You gotta Kiss a Lot of Frogs to become a Prince of Content!
Productivity guru, Brian Tracy's formula for starting your day right is by doing the most unpleasant task first. He asks you to" eat that frog." However, to become a prince of content, you will need to kiss a lot of frogs in addition.
Nobody likes kissing frogs. Right? " Frog " here is a metaphor for those tasks you do not like doing on your websites.
If you interview a number of internet marketers which of their daily tasks they would rather not deal with, I bet a good number of them would say content creation. What do you think?
It is one of the first tasks internet marketers on the rise outsource. A good reason why free lancers on Fiverr and other sites need not fear a drought of writing gigs from internet marketers. Especially, the good ones, that is.
Why affiliate marketers do not like kissing frogs
Newbies are scared of this important aspect of internet marketing because they are of the opinion that you have to be a writer to create content, Kyle's advice notwithstanding. Most newbies wrestle with sleepless nights thinking of how to come up with a continuous stream of content for their blogs. I know I did.
What they fail to understand is that the level of creativity expected of you in writing a post for your website is not the same as that expected of a novelist. Writing a 1,500 word article is a little daunting for the newbie but it is far less exacting than crafting a 300-page novel. It certainly takes less time and effort.
The more mature internet marketers dread the amount of time, effort and preparation that go into writing a quality post. They think their time would be better served doing other aspects of internet marketing, instead of writing, so they outsource it to other professional writers on fiverr and other freelancer sites.
Perhaps the main reason for most people not taking a liking to the task of writing a post is psychological. You have a subtle subconscious feeling that the piece of writing you have just produced does not meet your expectation and an even greater fear that it will not meet the expectation of your audience. We tend to forget that most times we are our worst critics.
For some perfectionists among us, writing a post is a never-ending task of tweaking it to no end.
Better to be prolific than perfect
The President and Founder of Piranha Marketing Inc., Joe Polish offers this advice, " It is better to be prolific than perfect." Being prolific means churning out a lot of posts consistently not minding the quality. Most of them will be imperfect of course especially at the initial stage. But remember that the emphasis here is not the quality but the number of posts written.
Because you are not hung up on the quality of your post, you do not experience the same psychological constraint of the writer hooked on writing for perfection. So you just keep on kissing frogs by turning out post after post.
Of course, you will get feedback from our responsive and supportive Wealthy Affiliate community especially if you ask for it. What you are trying to do at this stage is refine your writing through continuous practice and learning from your mistakes.
As you continue to do this consistently, your writing will begin to get better. You will be amazed at how refined your writing is becoming. All because of your consistent and prolific output.
The other guy who is hung up on quality will spend all his time editing and re-editing his article. He will remove a comma here, a period there while the prolific producer will be busy honing his writing skills by producing more and more content.
If you review all the posts you have written to date starting with the earliest to the latest, you will be amazed at how refined your writing has become as a result of your outputting.
Your writing is becoming perfect with every article you write. It is not because you deliberately chose to write a perfect article, but because you are consistently refining your art in the process of continuous writing and attaining perfection.
Renowned content creators kissed frogs too
Even established writers and musicians have had to kiss a lot of frogs for them to have a magnum corpus. Mozart wrote over 600 songs, only 6 of which were regarded as his greatest works. Beethoven wrote 650 pieces of music and only 5 were regarded as his tour de force. Bach wrote over 1,000 pieces of music and only three were considered his masterpiece.
If these renowned masters of their craft needed to produce so much work for them to have just a handful of masterpieces, Imagine how many more you and I need to produce before we are acknowledged princes of content creation.
I will end this post by referring to the advice, Ira Jeffrey Glass, an American Public Radio personality gave to budding writers and creation creaters, " Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions." I tend to agree. To be perfect, you have to be prolific.
You just gotta kiss a whole lot of frogs to become a Prince of content creation. There is no way around it.
Why are you reluctant to kiss a lot of frogs? Please share your reasons below.
Recent Comments
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I enjoyed your post very much. Funny and with a very good point.
I'm kissing those frogs. I'm writing every day. I actually like writing. I look forward to it.
Once I get the research done I'm away!
I REALLY want to provide something that the reader can use to make their life easier, better, or just entertain them, make them smile. That's where I think....OH...will that really assist them in some way? The research on ..what do they want?? I enjoy the research too, but it is tough when you're a newbie, but you've gotta just get on with it.
Louise
Hi Louise, don't stop kissing the frogs and honing your writing skills in the process. That sounds like a win-win situation! When you address your audience's pain points, they come running to your website............. and leave money on the table.
Thanks for sharing. I agreed we should focus on refining our posts with high pageviews to give high satisfaction to our visitors. New posts help to get published in social media for more audiences. I do not force myself to create a new post because our ranking is based on the average ranking of all our posting.
A well thought out and smoothly flowing post that challenges and inspires us at the same time .
Well with me the tendency is to procrastinate doing aspects like content writing at times resulting in less output and frustration .
At times there is also the fear of being judged by whoever will read what I've written .I guess I need to to work on overcoming that fear and work on the procrastination issue .
Thank you for your very positive comments. I appreciate. Let me reassure you that you are not alone. It has to do with our mindset and limiting belief in our abilities.
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I am of the opinion that perfection is impossible. I am not perfect so my writing cannot be perfect. I do believe in excellence however. So, no, I don't spend time editing and re-editing a post endlessly, I do go through it two or three times. Why? I want to make sure that the post says what I want to say clearly and that it flows. I do this even with my comments like this one.
With the advent of spell checkers and Word Processors, I have seen an increase in grammar errors, spelling mistakes, and bad sentence structure in professionally written articles in Newspapers and Magazine. This is even more prevalent on Websites and Blogs. It seems that people simply don't care any more about being excellent.
I get it. We cannot engage in Paralysis of Analysis in writing. However, we cannot just write whatever and throw it out there either. There needs to be a balance between the two.
I have learned that in any endeavor, I need to pay my dues before I can become proficient. This is true in Affiliate Marketing as well as anywhere else. Practicing a musical instrument can be boring and frustrating. What is worse is practicing incorrectly. I think this is true in every skill or art.
Let's take the time and effort to become better. It isn't fun and it is certainly time consuming but the results are worth it. There really aren't any short cuts.