Many online marketers are wary of applying focus. After all, it’s best not to have all of your proverbial eggs in one basket, right? As an internet marketer, though, you may want to reconsider…
It’s only natural to want to diversify your efforts. From a business point of view, it is logical. However, when you’re just getting started on a new project, you have to consider the harsh realities:
1. You only have so many hours per day to spend on internet marketing. Most people getting into internet marketing do it part time, and their schedule is dictated by work and/or family commitments. As such, your time is precious. Whatever you do, you will need to make the most of your available time. And cutting back on your sleep isn’t an option, either – because you’ll simply leave your mind foggy when you need it most (the next evening after work).
2. Building a business takes time. Yes, the amount of time it takes will differ according to the niche you picked, the marketing techniques you want to apply, and the quality (and relevance) of the content you put out. But regardless of what you do, and how well you do it, the results will require a substantial amount of time to appear.
Now – think logically: If you have three old broken cars in your garage, and you need to fix them, how would you go about it? Would you spend your time distributed between the three of them, so that they all start running at the same time, or would you fix one first, just so that you can have transport?
If you choose to fix them all simultaneously, it will take a lot longer before you are able to drive around. If you focus on one of them, you will have transport in a third of the time, with a third of the expense – even though you will still have two more wrecks in your garage.
The bottom line is this: Get one business going before you move on to the next. When you start up any new business, there are many things that need to be done once-off. And even the on-going tasks require some more effort at the start (especially marketing, and in the case of blogging, creating your initial content, etc). It’s pretty much like driving a car – you need to feed it more gas while it’s picking up speed, and then you can ease off the accelerator once you are up to cruising speed.
3. There is yet another side to the problem as well: The things you have to learn. When you start out on a new project, you have to learn as you go…
Remember the old saying – “the best way to learn about business is to be in business”?
As you dig into your internet marketing project, you will find yourself learning new skills, and learning about new resources and information that apply to your specific niche. It’s inevitable that some of your time will be dedicated to growing your capabilities.
However, if you do more than one project at the same time, you add to your learning curve as well. You simply add to the amount of you will require to master the essentials of your undertaking, so it slows you down as far as seeing results goes.
4. Besides sticking to one business model for the start, you need to also focus on one or two social networks. Yes, you can syndicate your content to a number of them – but spend your time on growing and mastering just one or two of them. You’ll find that you can accomplish mach more by knowing a lot about one social network (whichever one it may be), and having a good following there, than knowing a little about six of them, and also having small followings on those six.
Always keep in mind that, as far as social networks go, you will eventually reach a tipping point – beyond which you will find people “gravitating” towards you, and following you of their own accord. If you try to grow your followings on various social networks at the same time, and you have a limited amount of time available, you will simply take longer to reach the tipping point.
In addition to that, if you have to split your available time for learning about each of the social networks you are growing, it’ll take longer before you are able to use any one of them proficiently.
The value of focus lies in your ability to make money sooner. It lies in being able to quit your job sooner. It lies in having more money to pay the bills – sooner.
Choose one business model (personally, I prefer blogging, because of its long term benefits), and narrow down your focus to one or two social networks – and work to master only those. Once you have mastered those, you can expand to other social networks, and once your workload eases off (after everything is up to speed), you can consider another project.