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One of the interesting things about living in one part of the world and dealing with a lot of people in other parts of the world is the language problems that we encounter from time to time. I'm not talking here about dealing with people who don't speak the same language as you do ... I'm talking about the language problems that may arise when you're dealing with people who do speak the same language.

While a language may be common to a number of different countries it's inevitable that there will be subtle differences and there will be sayings that are common in one country but have little meaning in another. The title of today's column is a case in point, it's still fairly common here in Australia but has it ever been common in the United States?

Here in Australia to bite off more than you can chew is a saying that we use to describe taking on some task that is way too big for us. Of course when you take on a task or a project that's way too big for you then you're almost inevitably destined to fail and failure can come in two forms

If you're lucky when you take on a task that's too big for you then all you may do is waste some time and maybe little money on that task before you give up. It won't have cost you a lot but hopefully it will have taught you some lessons and given you some experiences that you can use later.

If you're unlucky you will waste a lot of time and money on the task and it can cost you your business. For some that may sound a little hard to believe but Steve and I have seen it time and again here online and out there in the real world.

For small businesses ... and webmasters who do affiliate marketing are small businesses ... a constant cash flow is incredibly important and tasks that are way too big to handle can destroy that cash flow in no time at all. Sure the payment you might receive for a big job may make the task look very inviting and you may even have the offer of a part-payment up front but what happens when the time to finish the task goes beyond your ability to survive on that initial payment?

How do you survive till the final payment comes in and what about all the other work you couldn't do while you were concentrating on that one big task? For designers and copywriters with small staff numbers big jobs can often look very inviting but when you're stuck in the middle of a huge job you can't respond to other regular and potential clients and then they go elsewhere.

Of course at the end of the job you get the final payment but what do you do then? You've possibly lost many of your regular clients to other providers and you're then trying to survive a dry period till more clients appear.

Solo affiliate marketers may not face quite the same problem with a big task but there are still jobs that you may want to do that you see as important to move your business to the next level that can take long periods of time. If you tackle those jobs and they take days or even weeks what are you going to do about the loss of income that will occur because you've stopped building free sites or galleries? What are you going to do if you lose some of your TGP submitter accounts because you've spent days on a single project and stopped submitting galleries on a daily basis?

It's important to consider just how big a task might be and what it might cost you in lost time and diminished cash flow while you're buried in that project before you actually start it. It's also important to be realistic about those hidden costs and allow extra time because projects rarely come in on time.

When you look at the projects or tasks that you might tackle from a realistic point of view then some of those projects that look so wonderful begin to lose their attraction. It's easy to be tempted by the promise of increased income but all that money can just be a mirage so it's vital that you consider all aspects of each potential project before you jump into it.

And now I'm off to do just that. We've been offered the job of developing a very interesting website that one developer has already choked on. This site is not beyond our technical capabilities but it might still be something that falls under the heading of ‘biting off more than we can chew' so we're going to look at it carefully and assess the situation because we don't want to be the second developer to crash and burn on this one.