Nothing Can Take The Place of Persistence

You’ve prob­a­bly heard the quote from Calvin Coolidge: “Noth­ing in this world can take the place of per­sis­tence.” Well, today, I learned about some­one I already know and admire, who cer­tainly embod­ies this trait.

Her name is Ladan Lashkari. She is a reader of this blog, and she even listed it as being one of her favorites. But when I learned her story, I was truly hum­bled.

The story was writ­ten by Eric Holm­lund. His blog, “Eric’s Tips,” is another blog I highly rec­om­mend. As you shall soon find out, he wrote a piece that’s so amaz­ing and inspi­ra­tional, that I had to tell you about it, with Eric’s gra­cious per­mis­sion. (And once you read it, you’ll be amazed like I am by how pow­er­ful Ladan’s story really is.)

If you think you have lim­i­ta­tions in your life stop­ping you from achiev­ing suc­cess, take some time to read about this woman’s lim­i­ta­tions. Her story is not only cap­ti­vat­ing, it’s awe-​​inspiring in so many ways.

So with­out fur­ther ado…

If She Can Succeed, So Can You!

I want to tell you about a young woman who has over­come some extreme obsta­cles on her brief but chal­leng­ing jour­ney to Inter­net mar­ket­ing success.

Her name is Ladan Lashkari, and when I say she’s a young woman, that’s an under­state­ment. At just 20 years old, she has a youth­ful look that defies the matu­rity she’s devel­oped in such a short time.

I sup­pose in the online world, youth­ful suc­cess is not entirely unusual (I met a cou­ple of 21-​​year-​​old Inter­net mil­lion­aires last month in New York), but this story hasn’t even begun, yet.

The fact that she’s a girl mak­ing money on the Inter­net becomes much more sig­nif­i­cant when you real­ize where she comes from.

Ladan was born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and lives there to this day.

There are polit­i­cal, eco­nom­i­cal, and reli­gious obsta­cles that make it dif­fi­cult for any­one to be a suc­cess­ful Inter­net mar­keter in Iran, and in most cases even more dif­fi­cult for a woman to do so.

With respect for Ladan, I’m not going to get into the details of the spe­cific polit­i­cal and reli­gious bar­ri­ers that many women face in Iran, but just be aware that this story runs even deeper than I’m able to write about.

If Inter­net mar­ket­ing was a wrestling match, she’s start­ing the com­pe­ti­tion with one hand tied behind her back sim­ply because of the place she was born into the world.

Next obsta­cle: the lan­guage barrier.

Although you wouldn’t know it from her arti­cles and sales let­ters, Ladan was not born into an English-​​speaking fam­ily. She started learn­ing the lan­guage at eight years of age, and devoured every Eng­lish book she could get her hands on.

Even at such a young age, she began to real­ize that her flu­ency in Eng­lish would open up more doors of oppor­tu­nity through­out her life. Through­out her teen years, this fer­vor grew as she tack­led the lan­guage head-​​on.

A true entre­pre­neur, she decided that she wanted to become inde­pen­dent and pro­duce her own income. When her fam­ily bought a com­puter, she quickly began exper­i­ment­ing with ways she could turn it into an income stream. She tried all kinds of busi­ness; teach­ing Win­dows, graphic design­ing with Pho­to­Shop, and web­site design. She even learned C++ programming.

Even though she was able to make money through those avenues, she knew that there was a big­ger oppor­tu­nity out there.

At 16 years of age, she dis­cov­ered the world of Inter­net mar­ket­ing through the late Cory Rudl’s web­site. She bought and stud­ied his Inter­net mar­ket­ing course, along with other ebooks and resources.

She knew right away that this was the busi­ness she wanted to be in.

Her friends and fam­ily tried to con­vince her that becom­ing a suc­cess­ful Inter­net mar­keter in Iran would be impos­si­ble, and that she shouldn’t con­tinue to waste her money. If you’ve ever faced the neg­a­tive energy of friends and fam­ily, you’ll under­stand that it’s a pow­er­ful force that can quench your enthu­si­asm and ulti­mately abort the launch of a new business.

For­tu­nately, her father believed in her, and the resis­tance of oth­ers made her more deter­mined than ever to find success.

After about a year of learn­ing and study­ing the busi­ness, she launched her first web­site, and the rest — as they say — is his­tory. But that his­tory has not been with­out its fair share of bumps and valleys.

