The Tale of Selling Bottled Hot Dog Water for $40

Yes, you read that title correctly and yes, it is 100 percent a true story. Right here in my hometown of Vancouver, we host a number of different street festivals that mostly take place during the summer. From Hats Off Day to Italian Day, there’s always something interesting to see, do and eat. And at Car Free Day on Main Street, one vendor decided to sell bottles of hot dog water for $37.99 each.

Okay, so it’s not quite $40, but you get the idea.

Outrageous, right? Who in their right mind would buy a bottle of water with a boiled hot dog floating around in that unfiltered water? A lot, as it turns out, because the guy ended up selling about 60 liters worth of the product. That’s 120 bottles, resulting in several thousand dollars in total sales. Oh, and he also happened to be selling hot dog lip balm too. At least the beef hot dogs were organic, right?

A Hot Dog a Day Will…

So, how did Hot Dog Water CEO Douglas Bevans pull it off? He positioned the hot dog water as “keto-compatible,” purporting such health benefits as increased brain function, weight loss, and a youthful appearance. Dressed in a hot dog onesie, Bevans explained to would-be buyers that the benefits of hot dog water are because it “bypasses the lymphatic system, whereas other waters have to go through your filtering system.”

But he wasn’t drinking his own Kool-Aid, so to speak. That’s because Bevans is hardly any sort of health expert and the “science” he was using to support his hot dog water claims were all bogus. But they sounded authentic enough to the people who bought it. Bevans did this as a performance stunt, trying to educate consumers into better critical thinking about the marketing messages they’re being fed. He knew his hot dog water was bogus and yet he managed to sell it.

I’m immediately reminded of the asparagus water fiasco with Whole Foods just a few years prior. The difference is that Whole Foods wasn’t trying to pull off some sort of prank, but it really does illustrate that kind of bogus health claims that plague this market.

Lessons from the Dog

What can we, as Internet marketers and content creators, learn from all of this?

First, on some level, the marketing is going to be more important than the actual product itself. Even if you have a mediocre product, even if you have one that is as utterly ridiculous as hot dog water, some slick marketing will help you attract some buyers. You can sell anything to almost anyone if you know how. The marketing is at least as important as the actual product itself.

If you have the best product in the world and it’s something that is truly better than anything else like it, but you don’t know how best to position it or *sell* it to the right, target customer, nothing else will matter. Know your customer, know what matters to them, and go straight for the jugular. That can be a tough pill to swallow, but it also means that everyone’s got a shot at making it.

Product Marketing and Marketing Product

Second, and this will sound completely counter to the first point, is that we have to realize hot dog water was little more than a performance stunt. Yes, he was able to get his flash in the pan and get a few thousand dollars in sales, but this is hardly a sustainable business model. (Not that he had ever intended it to be.)

For you, what this means is that as important as marketing and advertising and sales can be, you still need to put out a quality product if you want to achieve long-term success. You need to put something out there, whatever it may be, that people will want to buy and support again and again.

Then again, Betty White says she’s lived and lasted as long as she has because of hot dogs and vodka, so what do I know?

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5 Must Have Elements of a Checkout Page

Your checkout page is ultimately where all the hard work, innovation, and time you took in building your site pays off.  Conversions take place at checkout. How well you have drafted your logo, product, and information are important components to your business but at the end of the day, the conversion must occur and this process becomes finalized at checkout. I’m surprised at the amount of sellers who don’t test different variations in checkout pages so set themselves up to lose enormous conversions going forward. I believe you should always learn from those before you, and this means understanding your competitors, and the way they do business. With that said,

Let’s focus on the key components to effective checkout pages.

The Right Number of Form Fields

Checkout pages are the one exception when it comes to how many form fields are optimal for your site. In this case, 72% of the time, it is more advantageous to use a greater number of form fields to create conversions. Unlike, simple opt-in forms where I’ve encouraged you to add as little form fields as possible, it’s going to be the other way around on checkout pages.

The general public is very hesitant to readily hand out their credit card information, cvc number, and expiration date. When this is the first thing consumers come across, it’s often met with distrust, and this type of reluctance does not seem to prevail when it comes to email addresses and personal information that could possibly lead to receiving free kits, coupons, or weekly newsletters.

This is why adding more form fields to your checkout pages can actually increase your conversion rates.

Building consumer trust is vital in marketing, therefore, adding more form fields actually increases the likelihood that customers will continue on to checkout. The more information you can gather when they are purchasing a product, the less they’ll question if the product will be delivered or not. For example, would you buy a product is during completion the seller failed to ask for your shipping address? The answer is probably NO because the first question you’ll have is where will the seller be sending the item to if they don’t ask me for my shipping address.

To avoid typo problems that result in credit card declines, it is best to go to your payment processor and uncheck verification boxes such as “verify address”. This simple step can limit the number of processing errors that occur and ultimately lead to a higher credit card approval rating.

Trust Elements Throughout Your Whole Funnel

Developing consumer trust is the most important factor in creating conversions.  Placing seals such as Truste and Verisign Secured can help customers feel more comfortable about exchanging their personal and credit card information on your site. Both these sites will verify your site making sure consumers know that you have been checked out. This means the information you have provided to your sellers is legit. This will ultimately go a long way in building your customer base, and increasing the bottom line.

Consumers need to feel secure the moment they land on your pages so it’s important to filter trust seals throughout your entire funnel, starting with your front end pages.  The likelihood that conversion rates will increase depends heavily on your placement of secure seals. Put them at the beginning and gain customer trust immediately.

