Ka-Boom-It

Motivation sometimes is a hard thing to come by.  Especially if you’re an “online marketer”.  There are always any number of things to distract you from doing what needs to be done.  Spending time on Twitter, Facebook, Google+.. checking your stats (constantly) these things don’t do anything to increase your bottom line yet we all do waaaaaaaay too much of it.

Desperation is a huge motivator.  When you’re overdrawn in your bank account and have to pay for your kid’s lunch at school and you really don’t have any groceries you’re really motivated to work.  In all honesty this is what happened to me this week. Here’s how I got into this mess.

We recently moved back to our home town and to be totally honest I haven’t done any work since January of 2011.  This was great except I had not put systems into place to keep my income going.  All summer we played, went swimming and ran around in the golf cart (we live in a golf cart community) and went to cocktail parties with friends.  All the while, my income was sinking.

Fast forward to today and I’m kicking myself for:

1.) Not building lists in my niches

2.) Relying on Google for all of my traffic

3.) Not having email sequences set up to fall back on

4.) Not setting up automation to be prepared for my time off

Getting comfortable in your business is never a good thing.  I grew complacent and now I’m scrambling to catch up. So, what am I doing to fix it?  Number one I’m building a list in my niche markets to be able to contact those people.  I think this is the number one thing people fail to do.  Even if you have no idea how you’re going to use the list just start building it, like yesterday, eventually you’ll figure out how to give great content and monetize your list in some way.  Second I’m going to set up systems to prevent this from happening in the future.  There is a ton of automation you can put into place to be prepared for taking time off.  Learn from my mistakes and put those things in place before you take time off. (Doh!)

So here I go, I put myself in a position where I now have to work my ass off again.  Hopefully, I’ve learned from my mistakes and won’t repeat these particular ones again.

Actionable steps to take today -

1.) Start building a list in your niche Awebber

2.) Start generating other streams of traffic, put your content out there every where to drive visitors to your squeeze page

3.) Write your auto responder sequence and get it started.  It doesn’t have to be perfect it just has to be active.  You can tweak things later, just do it.

4.) Set up automation to post, comment, bookmark your content for several weeks.  Magic Submitter is great for this.

5.) Turn off your social sites during work hours.  Stop checking your Facebook stream and turn off Twitter, they will survive without you for a few hours a day, you’re not that important… really.