Chip Wilson's Blog

How long has it been since you’ve been able to work for more than three days without hearing about some great new tool, system, or technique that will instantly help you take your marketing efforts and sales results to the next level?  My guess is you can actually count the time in hours rather than days.

How many of these pitches have you jumped at?  If you are like most new (and many not-so-new) online entrepreneurs, the number is likely to be pretty high.  How many have had an immediate impact on anything other than your wallet?  My guess is zero, or pretty close to it.

Now for the bigger question – what was the real cost of your diversion?  Can you quantify the opportunity cost of abandoning your previous efforts to chase a “shiny object”?  Chances are you may never really know what the “new best thing” actually cost you.

It may just cost you your business.

Psychology vs. Discipline

We live in a world that is dominated by the psychology of instant gratification.  The Internet only exacerbates this problem.  The lottery psychology is one of the most dangerous things that an entrepreneur will encounter.  It is directly at odds with two of the most important traits embodied by all successful entrepreneurs – consistency and discipline.  There is little glamor in being disciplined and consistency is often viewed as boring, so these traits don’t get much press.  However, they are more important than 90% of the activities on which most on-line entrepreneurs spend their time.

You need to be rock solid and follow a concrete marketing plan to reliably build your business.  This is especially true when your efforts are just beginning.  Too many on-line entrepreneurs are so unsure of how they should market that they decide to try everything at once, almost at random.  These folks rapidly become overwhelmed and exhausted by running around chasing various strategies and tactics without any coherent method to their madness.  This activity is further complicated by the barrage of “shiny objects” that gets thrown at them with what seems like increasing volume as they wait for their efforts to produce results.

Best Intentions, Wrong Action

Everyone wants to identify what marketing works for them as rapidly as possible so that they can focus on it exclusively.  This is understandable, but the message they need to hear and understand is that any marketing strategy can yield results if you stick with it day in and day out, as long as your message is clear and well-targeted.  The key is to concentrate your efforts and do not scatter your shots.

How many people do you know that decide to build their business by branding themselves? They set up a blog with great enthusiasm.  They have an “official launch” and share proudly through the social media world that they are have created their very own media empire. They post every single day… for a week.  They make 3-4 posts the following week. Then it starts to seem like work.  By the end of the month, they maybe check in with their blog once a week.  Finally they are sick of it because it is taking a good bit of time and they see few results.

Maybe you can relate to this story.  Maybe in your case its not a blog, but article marketing or videos.  The fact is that you have to go any of into these types of marketing with the right expectations.  If you think you’ll get flooded with traffic just because you wrote 1,000 words or cranked out a couple of hours of video over a few days, you’ll have to reconsider.

All marketing is like this. How many people try PPC marketing and give up after spending 10 hours researching keywords and losing a few hundred bucks?  How many people have you seen that have signed-up on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube for a month and then, after the honeymoon, scrap it as a waste of time for something sexier?

Why The Contradiction?

There are many examples of highly successful marketers who owe their success to a specific form of on-line marketing.  You can find a guru for every camp!  Many of them are almost handing out the step-by-step instructions they used to create their success.  The obvious contradiction is that precious few of their followers are actually duplicating their results.

How do you explain the dichotomy? It all comes down to the fact that the majority of aspiring on-line entrepreneurs have the wrong mindset about their marketing going in. They operate under the assumption that if a form of marketing is going to work, it will work right away, relatively easily.  (This expected ease may, in fact, be what they thought they paid for if they bought a “shiny object”.)  As a result, their expectations leave them unprepared for the reality.

A Better Alternative

Instead of taking chasing the gurus’ shiny objects, follow their example and master different forms of online marketing one at a time.  I suggest that you create a 2-3 month action plan for any form of marketing you want to try.  Create specific objectives, such as to create one piece of fresh, new content on a fixed schedule until you have 60 – 80 out there for the world to find.  Test, monitor, analyze, tweek and retest your campaigns.  Know why you make changes.

As an added incentive, form an accountability group of your peers to whom you will answer even if you don’t feel like continuing, or when some resistance or doubt is creeping in.  They can also help prevent you from jumping into additional forms of marketing until you have mastered the rhythm of those you’ve already started.

The great thing about marketing is that it is entirely within your control, so long as you can maintain some basic control over your own mindset.  When you have discipline and are consistent with any proven form of marketing, you will gain the momentum you seek.

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