Everyone I talk to suddenly has the entrepreneurial bug. People who never intended to work for themselves have been laid off or outsourced. And the folks who are left are looking around wondering when it will be their turn.
But it seems like there’s always a muddy spot in the road where our wheels get stuck. For some people it’s technology, for others it’s selling, and for others it’s just trying to keep ourselves focused.
So this letter will be all about some tools for getting unstuck. Most of them are free, some of them cost money, but all of them can get your wheels moving again.
Gaah! Procrastination is eating my life!
If procrastination is not a serious problem for you, congratulations. My unscientific research shows that you’re part of 2% of the population.
The rest of us are seething with envy as we refresh the Twitter home page one more time before taking a little break for ice cream. Just five minutes, honest.
A friend pointed me to a fascinating book on resistance (which is an arty word for procrastination) called The War of Art. It’s a fantastic resource for showing you what resistance is, and all the guises it comes in.
Unfortunately, its solution (declare war on resistance and hit it over the head again and again until it dies, which it never will, because resistance is unkillable) seems . . . not so helpful. But lucky me, I stumbled across another cool resource that actually does work.
If you don’t know Havi Brooks yet, I think you will dig her. She’s goofy and funny and an even bigger hippie than I am. She also has a killer anti-procrastination product called Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic. It’s got a handy ebook with pictures and three audio lessons on how to KILL PROCRASTINATION DEAD DEAD DEAD.
OK, it’s more like, dissolve your procrastination with so much gentleness and care that it just gives up. I told you she was a hippie. Insanely, though, it actually works.
I’ve spent the last few months on a gigantic project that needs me to stay focused and keep moving. Normally for me that would be a recipe for, well, total failure. But Havi has kept me moving. I can enthusiastically recommend it, as well as all of her stuff.
Procrastination Dissolve-O-Matic
(If you really want to melt your brain, get her product on the Dance of Shiva. It’s this crazy brain yoga that boosts creativity and idea generation. Wacky to the max, but it works.)
Aaaccck! I don’t know how to get started
I answered this question individually so many times that I wrote a blog post about it to pull some resources together in one handy spot. These are the resources I’ve found most useful and user-friendly to get the ball rolling. You can take them as a little “entrepreneurship 101” course. (Hm, that would have been a good title.)
14 Must-Have Resources to Launch Your Small Business
Bleah! I don’t know how to get traffic
There are a whole bunch of SEO products out there, but for my money, Michael Martine strikes the right balance. His stuff is up-to-the-minute (no outdated advice about paid links or other stuff Google hates), it satisfies the 80/20 rule (it’s the 20% of techniques that will get you 80% of your results), and it doesn’t cost a fortune.
He’s got a new product coming out that’s all about getting yourself found on Google with a WordPress site. Don’t dawdle because I’m not sure how long he’ll be keeping the product open.
Feh! Computers!
There are two ways to handle this. You can learn it all yourself, which is theoretically possible.
But if you want to get unstuck as quickly as possible, partner up. Either find a nice, trustworthy resource you can hire like Men With Pens or Remarkablogger, or find a technical-savvy friend who gets computer stuff but who’s clueless about something you do really well.
Trust me, I have a trail of funky-looking handmade sites to show for my hundreds of hours trying to do my own stuff. I like knowing how to make minor tweaks, but if technology (or graphic design) isn’t your bag, get a partner and move forward. You’ll lose too much momentum trying to reinvent the wheel.
Double feh! Copywriting!
Almost the same answer as computers.
I say “almost” because knowing something about good copywriting truly will help every aspect of your new business.
But you don’t have to do the copywriting, you just have to get clear on what makes good copywriting and what techniques are the most important for getting people to buy stuff.
Plus, here’s the thing about copywriting. It isn’t writing at all. It’s assembling.
You don’t need good grammar, lapidary prose, or to in any way resemble a New Yorker short story writer. (Havi is snorting now.) There are plenty of fine copywriters who couldn’t write their way out of a dime store novel. But they know how to assemble effective copy.
But if you just don’t feel like going there, don’t. If you have a friend who likes to write, why not create a partnership? Give your friend a piece of the business in exchange for the words that will make your product fly into the arms of your happy customers.
I put together a “best-of” post at Copyblogger that ought to keep you busy for awhile. Head on over, bookmark it, then set yourself a reminder to read a post or two a week. Just remember, either you or your copywriter partner needs to learn the craft of persuasive writing rather than creative writing.
47 Ways Copyblogger Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions
Eeeeeek! Selling!
I’ll let you in on a secret. I am, by nature, the worst salesperson on the planet. As soon as my brain hears the word selling I go into a massive anxiety attack.
I once heard the advice that unless a person had managed to successfully sell door to door with something like Amway or Avon, they were doomed to mediocrity in business. I sincerely hope this is not true, since I was perhaps the least successful Avon lady in the history of that company.
I couldn’t sell raffle tickets to my grandmother without her wanting to think it over. I’m talking seriously pathetic.
The whole reason I became a “marketer” (other than the fact that it’s a way for a writer to make a decent living) was to figure out how to create systems that will do the selling for me.
(Here’s the point where, if this was a sales letter, I’d talk about the systems I’d created over the past few years to sell millions of dollars’ worth of products, blah blah blah. This isn’t a sales letter so I’ll save it for another time.)
Gary Bencivenga recently pointed his list to a really fine ebook on exactly this topic. The book was written by a gentleman named Harry Browne, and it’s loaded up with a lot of libertarian politics which don’t add much, IMO. But you can skim those easily enough. It’s all of $9.75, which is a pretty sweet deal.
The Secret of Selling Anything
I quit hating to sell when I realized that selling isn’t about me getting something, it’s about solving a problem for a customer and making her life so much better.
Once you make that mindshift switch, the rest of it gets a million times easier.
The copywriting stuff above helps a lot with sales-phobia as well. And right here on remarkable communication, I focus most of my attention on sales and marketing techniques for people who, let’s face it, hate sales and marketing.
You can subscribe to the blog (for free of course) by email or in a reader to get updates, usually about one a week. This is a totally different set of content from what you get if you subscribed to one of the email courses.
I’m the world’s laziest blogger, so sometimes it’s less than once a week. Trust me, you’re not going to feel overwhelmed or spammed.
If you love me so much you can’t stand the thought of missing a word I write, you can also find me at Copyblogger. You can subscribe by email or in a reader there, too. So, yay.
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