Know When To Quit

I am not the type of person to easily quit doing something because I didn’t see results in the first few days or a week. And that’s not what I mean when I say “Know When To Quit”.

Some people may tell you to never give up, to never quit doing something because eventually it will come to be. However in Internet marketing, I do not take that stand. Things are bound to stop working or to never start working in the first place, not everything, but many things will. I want to caution you though, to not end up wasting your time on something that may or may not succeed.

What I mean is, if for example you have a product that you are trying to sell online, let’s say it’s an ebook. At first you spend time creating that ebook, the sales page, and everything else to go along with it. Then launch day comes… you tell people about it, but no one buys.

At this point, Do Not give up. Test, track, edit, and add to it all kinds of things to see what response you get. If after a week of improving it you still are not seeing any sales, or not very many sales, still Do Not give up.

However there should be a time to quit. I don’t want to say that there should be a time to give up, as to me giving up leads me to think that you did not try everything you could, instead you gave up half way through.

When do you know that it’s time to quit?

- When you have done everything you can think of to try to make it a success.
- When you have put in all the time and energy that you truly think is worth for that project.

The product may become successful eventually… but what if you had to work hard at it for a whole year? Would it still be worth your time?

For some products I believe it would be. But for many, I do not think so. It’s a call that you have to make, to know when to cut your losses and move on.

If your product is a big home study course that may sell for $2,000, then maybe a years worth of work is worth it for you. But if your product is an ebook that you plan to sell for $17, a year may be a bit to long for you.

Knowing when to quit is something that we all need to learn how to do, in all aspects of our life. If something just isn’t working after you have tried everything you can think of, maybe you shouldn’t spend anymore of your time and energy on it. This can be hard though, especially if it’s something that you have fallen in love with and don’t want to see go.

Don’t drag out the ending, learn from it and move on.

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2 Responses to “Know When To Quit

  • 1
    Dan
    January 22nd, 2007 11:25

    Excellent thoughts there, Joel. I agree wholeheartedly. We definitely need to give 100% to the things we commit ourselves to, but only for as long as there is still reason to believe in them. There comes a point when we should know whether something is working for us or not.

    I tend to prefer to err on the side of hanging in there a little bit longer than I should than not long enough on something. I don’t want to be the proverbial prospector who invested so much time digging where he believed gold was only to give up just when the next swing of his pick would have hit the motherlode! :-)

  • 2
    Stop, but don’t Quit
    January 22nd, 2007 13:54

    […] You hear it all the time: “Quitters… they never win.“, “Know When to Quit“, “Quit your Job”, etc. […]

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