Remember when you first made the decision to pour yourself into internet marketing?
Maybe you've felt the rush of quitting your 9-to-5 in favor
of starting off on a venture where success or failure rest squarely on
your shoulders and yours alone, where earning potential is virtually
unlimited and the possibilities seem endless. It's an exciting moment,
to be sure. But are you still excited?
Far too many marketers find themselves ambling down a boring dirt road
that started out as a gold-paved promenade. In other words, they burn
out. They get discouraged as they hit a ceiling, or maybe they just get
bored in their routine. Whatever the reason, it's always important to
have a few tools for getting out of a rut on hand. For starters, the biggest
obstacles are always mental. While you want to be constantly learning and
getting smarter from your experiences, you don't want to lose sight of your
original vision and mindset. There's a talent to learning from experiences
without letting them make you overly cynical or discouraged. Remember
how excited you were to be your own boss? Remember how excited you
were to bring your business/product/vision to the world? Good. Now be
that person again.
Of course, it also helps if you've got the concrete routines and systems
in place to help foster such mindsets. Often, the hardest part about
working for yourself is, well, making yourself work. Having a strict
daily schedule in place can help you stay on task. Many pros use their
first few actions of the day as a psychological trigger and launching
pad for the rest of the day. For example, you might begin each day by
doing a 30 second speed organizing of your workplace, then a 5 minute
email blitz, followed by brewing your morning cup of coffee. Repeating
your process each day can get you in the mood to work.
Don't be afraid to expand. Sometimes, you're starting off with next to
nothing and have to do the grunt work for a while, but even someone with
the smallest of starting capital (or none at all) should be looking to
move to delegation and expansion as soon as possible. A couple of years
ago, article/content marketing was huge. The people who made a
substantial living off of it, however, weren't those writing articles
day in and day out. Instead, these people quickly hired a writing and
website team under them to allow for rapid growth. Or perhaps they
started a large writing outfit to cater to the marketers working with
content volume. Either way, they were running a business, not a
self-employment hobby.
In a business, you would work toward hiring and expanding, and that's
exactly what you should do. Take stock of your resources, and look at
which tasks can be quickly contracted to freelancers to help give you
more time to plan company growth. For many, the first task to go is
content creation. For others, it might be SEO efforts. Whatever isn't
exciting to you and is within budget to hire out, do it.
Finally, don't be afraid to adapt. You may have started your IM venture
two years ago, and a lot changes in two years these days. Constantly be
learning, researching, and ensuring that your own methods are still
considered best practice today. Never mistake comfort for
effectiveness.
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