It’s a problem a lot of us grapple with – looking for perfection. We feel we can’t launch a product because we’re not happy with the graphics, or the ebook we have put together is too long or too short. The web site doesn’t look right. We don’t want to start promoting our site because the autoresponders for the optin haven’t been written, or we don’t yet have a product to sell. Or the economy isn’t looking so good, let’s wait until things pick up. Does that sound familiar?
This is an issue for a lot of new marketers, I can fully empathise because it’s one I fight with on a daily basis. The more you get into internet marketing the more you realise that there are just so many possible ways of doing things. There is no way you can keep up with even a fraction of them. It is so tempting to wait until “all the conditions are correct” before starting a project. Well let me tell give you some advice, learned the hard way from almost 25 years business experience:
Conditions will NEVER be and NEVER have been perfect
There will ALWAYS be a reason to NOT take action. In fact if you’re not careful you’ll find a lot more reasons to avoid taking action than to actually DOING something. If you’re a perfectionist like me you’ll find yourself nodding your head in agreement at this point. I have a list of 12 different things I would like to do to this blog alone. However, they all come behind a much bigger list of other jobs I want to do. So do I give up on writing content on this blog until I have everything else set up?
NO!
The point is things will never be 100% perfect, never be 100% ready. Whatever you’re doing, just do it now, today. It doesn’t matter if it’s not right. It is far better to have bad sales copy than no sales copy. It is far better to have a poor looking web site than no web site at all. EVERYTHING can be improved, but it has to be there in the first place before you can make it better! If your product is only 40% right, well you can by time improve upon that, but if you haven’t even offered it to potential customers then it’s 0% right!
I’ll conclude with an example. This is my eBay shop:
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/bestmultimediaguides
Click on any of the listings and you’ll see that I use the same template throughout all my listings. I have changed that 4 times already, each time I have gained more sales. Also on my “to do” list is to change them all yet again because there are a few new things I want to try out. Now I got sales from the very first “template” I used, but I have never been happy with the look or content. That doesn’t matter, the important thing was to get something there on eBay that I could improve upon.
So the lesson is this – whatever it is that you want to do, just do it. Don’t worry about getting it right the first time, I can almost certainly guarantee you that you won’t. Finish that web site, that ebook, the sales copy – forget how it looks, just get it out there in front of people. This is the internet – with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks you can improve on anything – quickly and easily!