractions.

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2. You alone are destined for failure