If you will stay with me a while, I am going to tell three related stories and then make a point...I promise!

Story number one goes back to the days when I was a truck driving instructor. Many new truck drivers are very cautious, and even frightened at first. It is not unusual for a student driver to drive verrrry slowly. However, one young lady was going at incredibly slow speeds in all circumstances, and nothing I could do could get her to speed it up a little. She constantly spoke about never having made any real money in her life, and this gave me an idea.

One day, I said, "Shirley, how would you like a $4,000 a year raise?"

She said she'd love that, so I went on. "The company is going to pay you 25 cents a mile when you start driving full time. Let's say you can safely improve your speed and efficiency by 10 miles per hour. You will easily drive 50 hours a week or even more. That's at least an extra 500 miles a week. Over the course of a year, even if you only did that 65% of the time, and took a two week vacation, you would still make an extra $4,000.00 a year or more."

After that, Shirley speeded up quite a bit and turned into a fine driver.

Story number two happened a few days ago.

Several years ago, I put my daughter, a single mother, in one of my downlines, created a couple of web sites for her, and from time to time promoted them as well. One means of promotion involved a Pay-Per-Click search engine. Normally, I would send all visitors to my sites, but at the start of each week, I would switch the traffic to one of her sites until she got a couple of sales, then I would switch back. Now, for various reasons, which would take too long to describe here, this cost me about $100 a week out of my advertising funds. Her two sales would net me about $40 in commissions, so my net loss for doing this was $60 a week.

One day, it came to me that one of her sites was immensely popular at a certain traffic exchange, but she didn't have internet access and I didn't have the time to get the requisite number of clicks needed weekly to generate the two sales. However, I WAS able to buy a sponsoring position for her at $35 a month. This made her two sales at a cost to me of a little over $8 a week. Commissions from those two sales was still $40, but now I made $32 a week instead of losing $60. Additionally, I used the $100 I had been spending on her on my own sites, netting two additional sales a week for me. I made about $60 per sale, so that was $120 plus the $32 for an increase in revenue of about $150 a week. If this works only 60% of the time, I make over $4,000 a year more than previously, and still shove some business her way. Since over half the sales to new customers result in repeat business, the raise is actually a lot more than that.

Story number three also happened recently.

A few months ago, I was looking back at some web sites I created back in 2000 and 2001, when I first began teaching myself html. They were pretty basic, but had a lot of good content. I hadn't promoted them in a couple of years, so I loaded them into a search engine submission program I have, and fired them off. A couple of weeks later, they generated a nice little batch of inquiries, several of which resulted in sales. After a few weeks, this tapered off, so I brushed them up and shot them off again. Again, more inquiries, more sales. The increase isn't all that big, but it's averaging about one and a half sales a week. Since I made $60 on average per sale, that's about $90 per week. That's a little over $4,000 a year more than before.

I said there was a point to all this, and here it is. Two points, actually.

First, in my own experience, and in all the internet marketing and network marketing courses and literature I've studied, the importance of testing, reviewing, and refining your advertising and marketing strategies is of paramount importance. Sometimes simply changing an attitude, a technique, a wording, a process, or something else may be what it takes to generate or rejuvenate a successful process.

Second, complacency is a killer. You must always continue to strive to achieve maximum performance. Sitting back and saying, "There. That's done. Now I can quit." will eventually result in failure more often than not. My wife is a fairly successful, semi-professional online poker player, and every time she thinks she's got it all figured out, she realizes that she has to go back over everything she thought she knew and refine it even more to stay on top of her game. Every time she sits back and figures she's got it down to a system, she faces an opponent or situation that requires her to go back to the drawing board, despite her knowledge, skill, and success.

So, take a look at what you're doing. No matter how successful, or unsuccessful it may or may not be, review it, refine it, revise it, retry it...massage it and thump it. Who knows? Maybe it will give you a $4,000 a year pay raise...or more!

The author is retired from the Army after 21 years of service. He has worked as an accountant, purchasing agent, optical lab manager, restaurant manager, instructor and long-haul, over-the-road truck driver. He has been a member of Mensa for several years, and has written and published poetry, essays, and articles on various subjects for the last 40 years. He has been an active internet marketer since 2000, and now makes his living online. To learn more about improving your marketing performance, please visit http://marketingsecrets.xtramoney4me.net. To read more articles by the author, please visit his blog at http://donovanbaldwin.blogspot.com/, or http://xtramoney4me.net/internet_marketing_links/articles/index.html.