Jump­ing into busi­ness forced her to take her Eng­lish pro­fi­ciency to a new level. For a long time it was dif­fi­cult to read and com­pre­hend the many technically-​​oriented ebooks that she acquired.

And if read­ing com­pre­hen­sion was a chal­lenge, writ­ing was an even big­ger issue.

It would take her six hours to write and proof­read an arti­cle, but her deter­mi­na­tion paid off. Today if you search for her name on a search engine, you’ll find a slew of her arti­cles indexed all over the Internet.

And as if writ­ing weren’t enough, she wanted to write her own sales copy. Any­one who’s ever suc­cess­fully writ­ten a sales let­ter will con­cur that being a good writer doesn’t make some­one a good copywriter.

I’m amazed to say that Ladan is a good copy­writer. Being a copy­writer myself, I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t true. She applied the same vigor to learn­ing the craft, as she applied to learn­ing the lan­guage itself.

She stud­ied arti­cles and courses from the top copy­writ­ers, and prac­ticed until she had devel­oped her own style. While there is obvi­ously some innate tal­ent at work here, I’d say that she is also a tes­ta­ment that copy­writ­ing can be learned.

Start­ing her busi­ness was the begin­ning of a long uphill battle.

Because of the US embargo on Iran, she faces obsta­cles that most of us wouldn’t imag­ine. As I men­tioned, her cul­ture has already tied one hand behind her back. The lan­guage bar­rier effec­tively tied the other one. And the fol­low­ing prob­lems essen­tially tied her feet… a sit­u­a­tion that would crip­ple most mar­keters and par­a­lyze them from mov­ing for­ward in business.

Most peo­ple wouldn’t jump into a new busi­ness with their hands and feet tied. It’s impos­si­ble, right? Just don’t use the word “impos­si­ble” around Ladan…

To start with, she couldn’t get a credit card. That makes it pretty tough to buy any­thing online, wouldn’t you say?

My busi­ness relies on my credit cards for many things. Not a day goes by with­out sev­eral business-​​related charges to my credit card. As I think about it, many of the prod­ucts and ser­vices that I use come from sites that only accept credit cards.

She can’t open a Pay­Pal account. Again, this lim­its her abil­ity to make online pur­chases. It also rules her out of par­tic­i­pat­ing in a large num­ber of affil­i­ate pro­grams that only pay com­mis­sions via PayPal.

Of course, prob­a­bly the biggest dis­ad­van­tage of not hav­ing a Pay­Pal account is not being able to accept Pay­Pal pay­ments. She esti­mates that this one issue is cost­ing her many thou­sands of dol­lars in lost sales.

It doesn’t stop there. She can’t get a mer­chant account, so it becomes very dif­fi­cult to sell any­thing online. She can’t have a bank account in US dol­lars. So that rules out another pos­si­bil­ity of mak­ing or receiv­ing payments.

To make mat­ters worse, she can’t have any bank account that accepts wire trans­fers. This crip­ples her abil­ity to receive pay­ments from affil­i­ate pro­grams to her bank account, or from mer­chant ser­vices for her own prod­ucts. So even if she can find a way to sell a prod­uct online, get­ting that money into her own hands is a huge obstacle.

She can’t cash any USD checks. That rules out most of the other affil­i­ate programs.

She can’t travel. It’s almost impos­si­ble for her to get a visa to travel out­side of Iran. This means that she has not been able to go abroad to attempt to open up accounts, and she can not attend any Inter­net mar­ket­ing seminars.

Those are just some of the bar­ri­ers cre­ated by the embargo. There are many more lim­i­ta­tions imposed by the Iran­ian government.

On top of these phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers, she also faces another kind of dis­crim­i­na­tion that con­tin­ues to this day.

In a busi­ness built upon online image and per­ceived trust, she has been severely dis­ad­van­taged by the way much of the world views Ira­ni­ans. As she puts it, “the reac­tions are not very pleasant.”

She thinks it’s mainly due to the way the media has por­trayed Iran and Islam. This has made it dif­fi­cult to be open and build rela­tion­ships online, as she has found that even her own sub­scribers, cus­tomers, and busi­ness asso­ciates look at her dif­fer­ently when they dis­cover she is from Iran.

She says, “Some peo­ple even act like I am a ter­ror­ist.” She has received hate emails through her web­sites and also on forums.

“I know who I am and where I stand,” says Ladan, “but what the media shows the world and what my country’s gov­ern­ment does has noth­ing to do with me. So I just wish peo­ple in the west — espe­cially the United States — would under­stand this difference.”

