Recent events in the US and the UK have shown that things don’t always go to plan, even if you’ve got a large team of people working for you.

So if the things you’re planning to do or have recently implemented don’t go exactly as you thought they would, take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone.

One of the ways this is usually explained is a plane or a boat is constantly adjusting course to take account of what’s happening en route.

And we need to do the same.

• Sometimes things haven’t gone to plan because we got distracted or time “ran out” that day. If that happens to you occasionally, it proves you’re human. If it happens to you every day and your internet marketing business will always be started “tomorrow” then you need to ask yourself whether you’re serious or whether this is just a dream and then either keep or change the answer.
• Sometimes external influences take over and it seems the whole world is looking elsewhere – that can be the case but with the size of the worldwide market and the disparate makeup of people in it, chances are there will be some people who’ll be relieved to get away from the latest mega event and do something else.
• Sometimes you’ll need to pick up the pieces and start over. That’s happened recently in both the UK and the US – lots of pieces that no longer fit the puzzle, lots of toys no longer in prams. But Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and 2017 will all still happen for the vast majority of the population. There could even be the internet’s version of comfort food and an uptick in spending. Especially if you take the time to create a “hook” for people to justify spending some money.

The unexpected happens a lot so it’s worth getting yourself to a mental state where you’re not thrown about it for too long. The phrase “get over it” might seem like tough love but it’s actually a good one to follow a lot of the time.

There’s plenty of places to turn for help with almost anything that happens and it’s worth not being too proud to seek help.

In internet marketing, the unexpected takes the form of Google’s algorithm (you should actually expect that to change on a regular basis and not be too reliant on direct traffic from Google, just taking it as a bonus if and when it happens); it comes with spikes if something happens to suddenly come into favour (a brief mention by a powerful online presence can do that); it comes from that sure-fire product you just bought/created/sold as an affiliate that vanishes without trace.

Those are all normal things that happen all the time.

Ted Nicholas – one of the world’s top copywriters – only creates a successful sales letter every few times. The other ones are duds.

Dan Kennedy said that the late night informercials he helped create didn’t always work out. But the only way his clients could find out whether or not their quarter of a million dollars was going to work was to air the commercial. The ones that worked got re-aired. The ones that didn’t had a post mortem and were either tweaked or thrown away.

I’m just reading a book by Richard Koch and the firms he invests in – even with lots of research – only work about one time in three. But that gets him an annual 20% return, even after the ones that didn’t work out.

So it’s normal if things don’t go to plan.

But the trick is to keep at it (so long as you’re not flogging a dead horse – that MySpace campaign is probably worth dropping!)

Take stock, analyse, adjust and keep at it.

And be grateful you don’t own a polling company – their recent very public track record calls into question their results in other sectors. The methodology will have been the same and the inaccurate results will apply to all their research.