This week, I gave a talk at Stylist Live called ‘From Blog To Business’.
During the Q&A, one lady’s question really stood out.
She was talking about how she writes a blog post, and then procrastinates over it for hours, emailing it to several people to review, making all their changes (of course, if you ask them, people are going to make some suggestions!), reading it and re-reading it, and eventually then deciding to publish it next week before going through the entire process all over again.
The result is her posts never get published.
Her question was:
Do I need to take on an assistant to help me?
It got me thinking how so many of us want to know all the answers in advance, and won’t take action until we know the precise outcome.
She didn’t need an assistant, she needed to stop procrastinating, stop worrying and hit the publish button!
The reality is, no-one can know all the answers in advance, and none of us can control the future.
But if we take action and start taking steps in the right direction, and keep taking steps, slowly and steadily, things become clearer.
Often, content creation is one of the key actions that can move us (or our businesses) to a new place. Yes, content does equal online visibility with each blog post or social post bringing eyes to us and increasing our chances of being found online.
But it also equals us moving our own internal compass towards our goals or at the very least, towards making ourselves think more deeply about what our goals might be and how we can reach them.
There are two people I spoke to for my book, The Million Dollar Blog (ha! Yes I mentioned it again!) whose experiences demonstrate this so clearly.
The first is the world famous marketer and author Seth Godin, who said to me:
‘If you are disciplined enough to write down a prediction, a way of thinking, a promise, every single day, you can’t help but improve yourself. That hasn’t changed.’
But the next is fitness vlogger & blogger, Carly Rowena.
She only launched in 2014, but has 360,000 subscribers on Youtube, and over 800,000 views per month on her blog and a waiting list for clients.
Yet when Carly started, she wasn’t a fitness instructor and had no idea she even wanted to be one! She worked in marketing for a car manufacturer.
She created content hit publish time and time again without knowing what her true purpose was, and by doing so, over time, found her calling.
As she said to me:
‘I used to cry because I had no idea what my job was meant to be. My mum was a scientist and my dad was an architect, but I didn’t have a passion or talent. I so badly wanted to love a job and feel like it was mine. If I had never gone on YouTube, I never would have become a personal trainer. I was really nervous and had very little confidence when I started. My first video was terrible, and I didn’t expect it to become anything, I just looked at it as something that would help me realise what I enjoyed. I realised I could do certain things that I didn’t even know about. It made me realise that dreams can come true.’
So no, you don’t need an assistant, and you don’t need to know all the answers. If you want online success in any form, you just need to hit publish, hit it again, and hit it again.