Let me ask you a few questions…

• Do you have a credit card?
• Do you have a Pay­Pal account?
• Can you open a US bank account?
• Can you receive US checks?
• Do you have the free­dom to travel?
• Could you go to an Inter­net mar­ket­ing seminar?

Maybe you didn’t answer “Yes” to all of those ques­tions, but for each ques­tion you answered “yes” to, you are start­ing one step ahead of Ladan.

Let me ask you a cou­ple more questions…

Are you flu­ent in Eng­lish? If you said “Yes”, take two more steps ahead. Do peo­ple view you as a ter­ror­ist? No? Take three more steps ahead.

If this girl can do it, so can you. It doesn’t mat­ter how old or young you are. It doesn’t mat­ter where you live in the world. It doesn’t mat­ter what other inter­nal and exter­nal fac­tors are try­ing to hold you down.

You can succeed.

In spite of all her chal­lenges, Ladan views Inter­net mar­ket­ing as an easy oppor­tu­nity to take advan­tage of, and she encour­ages oth­ers to do as she has done.

“I think there’s noth­ing hard about it. It’s the per­fect kind of busi­ness for peo­ple who want to be inde­pen­dent and work for them­selves in a busi­ness that there’s no limit to your success.”

If you’re just get­ting started, she has more advice:

“When you are just get­ting started, you should know it might take some time to make the amount of money you expect, and you should keep on and don’t give up — no mat­ter how peo­ple around you try to dis­ap­point you. I think this is the most impor­tant and dif­fi­cult part… it’s where most peo­ple give up.”

In the three short years that she’s been in busi­ness, she’s worked hard and imple­mented many strate­gies that she’s learned by study­ing other suc­cess­ful marketers.

Out of every­thing she’s tried, she deems list-​​building as the most impor­tant com­po­nent of her busi­ness. “Noth­ing is more pow­er­ful than build­ing a tar­geted respon­sive list and build­ing a rela­tion­ship with that list.”

While her income may not yet be on par with the Inter­net mar­ket­ing super­stars, she’s earn­ing a liv­ing online that would impress even those of us liv­ing in a more gen­er­ous econ­omy (she recently earned $6,300 USD in a month).

The thing that must be kept in mind is that she is mak­ing more money than about 95% of the peo­ple in her coun­try, and bring­ing home more income than her coun­try­men who have 30+ years of expe­ri­ence in their careers.

I’d love to see what she’d be capa­ble of achiev­ing out­side the restraints of her coun­try, and so would she, which is one rea­son she is con­sid­er­ing a move to a locale more con­ducive of her busi­ness — such as Canada or Australia.

Editor’s note: Ladan, I can­not speak for my gov­ern­ment, but I gladly wel­come you to Canada with open arms.

She says the biggest key to suc­cess is, “Believ­ing in your­self, and promis­ing your­self that you will reach your goals and won’t let any­thing or any­one stop you.”

When I asked her what makes her dif­fer­ent from those who fail, she said that her suc­cess is derived from her per­sis­tence in fac­ing and over­com­ing chal­lenges and obstacles.

She points out one of her favorite quotes from Ross Perot: “Most peo­ple give up just when they’re about to achieve suc­cess. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a win­ning touchdown.”

When she’s not work­ing on her busi­ness, she enjoys read­ing self-​​improvement books (who would have guessed?), danc­ing, watch­ing movies, spend­ing time in nature, and going out with friends. In other words, she’s just a nor­mal girl with big plans and an indomitable pos­i­tive attitude.

Today she has more than 20 web­sites, and she hopes to expand her busi­ness by 400% while con­tin­u­ing to help oth­ers find their own suc­cess. You can learn more about Ladan and her busi­ness at her own blog.

As Ladan says: “If a young girl who got started when she was only 16 years old, with no pre­vi­ous busi­ness expe­ri­ence, with Eng­lish being her sec­ond lan­guage, with less than $30 to her name, in a coun­try where you can’t have a credit card or Pay­Pal account and is under a strict embargo from United States, and so much more limitations…

“If such a girl can suc­ceed, how is it pos­si­ble that YOU can’t suc­ceed — while you may not even have one of these limitations?”

Ladan will never give up.

I hope you don’t either.

Editor’s note: Eric, I con­cur. Great arti­cle. Bril­liant. And Ladan, you’re one of my favorites, too, just so you know.

About the Author

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