The first six months of my business were absolutely miserable. I was so focused on making it work. On figuring out the instant formula for success. On building a huge audience for my blog.
I was so focused on the wrong things, that I missed the opportunities that were right in front of me.
I bought several books, listened to more teleseminars than I care to admit, and tried many different products and services (I will be reviewing all of them in the future, so hang tight). I was searching.
And I figured out that while I was searching, there were thousands of other solopreneurs searching too. Wait, that’s the market to be in – providing insights and tips, the “secret sauce” to being successful. Here’s how I got rich on my own terms, so you just do what I did, and ta-da – you will get that same success too.
It’s embarrassing to admit that I was so starved for the answers I didn’t know, that I fell into that trap. Not that I didn’t find some amazing resources or gain incredible knowledge along the way – I did. But overall, I wasted six months of my life and business. On the wrong things.
One phrase that I came to hate was… “write epic shit.” My focus at that time was on building my website traffic with the logic of more eyes equals more clients. It seemed like a solid place to start – from zero, there was nowhere else to go but up. So I looked to people who already had big audiences, and wanted to lean how they grew them.
Following claims like, “In just six months you can get over 100,000 people on your list;” or “Learn how we made six figures in our first year through growing our traffic.” I think you get the idea – I was looking for answers in the numbers, and they all boiled it down to just write epic shit and your posts will go viral. Viral post = more traffic, more fans, and more clients.
That phrase made many people quite a bit of money. Why yes – if I write epic shit (whatever that really means) on a consistent basis, surely more people will want to share it. It will go viral and all of my dreams will come true.
I kept at it – kept my focus on the things that I thought “mattered” for my business growth. Mostly it meant sitting behind my computer and pushing out content and researching. And then going down the spiral of doubt and fear when my traffic didn’t double each month or when my list didn’t explode to over 1,000 people immediately.
When I was in one of those spirals, and interesting thing happened. One of my friends who has a personal blog, wrote something that went viral. We were actually gchatting when it happened – it was unreal. I got to see everything that I was working for, happen to someone else.
And thank goodness. Because I learned an awesome lesson that day.
More traffic doesn’t necessarily correlate with more fans, more clients, or more money. It simply means that more people will see your site for that specific post, but not that they will stay. Or that they are your customers. Or that they will buy something from you.
The crazy thing about what I was doing, was that I was earning income, not a lot, with having zero people on my list. I was selling books when I only had 30 people on my list. I was coaching clients at Google with only 80 people on my list. And so on.
The point is that yes, more traffic can mean more clients. But it’s not a direct correlation. Traffic or writing epic shit are things that we tend to focus on when starting out because that’s what other people are trying to sell us. It’s easier for us to think we can control those things with the hope of building the other pieces once our “traffic” is in place.
But that’s a lie we are telling ourselves to prevent us from doing the scary things. For trying things and perhaps not getting as many clients as we had hoped or not selling as many books as we thought. Traffic and writing are components of our businesses, but they aren’t the golden ticket.
And ironically, as soon as I stopped focusing on traffic and creating the most epic blog post ever, I started converting more clients. Because I was finally focused on them, not me.
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