When Creating Online Stuff, Content Comes First
There’s a single mistake that almost everyone makes when they think about their first blog, online business or product creation.
I know that I’m guilty of doing this, and I wish I could say I’d only done it once. I know a lot of people are in exactly the same boat.
That single mistake is that they put other things before the content. Let’s have a show of hands:
- Have you ever spent ages looking for a theme or designing a website you hadn’t written a single word for?
- Have you ever been tempted to go to Fiverr and order a book cover for a book you haven’t written yet?
- Have you ever started writing a sales page before you’d created/experienced the product?
- Have you ever got lost in the design of a sales page or website without actually knowing what it is you’re going to sell?
- Have you ever imagined starting an affiliate site without checking if there were affiliate programs for the product?
- Have you ever spent hours and hours poring over the miniscule details of the design of something before you actually put pen to paper and started work on it?
If you’ve said yes to any of those things, then you’re in the same boat as a lot of productive procrastinators. If you’ve said yes to all of those things… don’t worry. I’ve done all of those things myself.
(They always say you should write about what you know.)
There’s a single rule that governs you not doing any of the above: write your content first.
Today’s Valuable Lesson
It can be oh-so-tempting to waste an hour on “just imagining what it’ll be like when your website is up.”
It can be inspiring to see your book cover.
It can be educational to think about the design of your sales page.
But there’s one problem: By skipping to the interesting parts, you’re cheating yourself. You get a rush of adrenaline, dopamine or something when you finish a goal. If you get that rush before your goal is finished, then guess what? You will be satiated and you won’t achieve the goal until your dopamine rush has worn off and you’re back to the grindstone. Of course, when you get to that point, you’ll have already experienced a high and the rest of your work will seem more boring.
Today has been a boring day. I’ve been writing the content for a website. It’s going to be a lot of pages once it’s done. Occasionally, I’ll catch myself thinking about the fun bits: adding cool buttons, getting the theme looking slick and professional. Then there’s the amazing feeling you get when you get the first visitors, the first sharers, the first commenters and the first sales.
It’s all pretty awesome. But I don’t want to waste time.
I don’t want to waste time because another week has gone past on this project already and all I’ve been doing is staring at the white screen, black calibri writing in my word processor for hours a day. I really want to move on, but I can’t move on until the content is there.
I’ll finish writing this, and then I hope to finish the last few pieces of content tomorrow if not tonight.
Then I’ll be able to move on.
Why Should Content Come First… Aside From Dopamine Rushes And Motivation?
I did some work for a difficult client yesterday. This client expected me to magically know specific facts about his customers without letting me know about that before I wrote the landing page I was working on.
The reason I’m mentioning this is because it’s relevant: He’d already put together a website, grabbed an affiliate link for the product he wanted to promote and started doing social media marketing for a landing page. That landing page didn’t exist when he put these things in motion.
The fact is that you don’t know what a page, site or campaign is going to be like until you’ve got the most important contributor to that page: the content.
People design page templates for sales letters, then find their content gets broken up into funny little paragraphs that don’t work very well.
People design whole affiliate sites and then outsource their writing to India… and then wonder why they aren’t living the Tim Ferriss lifestyle.
People build blogs with beautiful headers, logos and all the right categories… and then bail out on their project because they haven’t actually got any articles and can’t think of anything to write about.
Websites ten years ago were ugly. To be honest, if you use the Wayback Machine, then even five year old websites tend to look dated.
Back in the day, it was a pain. Sites weren’t functional. They weren’t attractive. But what they did have going for them was content.
The same is true now. The standards are higher, but most things that you need to do now are a whole lot easier than they were back in the day to accomplish.
For instance, my first website didn’t have any sort of editor. You had to actually know HTML to make your site work.
Now, you can build websites with private memberships, immediately downloadable content, full social media integration and all kinds of other cool stuff without knowing a single bit of any programming language.
All you have to do to succeed that isn’t done by a plugin or solved by a quick YouTube tutorial is write the content.
That’s why you need to write the content first on any online project!