Master One Thing At A Time (Creeping Progress.)
Want to know the biggest mistake I’ve made in business (and possibly life)?
I’ve been building websites for a few years now. I’ve also taken on loads of hobbies and tried to start multiple businesses. Last year, I tried to learn a couple of languages, took up metalwork, solidified myself as a “professional writer” and tried to do pretty much everything about that myself.
This is something quite typical really; I’ve either not found “the thing” that I’m happy to do for the rest of my life, or I simply don’t stick at anything with full commitment for long enough to make it “my purpose.”
I don’t regret that. It’s fun learning new things and spreading your knowledge and boundaries. One thing that I do wish I’d done is learn to slow down and master things before moving on though.
MASTER One Thing At A Time
People who read the site make comments to me about advertising. They say, “Do more with your Twitter!” and “Send links out to other sites.” It’s a compliment that people think that the articles I write are worth sharing, so I’m pretty happy about that. I’m also pretty sure a lot of the material I’m writing is worth sharing, because it’s useful and actionable information that’ll help writers.
But I know I’m not ready to really engage with marketing and other media with the site yet.
The reason is that I’ve made this mistake before; pushing and marketing before I was ready to.
Social Media Sites Are A Challenge Themselves
I’m not a social media person. I don’t fundamentally get social media. So in 2014 when I had a new business, I did exactly the wrong thing: I opened an Instagram account (I’d never even been on Instagram before,) I opened a Twitter account, I got a Facebook page and I set up RSS feeds, a mailing list and the like.
You can guess what happened.
After about two weeks of desperately trying to get attention to each “hub” in the social media wheel, I gave up due to burnout. I even put the whole business on hiatus because I was sick of it. I didn’t touch any social media for about six months afterwards, and never wanted to go back to it.
I’m reading a book right now which would have saved me. It’s called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. I will write a review of it once I’m finished, but in the meantime, you could probably pick it up on Amazon. It’s about advertising on social media.
It’s a little outdated, having been written a few years back, but it has some pretty keen observations which are going to work forever:
- Each marketing channel has its strengths and weaknesses.
- Each marketing channel should be set up specifically for that channel.
- You have to be good at those channels, and not just on them.
If, like me, you don’t pay any attention to that, then you’re going to fail. Not only are you going to fail, but you’re going to be pushing a boulder up hill, wasting time and energy where you shouldn’t. In short: Doing a lot of things in a half-arsed way is worse than not doing them.
At the moment, the goal of this site has changed from a portfolio style site (It was originally going to be just the copywriting section) to a blog/writing resource site. I’ve almost reached a hundred articles, and will have done so sometime this month. That for me is a pretty cool benchmark to start doing some other stuff.
Having learned from past mistakes, I’ll be introducing new things one at a time. Only when I get indicators that I should move on am I actually going to move on to the next thing.
How You Can Use This
After five hundred words, it’s time to stop waffling about my own progress. Here are some takeaways that I’ve touched upon:
- Before you enter a new media, make sure you know what you’re doing.
- Before you enter a new marketing channel, have a plan of action.
- Also, have actual, tangible goals based on what you think should
- Do the work. If you’re not hitting those goals you set, then you’re doing something wrong.
- Don’t start something new until you’re hitting targets consistently on the current project.
As an example, say you have a website with four twitter followers. Before you start, work out the following:
- What is Twitter? Hint: It’s not a blogging platform. It’s not PPC. It’s not SEO. Why do people use it? Do people buy from it? Why do people share stuff and what do they share? Essentially, how does information on the platform get transmitted?
- Where do you fit in? What are you going to do in exact terms?
- Do you want a million followers or a hundred? Is your plan to bump traffic to your site or to have it stay on Twitter?
- Do this. See what happens. Adjust.
- Don’t set up your Instagram account until you’ve hit those original targets on Twitter.
And finally, an addendum: Any online platform will be subject to the “snowball effect.” That is, it’s harder to get your first thousand followers than it is to go from one thousand to ten thousand followers. You’ll know you can move on when the process becomes easier, i.e. you’re doing less work for more results.