Are You Still Waiting For Perfection?
I have met service professionals who took a year or even longer(!) to launch their newsletter. First, they spent months agonizing over whether they need to start a newsletter in the first place. Then, they did research to make sure everything would be perfect. Then, they started thinking about which newsletter service provider to use. Then they did more research to make sure they find the absolute best provider. Then they started thinking about creating a page on their web site about the newsletter. Then they did some more research to build the perfect layout for their web page….
They were waiting to make sure that everything would be perfect before starting their newsletter. As a result, after months of trying to make everything perfect and agonizing over whether they make the perfect decisions or not, they still haven’t started their newsletter.
In the meantime, those service professionals who picked a good newsletter service provider, created a good gift and started giving it away in exchange for subscription to their newsletter have been inviting people to their lists and building their client base for months.
If you wait for everything to be perfect, you will never take action. Instead, make sure that you make good decisions on what you need and move on to taking action.
If you are starting your newsletter here is what you need to decide on:
– Your Gift To Your Newsletter Subscribers. Find a good topic for your gift and create it. A good topic is something that your potential clients really want to know – an answer to one of the questions that they have, a solution to a problem that is bothering them.
– Create A Page To Give Away The Gift To Your New Subscribers. This page is called a squeeze page, and its only goal is to convince the people you send to that page to register for your gift and join your list.
– Set up Your Autoresponder To Send Your Gift To Your New Subscribers. This is how you will deliver the gift to those who sign up.
Don’t try to make everything perfect before you get started. If three months later you find out that you want to make changes to your autoresponder or giveaway page, you will be able to do that. Right now your goal is to stop waiting for perfection and start building your list.
Get started now, so that six months down the road you actually have built a client base, instead of still waiting for everything to be perfect. Learn exactly what kind of gift to create, how to create a squeeze page (I give you one to model!) and much more in the Build Your List Home Study Guide at https://www.EffectiveListBuilding.com
February 5th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
As a professional organizer, I urge clients to remember that “done is better than perfect”, but I am guilty of the same perfectionist procrastination that you describe. In fact, I’m one of those people who researched and weighed and worried for far too long before going to an electronic newsletter. Your kick-in-the-pants advice is straight on: create the gift, create the page, create the autoresponders…you don’t even have to write the actual newsletter until someone finally subscribes! :-)
You were my cheerleader, Biana, who got me off my behind and into newsletter mode. As I say to you often (quoting Carrie Fisher in “When Harry Met Sally”): “You’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.” Maybe those of us who fear(ed) an imperfect newsletter or blog should think of it a different way…if it’s perfect when we start, we’ll never give our subscribers a chance to say “Hey, this keeps getting better and better!”
Henry James said “Excellence doesn’t require perfection.” And Ivan Turgenev said “If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin.”