How About Some Counseling To Cope With Internet Marketing Blues?
For everything else, they have counseling. Marriage and family counseling, career counseling, rehabilitation counseling, educational counseling, substance abuse counseling, mental health counseling, grief counseling, you name it, they have it. They even have debt counseling for those perennially in debt. But I haven’t come across any counselors for bloggers.
The internet marketing - online business, affiliate marketing, blogging, call it whatever you like – is like any offline business activity and not everybody who venture into it are successful. In fact, the success rate is extremely low and it is said that more than 90 percent of all online businesses fold up within the first four months itself. I’m sure another 5-6 percent more shut their business lock, stock and barrel within two years.
The high failure rate or the high levels of frustration among the beginner internet marketers is real, and this calls for a good counseling session for those aspiring bloggers. Though rarely discussed in the open, some “risks” involved with an online business could be
- Disrupted biological rhythms. Bloggers tend to be active till late in the night either by choice or by compulsion because of their routine office work.
- Sleep disturbances. This has negative impacts on health, performance and social relations.
- Anxiety. In our effort to keep up with our own “targets” on the number of blog posts to be written, videos to be created, to be active on the social media, anxiety happens. And when anxiety hits you, it can have debilitating effects and can easily rob you of your peace of mind.
- Depression. Prolonged absence of traffic to your site can lead to depressions. When you have done pretty much everything and had been going by the book, and following the lessons from the experts diligently, but when the traffic does not pick up even after several months of blogging and after having invested into it an insane amount of time, it’s very easy to go into severe bouts of depression.
- Eating disorders. This results from staying glued to your computer for long hours.
- Disrupted family and/or social life. Bloggers tend to be loners and prefer to be left alone. The obsession with blogging can have serious repercussions on the family as well as social relations.
I think it’s a good idea if we can take professional help to overcome the many negative impacts of blogging. In your zeal to push yourself to the limit, are you jeopardising your health? Do you often feel you are “not yourself”? Ah, you seriously need professional help. The problem is, there seems to be no professional blogging counselors at the moment. Just as they have career counseling, I think there ought to be a comprehensive counseling for all aspiring internet marketers before they embark on their online journey.
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Excellent, Sukumar! Thanks for this very thought-provoking post.
We are fortunate in that we work together here at WA and therefore, share the workload. However, it is very easy to lock yourself away and become to focused. Perceptual narrowing can occur and all you see is the keyboard and screen.
Live life as well as work and strive for the all important balance.
None of us know how long we have so let us also enjoy.
Stay balanced in your life, friend and we wish you every success!
i think entreprenuership (not just blogging) can have that effect.
Once you get yuor first sweet taste that making money online is possible, you get to the point where you do not want to do anything else but grow your business.
Since there is no ceiling to the amount of money yuo can make, you never stop working.
But as some people have pointed out, a balance is needed. Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
finally, one thing that I highly recommend, is after you get a few things in place and making money consistently, begin using yuro income to outsource content creation.
you do that and you can let your business sit for a month and not have to worry with anything other than chillin and you continually make money.
one thing that entreprenuers need is balance, planning, and execution.
We need to balance our life, that's for sure. Let us all enjoy what we are doing and listen to our bodies.
When we are hungry, let's eat; when sleepy let's go to sleep. Pretty simple, basic issues, I would say.
Let us persevere, work hard but know our limits.
We want to earn more to enjoy, not to get sick and use our money to pay for doctors and medical bills and drugs. That would be sad.
Of course counselling is just there, if we really need it.
It all starts with ourselves and knowing how to take care of our bodies - physically, psychologically, and spiritually.
Marita
Very interesting blog. It just reveals that internet marketing life is no different really then life outside of the internet Thanks for your thought provoking article.
I haven't heard of bloggers taking suicides or going into extreme neurotic behaviour but that is very much possible, you know.
I think ou make a great point. Somedays it seems like it is overwhelming but then that is when I make myself do digging and find inspiration from WA members. May not work for all but it seems to help me
One needs to distance oneself from all the blogging activities once in a while. Otherwise, the mind gets clogged and the inspiration to carry on hits rock bottom. The ups and downs of the journey sometimes get difficult to keep up with.
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This is a fantastic idea, Sukumarth. And very much needed.
I'm a good candidate for counseling at the moment. But I hope to be a counselor someday :) Cheers to that!