Are you Failing? Winning? What’s the difference?

So what exactly is the difference between failing and winning? When it comes to your business the answer might surprise you. Knowledge is one of the three major forms of power. If you do not have knowledge you will not succeed in your online business. The fact is you can learn lessons from success, sure, but honestly you learn a lot less from success than you do failure.

Failing is almost an art form. You need to understand how to fail and actually get something out of it. If you’ve tried something and it didn’t work out for you, the truth is you can learn a lot from that situation. Learning how to protect yourself from future failures, for instance, is one huge way that you can come out on top from a losing situation. You learn a lot more from losing than you do from winning.

Also, some of you reading this might not even know if you’re winning or losing in the first place. Personally I think that “winning” is really about whether or not your business is moving forward. Making some quick dollars for rent at the end of the month sure feels like winning, but overall if it’s not helping you make more sales in the future then you may not find it to be as useful as it could be. If you instead invest some of each dollar you make back into your business, and actually work towards building something up, then you will find that you’re more successful.

There’s another point I want to make here, and that is it’s EASIER to learn from the failures or mistakes of others rather than go through it yourself. If you’re trying to make something happen that somebody else is already trying, try to contact them and ask them how it’s going for them. Sure, they might not tell the full truth about it, but it’s worth asking. Also keep a close eye on what they do in the near future as well when it comes to the decisions they made for a certain failure.

For instance one thing that a lot of people bring up is the idea of a monthly charge for rap beats. But the fact is that so far every person who’s tried to do a “beat vault” with a monthly charge for beats has ended up cancelling their monthly service. I’ve seen big companies as well as little guys try to sell this kind of service and fail. This is just part of the game of beat selling online. Factually, nobody is going to be willing to participate in a monthly subscription for beats because it simply isn’t a product that people will pay monthly for.

Artists are much more likely to buy one beat that they are ready to write to than to pay a monthly subscription. I’ve even tried this same tactic in the past with little success. In my experience the majority of buyers ended up cancelling their subscription within the first month. Some waited until month 2 or 3 to cancel, while maybe just one or two people stayed on for longer periods of time.

You want to make a monthly subscription model where the average number of months subscribed is 6+ months. The only way to do that is to make them a resource they don’t have yet and are willing to pay to use. If you think about it, if the average subscriber stays on 2 months and the cost is $19.99/mo, why not just have a product that’s $39.99? You’ll make your money quicker and won’t have to deal with the subscription aspect.

I’ve made subscription services that lasted much longer than 1-2 months on average. In fact when I let other team members aboard Beats4Legends LLC, I ended up having an average subscription rate of about 6 months. So if I made a sale, I could count on that sale bringing in more money as time went on. If you can think of a subscription model that gives them a tool or resource they desperately need, then you’re in the clear for a sure win.