Learning to Give up When:

It just isn't working.

I belong to a local chapter of Freecycle (http://www.freecycle.org/) and some of the members irritate me no end. They are what the moderators refer to as "frequent flyers" which means they always say they want your stuff BUT they never show up to pick it up (or they say they DID show up but you weren't home).

One in particular first says "I came by and you didn't answer the door" and when you reply then says "I can come back by in a while" and never shows up again. This is also a person who refused to pick up a large box of food simply because I put it on my front porch so I could do errands--errands I'd already put off for hours waiting for her

To keep myself from going ballistic about these repeated no-shows, I've decided to simply not give them anything.  There are plenty of people who do want what I'm offering and don't make me jump through hoops to give it to them.

How does this have anything to do with online marketing? There comes a time in online activities where you need to take a good long look at what you are doing -- evaluate what the results are, look at the costs (in both time and money), see if the results are a good use of the costs -- and perhaps change what you are doing  or in extreme cases stop altogether.