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I know it held me back for nearly two years before I finally saw it. You don't need to take that long :-) Learn from my mistake today and succeed.

I wanted to title this article The Ultimate Secret To Your Online Success. But I suspected that not many people would actually believe the claim. As I wanted as many people learn from it as possible, I settled for a less catchy but more believable title.

I consider what I 'discovered' the ultimate secret not because you can't find it anywhere. You can. In fact many successful people talk about it quite openly.

I do consider it a secret because it took me almost two years online to discover. It stared me right in the eyes the whole time, yet I couldn't see it. As far as I was concerned it was hidden from me.

Then after two years of struggling to make any decent income online, it was time for some deep soul searching.

I had my back against the wall: It was either turn it around and start making money online, or go back to my old career. For a while I also considered selling one of our homes, but my wife and I decided that this was a dumb idea. Selling a house was not going to solve my problem. It would only prolong my online agony.

What I really needed was to discover what I was doing wrong for the past two years, and change it. Otherwise, I was quite prepared to go back to my successful computer programming career. (But I just didn't like the idea of working for someone else again.)

It didn't take me long to discover what I was doing wrong. And this brings me to the ultimate secret:

LASER FOCUS

If you have been trying to make money online and haven't been very successful, you can probably relate to some of the following.

While still at my old job, I discovered the world of the online marketing. Got quite excited about the possibilities.

I did some research and have invested in what I considered to be the best ebook on the subject.

Few months later when the opportunity came up (or so I thought at the time), I decided to become a full time online marketer. I also decided to specialize in affiliate marketing.

I really applied myself the first couple of months or so.

Then I discovered another great book on affiliate marketing. Bought it.

Then I discovered this great tool that would help you not only create great looking affiliate websites, but would also tell you what you needed to change on each page in order to make it optimized for search engines.

I really liked the idea, so I bought the tool.

Slowly but surely, I was becoming more and more confused. Which guru do I follow? All three approaches worked. But I had to know which one worked better (I'm very analytical by nature ;-) ... Instead of following one, I began to follow them all.

I lost my focus. As I lost focus, my search engine traffic stopped growing. As my traffic stopped growing, my income stopped growing as well. I started becoming more and more frustrated and searched for other, "better" ways of making money online.

Then I discovered that another affiliate marketer got quite successful buying ads on Google. I had to find out how. Bought that ebook too :-)

It only started getting worse from here on.

Over the period of little more than a year, I managed to spend thousands of dollars on various Internet marketing ebooks and courses. Most of them were really good. I always do a pretty thorough research and rarely am unlucky enough to buy rubbish (although it does happen occasionally).

The problem was not with the materials I bought, the problem was that I didn't apply any of them long enough to see the full results.

I wasn't following any one expert for long enough to give myself a fighting chance. I was too distracted. In short, I lacked FOCUS.

Affiliate marketing is one of the greatest opportunities on the face of the Earth. And so too are dozens of other methods of making money online. Search engines do reward with free traffic those that apply themselves diligently. Yes, you can make money with Google AdWords, if you stick with it and study it hard enough.

Why am I telling you all of this?

It certainly doesn't give me any satisfaction to talk about my failures. The only reason I wanted to bring this up is to make you aware of what you are probably doing wrong yourself.

Please learn from my mistakes. Life is simply too short to make all of the mistakes yourself.

I want to save you months or years of frustration. Once you waste that time, it's gone forever. Not to mention the financial and emotional cost.

You need FOCUS. Not just any type of focus. You need LASER FOCUS. If you look at a 40 Watt light bulb, all you see is a nice, soft light, probably not strong enough to light up an average size room properly. But you take the same 40 Watts and put it out of a laser gun, and what you will discover is that this FOCUSED beam of light can cut through various objects like a knife can cut through paper. Wow. Same amount of energy, different focus. LASER FOCUS.

Focus means, doing only one project at a time.

Focus means, bringing your current project to fruition, before you embark on another one.

Focus means you stop buying every new ebook or PHP script that comes out - which you often do out of fear of missing out.

Focus means unsubscribing from all ezines, except one or two that you consider the absolutely best ones for your particular situation.

Focus means not wasting your time surfing the net. At least not until all of your tasks for the day are completed (and even then you need to put a strict time limit on it).

The day you regain your focus, your life will change around. Mine has.

May the focus be with you.