One thing is certain in business…any business, you will face obstacles and challenges that need to be overcome.

In online business, there are an infinite number of things that can and will go wrong.

Your hosting can go down, your autoresponder might terminate your account, your site will get Google slapped, your Paypal account might get suspended, etc…

The list of possibilities of ‘bad’ things that can happen is endless and you will certainly face many as you move along in your business. I’m sure of it.

Some of these will be your own fault but many won’t. It really doesn’t matter which, what matters is your attitude about the problem and how you go about fixing a problem when it arises.

This topic is very timely for me because I just recently had a setback in my business.

As a matter of fact. it’s not even resolved yet because I only noticed it two days ago and am in the process of working things out with my partner.

Here’s what happened…

About a month ago, I began promoting a high ticket affiliate product that is fantastic. I’m incredibly proud to be involved with it which makes it very easy for me to promote. It’s fun to get behind something that you think is awesome and truly believe in…duh!

So I’ve been sending a good amount of traffic to this particular funnel where the main goal is to sign people up for the big-ticket offer but even if they don’t buy that there’s another low ticket option that is really good too.

Soon, leads started coming in and sales began rolling in for the low ticket offer which was encouraging and I was looking out for the big-ticket sales to start coming in as well. Based on the numbers I was hearing from other partners and the sales team I had a rough idea of how my traffic should be converting on the big-ticket offer.

I was sending the right amount of traffic and was expecting big-ticket sales to start popping off at any moment.

I got crickets…nothing…zero.

Ok, I thought to myself “Be patient, the stats aren’t there yet to make a decision”. I even considered that maybe I needed to look at improving my traffic quality.

I was tracking my clicks and conversions and the numbers were still too small to be of statistical significance so I didn’t put too much stock in it but things weren’t looking good and I was beginning to realize that I might have to rethink things very soon.

Then, as luck would have it, I got an email from a lead asking about the pricing chart for the big-ticket offer. There are five different packages for the big-ticket offer each with a different price point that is all listed on a chart on one particular page.

I went to that page online to grab the URL and send it to him because you get credit for sales from customers that come in through your affiliate links and this was my pricing chart affiliate page with my affiliate links on it.

Well, while I was on that page I happened to hover over one of the “buy now” links and you probably know that when you hover over a link on a page, the link appears in the bottom left of your browser window.

I noticed the affiliate number in the link and noticed that IT WASN’T MINE.

Every affiliate of a product gets an affiliate ID. In many cases, it’s a number, and let’s say for argument’s sake that my ID is 1010 but the number in the link was 1001.

Someone on my partner’s team accidentally screwed up and flipped the “1″ and the “0″ on the end of the links on my affiliate page. I have no control or access to anything on this particular page so it couldn’t have been my fault.

Not to say I never screw anything up…I most certainly do but in this particular case, it wasn’t me.

So affiliate #1001 was getting all my commissions on big-ticket offers.

To say that I was not happy would be an understatement.

I contacted my partner and explained what happened. They looked into it on their end and agreed they made a mistake and told me that they were able to trace things back and I had in fact made 5 big-ticket sales for total commissions of $871.25.

Now THAT’s more like it!

Funny enough, my forecasts indicated that I should have made 5 sales and I had, in fact, made 5 sales (a rare case of forecasts equaling actuals, hardly ever happens) but I just didn’t know about it because the other affiliate got credit for it.

We’re still in the process of trying to get everything moved over to my account but I’m confident we will find a way to work everything out.

There are a few lessons here.

Notice how when things didn’t go as I had hoped initially I didn’t immediately throw in the towel. I was prepared to adjust my approach and stick with it.

I was patient and even though I stumbled upon the problem by accident, I know I would have figured it out eventually.

It had already crossed my mind that there was a potential technical problem and I would have stuck with my plan long enough to know that it was impossible that I hadn’t made one sale yet. I would have gone looking for a technical problem and I would have sniffed it out.

Many would already have thrown in the towel by this point and walked away from the situation thinking that the offer sucked, never knowing that it was actually a winner.

In fact, they would have walked away before knowing much of anything about the overall effectiveness of a funnel even if the whole thing was set up correctly.

Wannabe internet marketers do it all the time.

You see, I had sent thousands of clicks to my squeeze page for this offer and the funnel is deep.

It goes like this: Squeeze Page > Thank You Page > Application Page > Video > Phone Call > Pricing Chart. It takes a few days to get through. There’s also a 3-month email follow-up sequence driving people back to the offer.

So even though I had sent thousands to the squeeze page, less than 100 saw the pricing chart for the big-ticket offer because a lot fall off along the way. That’s not enough to be statistically significant. You need at least 200 to see the pricing chart to start making decisions about anything.

Many make the mistake of sending a couple of hundred people to the squeeze page only and think that’s enough.

That won’t tell you ANYTHING at all about the funnel…NOTHING.

I could go on and on about mindset and attitude stuff because it’s that important but I really want to leave you with these two takeaways today: