Magnetic Copywriter

Online Business Lessons I Learned from My Car

By Rick De Lima

It's funny how life sends us valuable lessons in ways that are not always obvious at first.

There I was flying down the highway. Nice sunny day. The car is purring like a kitten. I'm feeling pretty good.

Suddenly without warning. I'm going nowhere in a hurry. Got my foot on the gas, should be accelerating. Instead I hear this high pitched whirring sound and I'm slowing down. What the heck is going on?

I look at my dash instuments and notice the engine is reving up over the red line. For those of you not familiar with motors; its the danger zone. Your motor could seize up at any time.

A two hour drive suddenly became a six hour ordeal. A marathon against time. Since I'm on a country highway there are no rest stops or safe pull off areas. I had to nurse it along to a transmission shop.

Turns out my transmission chewed up third gear, not good. Whoa, I wasn't ready for this. It's quite a costly repair. Over two thousand dollars.

So what does all of this have to do with business. Well, as I was sitting in the 'tranny' shop waiting for my wife to pick me up, I started thinking there's got to be a lesson in all of this.

You work hard at your business. Everything seems to be running smoothly, so you figure just click on the auto-pilot and cruise for a while. Ahh! Feels good.

In business as in life there are many things we take for granted. One minute you're cruising along without a care in the world. A minute later you're going nowhere. The term spinning your wheels comes to mind. Sound familiar?

Your foot is on the gas peddle. In fact for most of us we've got the pedal to the metal. If that's so, then how come we can't seem to reach our destination?

Sometimes it seems like our business is going in reverse.

So the lessons learned? Sometimes backing off the pedal is a good idea. Certainly taking time to do a tune up on your business can save you costly downtime.

In the case of your car, a mechanical break down is fairly obvious. In your online business an unforseen failure may not be so apparent.

You load your autoresponder messages, click your mouse and off you go. Or at least you think so. How many times do you follow up on your messages to see if they got through; or even if they were delivered?

Why is your sign up rate slowing down? How many times has your cyber transmission slipped out of third gear? Bounced emails, spam filters, stale copy and faulty links or software can all mean a loss of income for you.

You see transmission problems can pop up (no pun intended) at any time and be quite costly.

Just like my car trouble could probably have been prevented, so to can your online business break downs.

With a little preventive maintenance, you can reach more people, more of the time. That's why backing up your files is important. You do back up don't you? Yeah right, just like I do. So, what if your customer list disappeared into cyber space tonight? What would happen to your business?

The point is even though you can earn money on the Internet 24/7 you should take the time to run a few business checks. By doing so you'll avoid serious and expensive transmission break downs.

If you want to succeed then pay attention to these details. Work hard at the margin constantly and you will be successful.

Enjoy your ride on the information highway. Until next time.

Happy Motoring.

Rick De Lima is a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant. He has written and ghostwritten numerous articles, books and reports on various subjects. To find out more go to: www.MagneticCopywriter.com