One of the most important things that you can do to keep your business on track is to keep yourself on track! In my online marketing business, it’s very easy to get so wrapped up in the constant flow of information from various sources, including the news media, forums, and various blogs that I subscribe to, that you actually never accomplish any real work!
For a new marketer especially, it’s important to spend a certain amount of time reading the forums and blog posts in order to learn the basics, however, any marketer – new or old – can get so caught up in reading the latest Google update analysis, or the latest offering from the gurus, or even the latest rant, that they lose track of time and spend money they do not need to spend on products that are, at best, marginally helpful in your quest to earn online.
Recently, after several years of frequenting various forums, and reading several guru’s blogs, I decided to *NOT* spend any time reading anything that didn’t directly relate to some concern that I had for my business. The reason? Because, honestly, the forums are full of people just like me…everyone is speculating on the effect that this change or that update will have on their overall business. And, since my business was actually affected by the recent Google algorithm updates, I was desperately reading and TRYING different approaches to regain my lost ranking and lost earnings. The result? Utter chaos! Over the past six months, I have changed every one of my sites no less than 3 times, many more than that. I have purchased this plugin or that piece of software, all in the hopes of regaining what should have been only a temporary setback. Instead, I turned it into a half year saga…every week I bought some new plugin, some new report, or some new theory that other people had as to why MY business might have been affected!
Finally, after months and months of frantically restructuring site after site after site, I realized what I was doing…if I hadn’t already been set back by an update to the algorithm, I was definitely setting myself back with all of my wild, erratic changes…I was setting myself up to be branded as a fly-by-night, ever changing, spammy marketer.
As an experienced brick and mortar business person, I already know that! But in my foray into the online business world, where every change you make is noticed immediately by your visitors, I forgot that consistency is still the key to stable, long term growth of your business. Think about it…if every time you went to the web site for CNN, it was a totally different website, would you trust their content? NO. When you go to an established website, you expect a certain degree of continuity. You don’t expect it to look like it’s been hacked, or redirected to a site that in no way resembles the site you found last time you visited.
So, rather than continue to repeatedly change and rearrange my entire business in the hopes of emulating the supposed success of another marketer…I completely cut myself off from purchasing any new plugins, software, reports, etc., aimed at improving, changing, or magically solving my problem. I no longer spend more than 15 minutes in the forums. I read each blog post with a grain of salt. And, when I’m tempted to hit that BUY button, I look at the list of things that I have purchased in the past six months, and realize that I’m not using any of them.
So, this home business tip is simple: Don’t buy into someone elses hype. Build your business in a stable, consistent way. While you might see the occasional setback, and you might need to adapt to changes in your market, make sure that you’re the one deciding what needs to change…not some “guru” who’s trying to sell you some report or some tool that will magically change things overnight. Real business doesn’t work that way, and neither should your home based business.
