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How Perfectionism Kills the Online Entrepreneur

06 2008 Friday

By Donna Gunter in Featured

“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.

Using Online PR Distribution Services to Your Advantage

06 2008 Friday

By Susan L Reid in Featured

You have something fabulous to announce to the world! So, what online press release distribution service do you use?

With so many to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start. If you do a search for newswire services it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the possibilities. You might either give up or go overboard, spending lots of unnecessary money and duplicating your efforts.

Before you do either, first consider what you want your press release to do for you. Do you want it to be primarily a public relations tool to get your news out? Or would you rather that it be a search-marketing tool that can provide search-engine visibility and target prospects? If you’re thinking like a savvy businesswoman, the answer is: both.

You will gain excellent visibility if you:

- Optimize your press release through the strategic use of keyword-rich headlines and body copy.

- Include extensive links back to your website or specific landing page.

- Distribute your release through the right online newswire services.

When you optimize your press release, it will also be indexed quickly in the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Also, each time your release is picked up by another website, it also creates a link back to your site.

Once you’ve decided what you want your press release to do for you, the next step is to determine which online newswire service (or combination of more than one) you want to use. Would a free service be best, or would a paid service be better?

Free PR Distribution Services

Some of these newswire agencies are free. Others offer free basic services and then charge fees for expanded services. Fees range from $20 to over $200 and are generally used by small to medium-sized online businesses.

- www.i-newswire.com

- www.pressbox.co.uk

- www.pr.com

- www.prleap.com

- www.prlog.com

- www.prweb.com

- www.theopenpress.com

- www.24-7pressrelease.com

PR Web is on the leading edge of online news releases and is geared towards optimized press releases.

Paid PR Distribution Services to Consider

Most of these paid services offer multiple payment options, depending on your distribution preferences. Commensurately, their services are more expensive ($500 to $700 per 400-word release and can include an annual membership fee of $100+). These are the newswire services that tend to be used by traditional PR agencies for their corporate clients.

- www.businesswire.com

- www.ereleases.com

- www.eworldwire.com

- www.internetnewsbureau.com

- www.marketwire.com

- www.massmediadistribution.com

- www.pressrelease365.com

- www.prnewswire.com

- www.send2press.com

- www.urlwire.com

- www.xpresspress.com

PR Newswire is the world leader in the electronic delivery of news releases and information directly from companies, institutions, and agencies to the media, financial community, and consumers.

Choosing your online press release distribution service doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It’s easy, once you know what you want your press release to do for you. If you just want to get your announcement out, then consider a free PR distribution agency.

If you’d like to be included in major search engines, generating links and targeting prospects, then an expanded fee newswire agency will serve you well. For the highest exposure and maximum visibility, you can’t beat the service of a paid PR distribution

agency. They will get your news seen at the top of major search engines, and their RSS/XML feeds will get your news distributed to thousands of interested journalists.

Take the time now to review the options and decide which PR distribution service is best for you. This way, you’ll leverage your press releases to greatest advantage and position your business for success.

Business Coach & Consultant for entrepreneurial women starting up small businesses, Dr. Susan L Reid is the author of “Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success.” For ideas, tips, and support for your business journey, sign up here for our free e-Zine.

Stop, Think - Before You Build Another Link

06 2008 Friday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

Search engine optimization encompasses link building as one of the cornerstones of off-page optimization. Off-page optimization deals with the number of inbound links a site receives from other websites and how they reference and link to the target site.

Before you look outside of your own site for links, harvesting the “link equity” and internal link opportunities that exist within your own site are paramount when acquiring competitive keywords.Internal links are link wine, they get stronger with age, so how many pages do you have within your site that have page rank (a healthy volume of link weight) that you could harness for a common goal.