Are You A PROFECTIONATOR?

Let me guess…you have been ‘network marketing’ for several months now but you’re still not seeing any significant amounts of traffic to your website. Your income is similarly at a distinctively low level with nothing to show for all your time and effort spent online.

So let me ask you some questions which should identify where the problem lies with the progress of your online business.

• Do you spend a lot of time looking at the innermost workings of your website, modifying and remodifying certain design aspects of your website like your layout, colour scheme and graphics?

• Do you keep changing the focus of your online business because you suddenly get the urge to market the ‘next big thing’ in network marketing?

• Is your email inbox full of unread emails from the dozens of network marketers you subscribe to?

• Is your Wordpress (or other platform) blog full of plugins that YOU think are really cool, but no-one else uses?

• Do you aimlessly trawl through other niche blogs and websites with the misguided perception you’re ‘doing research’?

If you answered yes to most of these, then you are what I term a PROFECTIONATOR – a combination of perfectionist and procrastinator (yeah, I know, pretty lame term, but hey, I coined if first..!). You are basically justifying your procrastinating by being a ‘perfectionist’; focusing more on the easy and interesting  stuff like blog design and playing with all the latest and greated WordPress plugins. And there is nothing wrong with that – if you’re not looking to make any money online.

I and many other bloggers have been guilty of that when first starting off. You are unsure as to what works and what doesn’t and by combining this uncertainty with an unhealthy interest (for me, anyway) in all things technical and design oriented, you can find yourself wasting hours picking apart websites, seeing how they tick, and getting lost in an endless iteration of design changes to your own website.

Finding your ‘groove’

And in some respects, everyone has to go through it, as the time spent poking around other websites and blogs is a great way to immerse yourself in this industry and get into the ‘blogging groove’. You need to feel comfortable with what you are getting yourself into and you need to have been able to spend the time sucking up all the information you can.

For one of the key things that differentiates you from all the other ‘network marketing’ wanna-be’s is the amount of knowledge that you’ve managed to assimilate into that brain of yours. No-one made money online who didn’t know what he/she was talking about.

But at some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and start taking action by creating content. There is no point having mountains of valuable and relevant information stored away in your head if you can’t get it out there to the people who need it.

It took me almost 12 months before I finally settled down with a blog design I was happy with and start creating some content to populate it with. It may take you 1 month, and yet others may take years before they are confident enough or committed enough to really get their blogging/online business up and running.

Change is good – but not TOO much!

Modifying and updating your website will always be an ongoing process, but it should only be done a bit at a time when and if required. Continual analysis and monitoring of your website is part and parcel of running an online business, and it’s only when you have identified a weakness in your website design that you should take steps to resolve it.

Too many people lose focus of the big picture about what their website is marketing and get lost in the details and minutae of their site design; chopping and changing components without any evidence to back up their decision.

But it always comes back down to the basics, which is that consistent action is the key to success online.

So with all that in mind, let me turn those negative things into positive actions, and see how with only a small bit of effort, you can COMPLETELY turn your online business around:

• Initially spend some time getting your website design right, but don’t spend month after month tweaking away for nothing. Pick some top websites in your niche and follow their example. There are tons of websites out there that have really bad designs but because content is more important, it negates those bad design aspects.

• Do your homework first and find a niche you can become passionate about. Do you have an interest in something or are you particularly good at something?  Is the business opportunity you’re looking at have a lot of competition? If there is, that can be good because it means there is money to be made in it. Focus your time and energy on that business opportunity, then ONLY when you are sure that it is doing well, move on to another niche to add to your business portfolio.

• By all means, subscribe to lots of network marketers, but quickly determine which ones are worth subscribing to and unsubscribe from ones that aren’t. It will free up your time, energy and your inbox!

• Have a look around at what the other top bloggers are using. You’ll notice that all the good ones only have a few key plugins. Don’t clutter up your site with fancy stuff that no-one else uses.

• When you’re doing your research on other blogs and websites, cut and paste their URLs into notepad and take notes as you go along.

I have a document open all the time where I add notes as I go along, and so now I have a big database of websites I can go to when I need information or inspiration concerning a certain aspect of my online business.

As you can see, it only takes a little bit of effort to actually leverage your aimless actions into focused actions. The simple act of actually getting on your computer and trawling through websites is 90% of the effort you need. In the vast majority of cases, just a bit more effort into directing your actions makes all the difference.

I’m a big fan of ancient Roman quotes as I think that a lot of the things we need to learn and understand about life are simple truths that in our modern times have been hidden by the confusion and distractions of our technology laden lives.

One of my favourites is from the poet Horace and this one is particularly relevant to this blog post:

“He who has begun is half done. ” ~ Horace

Action above all other things is the single determining factor in the success of every top producer and entrepreneur in the world – BAR NONE.

So stop procrastinating and being a perfectionist – stop with the design changes and half-hearted aimless Internet surfing and start focusing your efforts into creating some good content for your blog that will benefit the community as whole. Because it’s TAKING ACTION that matters, not how many plugins you can cram into your blog or how good your header design is.