Cooking up Success in Your Internet Business

Despite having a jaw-droppingly beautiful gourmet kitchen and a cupboard full of interesting cookbooks, I’ve never really stepped up to the plate and learned how to cook.

OK, I do make the world’s best sphaghetti. And once, a friend of East Indian descent even asked me for my Beef Shahi Korma recipe.

Otherwise, I open a lot of cans and consume a lot of nukable frozen entrees. Local restauranteurs know me by name and my dinner parties are either pot luck or catered events.

Weird, especially considering how much I love food. I felt like a kid in a candy store last week in Chicago with its awesome array of ethnic restaurants.

So, why don’t I cook?

Well, while the Nasi Goreng recipe sounds absolutely mouth-watering, you don’t really know how it’ll taste until you actually make the dish… and chances are it won’t taste like my Mom’s.

If you decide to go ahead and try the recipe, then there are ALL those ingredients to find and buy. More exotic ingredients aren’t always available in my small town, and it can be embarrassing to ask for Kecap Manis when you can’t even pronounce the word, let alone know whether it’s animal, vegetable or mineral.

Worse, once I forgot that a recipe called for dry white wine, bought some sweet stuff instead and we ended up having onion soup for dessert.

Too, an elaborate dinner costs elaborate money. Granted, it’s nowhere near what you’d pay if you went out to a restaurant, but you still have to cook the stuff yourself and then clean up afterwards.

After an exhausting trip to the supermarket, you’re pretty hungry. The pizza pop goes down nicely, and it certainly beats slaving over a hot stove for an hour. Two weeks later a moldy $20 piece of swordfish crawls out of the back of your fridge.

If you pass on the pizza pop, those hunger pangs may make reviewing the recipe too mucn of a chore. Overlook that step however, and you invariably find out that the recipe called for that 20 pound turkey to be thawed before cooking. Sorry folks, dinner won’t be ready until tomorrow.

Even after reading the recipe two or three times, I refer to it again and again throughout the cooking process. Sauce gets strewn and the pages get stuck together. So even if the dish turns out well, I’ll never be able to use the recipe again.

Despite the hassle and expense of shopping, reading and food preparation, a tasty outcome isn’t guaranteed. I’ve called the Chinese Laundry from my smoke-filled kitchen more than once.

Yet sometimes the results are simply succulent.

So, why don’t I go for the gusto and really learn how to cook?

No, it’s not fear. I do have fire insurance.

However, I do prefer my house not to smell of eau de burnt chicken, and the undercooked variety poses serious health perils.

Other than hearing friends’ kids say that they like my spaghetti better than their mom’s, I don’t find much joy in cooking. It’s easier and faster for me to either dispense salad from a bag or go out when I want more exotic faire.

It’s simply not worth my time and effort, therefore I just don’t act on it.

That’s how I feel about cooking… NOT my Internet business.

That’s absolutely worth the time and effort to plan and take action.

Learning how to market on the internet is a little like to learning how to cook.

Buy a book or go to a conference (get a proven recipe), and read it until you understand the process. Buy the tools and services (ingredients) that you’ll need to build and market your site. Then act on the process (cook – put the ingredients together) while referring to the manual (cookbook).

Unlike cooking, you can keep tinkering with the recipe until you get it exactly right, without feeding your first attempts to the dog.

Persistence is the key, and the rewards are phenomenal.

Especially if you want to dine out regularly because you don’t know how to cook, like I’ll be doing tonite.

I’m at home now, and just signed the backs of 24 checks. All that writing has made me hungry.

Keep at it. Even if you only learn how to do one thing well (affiliate marketing, eBay selling, etc.), you’ll always have more than enough to feed yourself.

Get cooking!

Cheers,

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If you’re still looking for the perfect educational tool to learn about all aspects of Internet marketing, check out IMC’s “Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet” course, especially if you learn better using audio/visual tutorials.

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