Don’t Let Your Website Eat You!

If You Are New to Blogging, Internet Marketing, or Any Other Kind of Online Business, Don’t Let Your Website Eat You!

It’s easy to get so wrapped up with taking courses and coaching, learning the lingo and the culture, your Alexa score, Google Analytics, keyword research, updating content, researching content, statistical analysis, and worrying, that you fail to come up for air.

The fact is there is a huge amount to learn! The temptation, at least for those that are serious about it, is to try and learn it all at once and as fast as possible.  While that’s a laudable goal, it will kill you in the end!

There is too much to learn to be having the sprinting mentality.  You need to have the marathon mentality.  You need to pace yourself so you can stick with it for the long-run and enjoy success.  Otherwise, you will burn out and never finish the race.

If you allow your website to be in control it truly will chew you up and eat you! It will steal your sleep.  Once sleep is gone, it will chew up your sanity.  Next will be your health and vitality which it will gleefully consume and use for its own purposes.

Your neglected relationships will be next.  Pretty soon you will decide it just isn’t worth it and give up.  If you’re a blogger, your blog will become one of those dead blogs that Rose Mis talks about in her book, Dead Blogs Don’t Lie.

Instead of a great website with great content that’s updated regularly, it becomes a lonely, forlorn, abandoned thing with its walls falling apart and cobwebs in the corners.

You don’t want this to happen to you!

 

So what do you need to do to prevent this?  Here are some steps you can take to make sure you escape the beastie’s teeth and you don’t become your website’s next meal!

Make sure you have a plan.

Your plan should extend as far in the future as you can see.  For example, if you have purchased a bunch of online courses, decide which ones are the most important and plan to work on those first.

If you have a course on how to set up your website, this would have a higher priority than something about using social media to drive more people to your website.  Clearly you need to have a website before you can drive people there.

For days that are closer to the present, your plan should be more detailed.  For tomorrow, you should know minute by minute what you plan to do.  This eliminates having to waste time and energy thinking about what to do while you’re trying to do it.

Pace Yourself.

As mentioned earlier, this is the same idea as the sprint compared to the marathon.  You need to find a pace that you can maintain for the long haul.

Pacing yourself means figuring out how much time you can spend on a regular basis.  It has to fit into the rest of your life.  If you have a spouse, a job, kids, hobbies, and other commitments, you need to figure out how much time you can spend on your website and still do a good job maintaining your prior commitments.

Don’t Shortchange Yourself.

Remember that you also have a commitment to yourself.  You have to take care of yourself.  Make sure you get enough sleep.  Also make sure you leave time for some fun.  If either of these areas suffers as a result of your online endeavors, you are doomed to failure almost before you begin.

Without enough sleep your creative powers can disappear and you become extremely inefficient.  Without any extracurricular fun, your passion can become drudgery and you may even begin to hate it.  None of this is conducive to a fulfilling life or an exciting online experience!

Have a Long-Term Point of View.

Just as you need to pace yourself, you need to have a long-term view and cut yourself some slack.  If you’re anything like me, you’re very hard on yourself and expect a great deal.  You want result now! And when you don’t get the results you expect, you beat yourself up over it.

It’s good to have high expectations.  But they need to be reasonable.  I find it useful to keep a journal so I can look back and see how far I’ve come.  Sometimes it’s much more useful and encouraging to see how far you’ve come, rather than always worrying about how far you have left to go.

This industry is no different than any other in that it takes time to learn everything.  You wouldn’t enroll in college to become an engineer and expect to be ready in two months.

Just because this isn’t officially college doesn’t make it any different.  I’ve been to college and got a degree in business with a major in accounting.  In many ways, I think learning this industry is much harder than anything I did in college.

Realize this is Rewiring Your Brain.

A big reason to keep all the previous tips in mind is that this endeavor is actually rewiring your brain! In your “formal education,” whether it was college, high school, or whatever, you learned mostly facts.  Rarely does formal education teach you how to think! That’s why people with photographic memories can do so well in regular school.  It’s also why extremely clever people, who think outside the box, sometimes do very poorly with formal education.

What you’re trying to do here in starting your online business is nothing like formal education! It is truly a mind bending and stretching experience.  Think about how school was for you compared to learning about this stuff.

I don’t know about you, but I never came home from school feeling like my brain was going to explode.  In this industry, I feel that way almost every day.  In school it was mainly a matter of putting in the time.  The material was definitely not mind bending.

This material is a new way of thinking.  It causes you to make connections that you would probably never make otherwise.  You have to actually grow and become a better you to succeed. You have to forge new mental pathways that were not there before.  When I come off a coaching call or listen to really good teaching on this industry, sometimes my brain actually hurts.

As I said, it is not just information.  Your brain is actually being rewired, and that, biologically, can only happen so fast.  So realize this and don’t push yourself faster than your brain can adapt.

Give each new idea time to sink in and become assimilated along with everything else you’ve learned.  This cannot happen if you have the attitude that you’re going to race through this as fast as you can.  Since your brain can only rewire so fast, whatever can’t be assimilated will sort of slide off the outside.  You will simply end up having to go over it again.

Be consistent.

One of the reasons to pace yourself is so you can be consistent.  Consistency is probably the single most important attribute of creating a successful online business.  The search engines and your website visitors love consistency.  So while you’re implementing the other tips above, be sure you remain diligently consistent. It’s part of your long-term strategy and will pay off handsomely in the end!

I hope this article has been useful and encouraging to you.  I also hope it has provided some comfort and helped you to be a little easier on yourself.

If you have a different take on this I would love to hear what you have to say.  If you have additional suggestions or tips on how you’ve kept your website from eating you, please share them here by leaving a comment.

Thanks for visiting and I look forward to seeing you back soon!