By most accounts, only about 5% of people who try making money online ever reach the $100 a month milestone. Wow…1 in 20?

From my experience with beginners, that’s probably correct. I wish I could say that half of the beginners who come to my site end up doing well online. But I know it’s not even close to that.

“You Can Lead a Horse to Water But You Can’t Make Him Drink.”

My site has countless videos and pages of content which show exactly how to achieve Internet marketing success. I have reviews of all the tools I use in my own business. I teach beginners exactly how to find a niche. There are many videos and tutorials for making sites with WordPress. Plus there are dozens of tutorials about SEO, List Building, and article marketing…the list goes on and on.

Why do so few people have success?

I’ve communicated in one way or another with thousands of beginners in the past 5 years. If I had to name just ONE thing that is responsible for most of the failures, I’d have to say it has to do with lack of proper focus.

(Many of you may remember from my early days my favorite mantra: Relentless Focused Action)

“…the lack of proper focus.”  The IMPORTANT word there is PROPER.

Many beginners have great focus. Most have INTENSE focus on making money by next month. That’s a problem of course.

They jump from one shiny object to the next. Where there is smoke there is fire so most shiny objects do have potential. But most beginners never give any of them enough time to get traction.

But others have intense focus on a plan that just won’t work

I heard from a beginner once who had many hundreds of poems a relative had written. First, I have nothing against poetry at all. They were good poems. But there are many good poems in the world. They published them into a book and were trying to sell the books on their poetry site. They had tried everything to sell these books on their site. They spent a ton of money on advertising (uggg). They paid for a LOT of AdWords advertising (uggg).

I’m not sure they ever sold a book. I told them to forget the site and just get the book on Amazon. But they had invested too much effort, money and time to go that direction.

Too much focus in the wrong direction.

Back in the early 2000’s I had an issue with focusing in the wrong direction. I made ALL the mistakes that I see beginners make. I could have just quit like so many do.

But it finally occurred to me (luckily) I was trying to reinvent the wheel instead of carefully studying and listening to those who already were successful.

However, as it turned out, success was not paint by numbers; I did have to find my own specific path.

But by looking at the success of others, at LEAST I knew which direction my own path should go. I stayed focused on the main direction and the end results. My path had quite a few detours and backtracks, but I never lost focus of the big picture and the results I wanted.

If you are still trying to “make it” online, here are three things to keep in mind each day you are searching for or refining your path:

• Have patience
• Have realistic expectations
• Study how successful online marketers achieved success and then tweak the methods to fit you and your personality.

Stay focused correctly, never stop  learning, and never give up!