There’s an excellent chance that being a perfectionist is holding you back in internet marketing and probably other areas of your life.

Maybe no-one else has had the courage to say this to your face but I’ve got news for you: whatever it is your doing will never be perfect.

Get over it and stop letting your perfectionism hold you back!

Even if something seems perfect now, in a few years time you’ll look at it and wonder why on earth you ever thought it was superb.

That’s the nature of progress and change.

Being a perfectionist holds you back in internet marketing and elsewhere, It’s that simple

I see it time and time again.

The same people asking almost the same questions as they did weeks, months or even years ago.

Some of them even send me emails with the same question, maybe reworded slightly differently, because they’ve stalled or can’t work out how to get around the problems they’re hitting. Lots of which are due to perfectionism. Sometimes disguised as procrastination because it’s really easy to not do something – that way, if it’s never even started, it will never be subject to the vicious perfectionism criteria.

Often those questions are niggly – which is why they prey on your mind.

But equally, they’re almost never show stoppers.

They’re more usually “what if” questions…

• What if I don’t get any traffic? Well, most of the time that can be solved by creating lots and lots of good-enough-to-press-publish content that targets quite long tail keywords and gets shown in the search results fairly fast. Admittedly that will be for relatively rarely searched phrases, but much like a dripping tap, they mount up and a few visitors here, a few visitors there multiplied by tens or hundreds of pages of content can turn a nice profit. I’ve done that on more than one occasion and can tell you that even 150 – 200 page views a week (an average of one page view per page created, but the 80/20 rule means the actual views are skewed) can turn into a useful amount of affiliate commission each month.
• What if I choose the wrong keywords? You probably will. Because there aren’t really any “right keywords” any more, always assuming that some time in the past there could have been some. Unless no-one in the world would ever search for the various phrases you’re targeting, the keyword phrase is OK. And quite possibly even utter gobbledegook will get searched for like this song written years ago to confuse the people who were always trying to put meaning into the lyrics Elton John sings:

• What if the product I’m promoting stops being available? That will happen to almost every product at some stage. Not water but near enough anything else. At one stage, Coca Cola almost made their product a thing of the past although there was sufficient outcry that didn’t happen. But there are more variants of their cola now than there ever have been and I’d be surprised if they all stayed on the shelves. After all, Tab didn’t, back when they weren’t convinced enough about the taste to call it Diet Coke. My personal preference is to promote products that are close to evergreen as possible and then check every now and then in case even those have been replaced with a new improved version that needs a different link.
• What if I choose the wrong WordPress theme or don’t install every single recommended plugin? Nothing that will stop the world from spinning except inside your perfectionist head. The internet is fluid. You’re not carving your words into a rock or painting heiroglyphs onto walls or spending forever painting illuminated manuscripts or even putting type into a printing set like you did as a child. You’re selecting computer programs that you hope will enhance the performance of your website in some way or other. If something breaks or doesn’t work as expected, you revert to what was working before even if it’s not as perfect as you’d like it to be. The world didn’t end. The earth didn’t open up and swallow you. If the change was short lived, chances are the only person who knows you’d tried is you. So the reputation you think you’ve got as the perfect person is still in tact.
• What if the sky falls? OK, that’s not a question I’ve received but you get the idea. Most of us are exceptionally good at asking what if style questions in our quest for perfection. And most of the time, fortunately, the scary scenarios we come up with to answer those hypothetical questions never materialise.

Almost all the time, the perfectionism is just an excuse to procrastinate.

Procrastinating isn’t as scary

After all, if your project isn’t finished then it can’t go wrong.

Well, that’s kind of true.

But almost all the time it’s also a lot better to get something reasonably right and release it to the world than it is to sit there, staring at your computer screen, running as many what-if scenarios as possible.

Sure, there are some things that need to be as close to perfect as possible.

You wouldn’t want the plane you’re flying on to still be at the prototype stage unless your career was as a test pilot for that situation. In which case you’d want reasonable proof that the aircraft was likely to be able to take off, fly and land safely. Plus you’d probably want a parachute and some form of emergency escape mechanism.

It’s that last sentence that tells you everything you need to know about stopping your perfectionism holding you back.

Make yourself a parachute!

Not an actual silk one.

But the equivalent.

If you’re making a big change to a website, make a backup before you do so. There are plenty of options for doing that including plugins for WordPress that will clone your entire site as well as more techie options that involve you going into your hosting control panel.

In fact, WordPress warns you to take a backup before you upgrade to a new version. Chances are you don’t follow that advice (life’s too short to do that if you have multiple sites in your internet portfolio) but it’s worth doing if you change a theme or move from one SEO plugin to another or carry out some other similarly big change. I’ve done it occasionally and been grateful that I had something to roll back the changes when something didn’t go totally to plan.

But don’t use making the parachute (your escape route in case things go wrong) as the new excuse for not doing anything.

For instance:

If you haven’t launched your website yet, set yourself a target to do so within the next week.

That gives you plenty of time to get a domain, get hosting, click the “install WordPress” link and play around with the WordPress settings for about an hour to get it working the way you want it to work.

Then another hour to write your first piece of content and press the publish button.

That’s it.

Your built in perfectionism switch has been circumvented. And you could probably have set the site up in an afternoon or evening, not even as long as a week.

if the page needs changing at a later date, change it.

If the site design starts to look dated, change it.

If your visitors bounce away from the page in the blink of an eye, do something like adding a video to keep them there a bit longer.

If they don’t click the buy link often enough, change its placement or its look and feel.

If you want to make your plain theme look a bit fancier, use some of the codes you can get in products like WP Cheat. I’ve used them on quite a few of my niche sites and they turn an otherwise almost black and white web page (my favourite!) into something with a bit more eye candy.

If people don’t buy when they get to whatever it is you’re promoting, test to find out whether a different product would sell better or a different approach would help – a new piece of content might be best for that or just extending and elaborating on an existing page can work as well –  or if you’re just being impatient because the first ten people to click the link didn’t buy.

But none of that can happen if you’re being a perfectionist.

Because you haven’t got to the stage of people arriving at your site because your site isn’t live on the internet.

So resolve to push your perfectionism out of the way.

And figure that good enough is almost always good enough.

If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have Windows as an operating system. It’s taken upwards of ten versions, well over 20 years and a lot of advances in computer power for it to get to the product we simultaneously love and hate today.

If you’d like more help to get started, one of the easiest ways is with promoting affiliate products as a lot of the barriers we put in our own way are automatically dismantled by virtue of having a ready made product to promote.

That gets a lot of the things that you’d prefer to be a perfectionist about cleared out of the way.

Get my free affiliate marketing secrets video here.