"No, I'm not ready to release my....(fill in the blank here
with ezine, ecourse, ebook, blog, website, etc.) because
it's not quite ready. I need to...(fill in with your
excuse here: do more work on it....have it
edited....review the copywriting, etc.)"
How many times has a statement similar to that come out of
your mouth? I know for me that it's happened more often
than I care to recount. I am a recovering perfectionist who
used to utter some variation of the above sentence with
great regularity.
What I've discovered in my time as an Internet entrepreneur
is that my need for perfection in my products or marketing
materials is simply another excuse to procrastinate. Yep,
when I try and convince myself that the ebook needs more
copy editing or that my website needs just a few more pages
to make it say just what I want it to say, all I'm doing is
creating plausible excuses to put something off for a few
more days, or even weeks or months. Why? Because inaction
is safe -- you're not putting yourself out there to the
world to face possible criticism. The longer you excuse
yourself from taking action, however, the more difficult it
becomes to build a business and create the kind of life you
want for yourself.
Don't let yourself fall for your own fabricated excuses.
Stop waiting for perfection. It's never going to arrive.
Better to release something that may not be perfect than to
release nothing at all. How much money can you make on an
ebook that no one knows about? Last time I checked, it
wasn't much!
Sure, you may fall under the scrutiny of other
perfectionists in the Internet world who are gleefully
waiting to tear you apart by pointing out your errors.
Thank them for their constructive feedback, create a
correction log, and let the criticism fall off of you like
water off a duck's back. In my experience, those critics
who have the leisure time to point out the flaws of others
really aren't doing much with their own lives and
businesses. That's why they have the free time to correct
the errors of others.
The whole notion of how perfectionism was holding me back
was aptly illustrated at a Coachville conference I attended
several years ago. The late Thomas Leonard, founder of
Coachville, had brought up on stage a very successful
Internet entrepreneur to speak to us about how he had found
a great product to sell online and the process he used to
uncover the hungry target market who would pay handsomely
for the material he was selling. We were all given the
12-page handout of the long sales letter that was used to
sell the product, and many of us were taking copious notes.
However, I noticed the guy next to me, an engineer, wasn't
taking notes. Instead it appeared he was going through the
sales letter and was making grammatical and punctuation
corrections. He disappeared during our next break, and
when I returned to my seat afterwards, I discovered that he
had returned as well, but seemed to be highly agitated.
Without waiting for an invitation, he proceeded to tell me
what had happened over the break that had gotten him so
upset. He showed me his copy of the sales letter and the
corrections he had made and said that he'd gone up to the
speaker during the break and offered to give him the
corrections to the sales letter. The speaker took a look
and told him, "No, thanks."
The engineer couldn't believe that this speaker wouldn't
take advantage of all the work that he (the engineer) had
done to correct the sales copy. The engineer thought the
speaker was being rather foolish and apparently told the
speaker that he was being short-sighted not to take
advantage of the offered corrections.
The speaker informed the engineer that the sales letter in
question was making him $67,000 per month in sales and that
he had no intention of "fixing" a good thing. Furthermore,
the speaker explained that because he had worked so hard on
crafting the wording of the sales letter and that the
letter was bringing him so many sales that he'd be foolish
to tinker with any portion of it.
Apparently the engineer left the conversation with the
speaker in a huff and returned to his seat, still steaming,
and still convinced that the speaker was making a grave
mistake by not taking his copy editing advice. The
engineer was so blinded by the need to be perfect and be
right that he was blocking his path to online success. I
bet today that he's still tweaking his sales copy or his
product and has yet to do anything with coaching business.
So, which do you want to be? The engineer with the
grammatically correct sales letter that never sees the
light of day, or the Internet entrepreneur making $67,000
per month off a product that has a sales letter with
grammatical and punctuation mistakes?
Don't let your need to be perfect hold you back any longer
from taking the action you need to release your product or
service to the world. In most cases, taking action, even
though it might be a bit flawed, is always better than no
action.
----------------------------------------------------
Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business
Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals
learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their
expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To
claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing
Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizU.com . Ask
Donna an Internet Marketing question at
http://www.AskDonnaGunter.com .
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