Internet marketing is a complex and ever changing business.

If you don’t push your comfort zone, you’ll likely go backwards very fast.

Partly because the rest of the world won’t stand still.

Partly because if you’re not regularly doing stuff, Google will neglect your site.

So, what can you do to help prevent that?

In a nutshell, push your comfort zone.

It can be lots of small nudges or less larger nudges but you need to do it!

Start by working out roughly where your limits are currently.

You instinctively know those – they’re the things you can do almost in your sleep.

For me, it’s things like writing articles and – more recently – creating slide show style videos.

For you, it could be something else.

But you’ll probably know what it is.

Even if it’s just learning and reading stuff.

That’s nothing to be ashamed of and it’s the stage where quite a few people I meet are at. Even if they’ve been doing some form of internet marketing for a long time.

But there comes a stage where you need to stop learning and start doing.

Which is where the comfort zone comes in.

Historically, we like to stay inside certain boundaries.

For most people, our child-like sense of wonder gets less as we get older until we get stuck in a rut but can’t quite explain why.

It may seem new-agey and you may not see the point of doing this but get a piece of paper and a pen.

Draw two lines down the middle, top to bottom so the paper has three roughly equal columns.

In the left hand column, put the things you’re comfortable doing in internet marketing.

Reading/watching stuff, sending the occasional email question, maybe writing the occasional blog post.

Whatever you’re happy to do.

In the middle column, put the things that you could do at a push.

But you’d rather not – maybe because you think you don’t know enough about them or maybe because you just plain hate doing them. Either reason is fine.

Then in the right hand column put all the things that you think you need to do to further your internet marketing career but that you’d need need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, before you even considered doing them.

That list might be painful to write but don’t worry about that at the moment.

I’m not going to ask you to do anything from that list.

At least not yet and maybe never.

It’s that middle list that you need to look at in a bit more depth.

If you’re like most people, the things in there will be in a range from “sort of OK” through to something very close to “eek”.

There’ll probably be some things in that list that you’ve tried before and almost got right but not quite.

Tackling one of those again won’t stretch your comfort zone much but that’s fine.

Comfort zones are a bit like fears – their boundaries shift, almost at will.

Which means when you stretch them they rarely go back to where they were before.

So pick something from that middle list.

Ideally something that’s a bit of a stretch but not too much – partly because that should mean you can get it done fast.

Which is always good as it means you don’t get too much chance to think about it and over analyse it.

So if it’s something you “should” be doing – but haven’t yet – and that you can go from start to finish in an hour or two, that’s a fantastic one to start with.

Then do it!

Ideally now.

But absolute worst later today or first thing tomorrow.

Regardless of whether or not you finish it and regardless of how well or badly you do, you’ll reduce the fear factor for the next time.

And – unless you hate it so you much that it shifts to the right hand column – you really should make sure there’s a next time.

Because the next time is almost always easier.

And after a few “next times” you’ll probably wonder why you were ever worried about it in the first place.

So do yourself a favour and follow through on this.

Preferably on several of the items in that middle list.

You’ll get ahead further, faster, than you ever thought possible.