Trust seals on your checkout pages won’t boost conversion rates significantly but placing them throughout the entire site can lead to nice gains at the end of the month. You could see up to a 10 % boost in conversion rates.

Finance and health industries lend themselves best to this tactic. If springing for a VeriSign or Truste Secured sign is not within your budget, you might opt for your own free generic version. These often produce similar results and will allow you to see a sizeable boost in your conversion rates after applying this strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions (very important)

In short, addressing doubts will increase your conversion rate.

Customers will always have questions they need answered. Understanding what drives customers to buy and what inhibits their purchases allows you to address concerns effectively. This section is also perfect to keep updating with new questions being asked over time. Sometimes, the question customers need answered won’t be available by you, so having a forum can also help increase sales.

Using Qualaroo on your checkout page can help you develop an FAQ section. Addressing customer queries will help you to determine necessary adjustments and will ultimately increase your conversion rates. This tool provides analytics to make sure you get the right type of question on your site with full in-depth questions.

FAQ placement can also significantly affect conversion rates so you must test out different locations to determine optimal placement. Add a link towards the top or even the bottom which will easily allow people to find the FAQ section on your website.

Two Steps Are Better Than 1

Let’s really focus on our main objective. A checkout page is meant to be used as a conversion tool. Customers and potential customers will land on your checkout page so why not make it conducive to convert all who visit by using a two-step process?

By setting up a preliminary information page that gathers emails and addresses, you can focus on your potential customers. Those who are hesitant can be added to a remarketing campaign via email or seduced with coupons and promises of free products or services.

The second step will involve gathering credit card information. Customers will feel like they have already given their personal details on the initial page and thus will be more comfortable following through to the final stage.

Overall, this tactic will increase your conversion rate by 15%. Timothy Sykes used this approach and experienced a 12% increase in his conversion rate. In the end, you have to remember the following:

With a two type process, you’ll be able to get the MOST important piece of information which is the customers email address. This will allow you to send them updates about new products entering the market place which they’ll find interesting. You already know what products they had within their cart before abandoning so use this to your advantage, and segment them into a completely separate group. When you have specials on the same products or even similar products added to your inventory, you can send those same customers a follow-up email.

Help Your Visitors Through Live Chat

Live chat is another way to address customer queries and therefore make necessary adjustments to instigate customer conversions. If you take a quick look at some of the MOST popular websites online, you’ll notice they all have incorporated a live chat. As a matter of fact, even the websites starting out have incorporated a way to add chat onto their blog. Chat tools are very inexpensive so can be afforded by anyone who is just starting out.

To use this tool effectively, you need to ensure you have someone to answer questions 24/7.  Customers want to interact with live chat representatives immediately, so it’s vital to consistently employ someone to man this feature. I know this can be tough especially when you are on a budget, but you have to be on the grind on your own if you are just starting out.

Placement of a live chat on each page can be distracting to customers so test out utilizing this feature on just your checkout page. This is the place where most questions and uncertainties occur so placing a live chat can address these effectively. Again, chat plays as an important role as the FAQ section because customer will have questions which you thought you’ve covered. Having a way for them to ask new questions is a great way to add value, and increase the likelihood of closing a sale.

Social Proof

Social media has changed the way we communicate with each other, and this works enormously well for those who are in business. Through social media, and other forms of social proof, you can show people what others are saying about your business. Social proof works well because customers are just like others who are buying, and they trust them more than the word of a business, especially first time buyers.

Here are a few more things to pay close attention to, and understand…

Testimonials add great value to your site. Customers are always looking for reassurance when purchasing products online and product satisfaction is always foremost in their thoughts. A positive online shopping experience is what they are after and testimonials on your checkout page can be your tool to help them achieve this goal.

The addition of corporate logos or positive reviews can help sway consumers to believe that what you are offering is legit and well supported by public opinion. When using company logos from your consumer database, ensure that companies of all sizes are well represented. This will allow you to cover a large consumer demographic and avoid customer neglect.

Furthermore, it is crucial to create strong testimonials that include a person’s full name, location and picture. You will be surprised by how following these few simple steps can lead to conversions on your checkout page.

After the customer is done shopping and received their product, you can send them a follow-up email so they can share their feedback. It’s a great way for you to find what’s working, and what’s not. Learn from your customers, and ask them what you can change going forward to better improve their experience. At the same time, you can ask them for a “review” to post on your website as a way to show social proof.

Conclusion

As with all marketing, there is a need to test, measure, and make adjustments on a continual basis. I always tell my customers that no matter what niche your involved in your going to have to test to find out what’s working, and what’s not. The same applies to your checkout page, and gathering the right information from your customers. I’m always looking for ways to improve the user experience, and that is my objective no matter if I’m testing a form, checkout page, content marketing, etc.

Keep in mind, your business is unique, and therefore must stand on its own merits. What works for others may not yield results for your company. It’s all about competition and standing out because that’s what will force customers to purchase from you, and not your competition.

Optimizing your checkout page is a creative experience. Feel free to share with us any strategies that you have found to be successful and make the game of conversion a game everyone can play.

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7 Highly Effective Steps to Boost Your Social Media Strategy in 2019

Nobody can deny the growing importance of social media as a great digital marketing tool that can offer greater marketing mileage for a brand, business, product or service than any other tool.

Content shared on social media platforms can easily be evolved into the most powerful marketing and advertising tools and tactics to enhance audience engagement with an intention to get more sales and leads as well. According to digital marketing experts, brands and businesses of all types must be investing in social media marketing in order to keep their existing and potential customers engaged and to provide them with details and information they need before placing an order. Otherwise, they will lose out a lot of social media customers/clients which means a bad impact on bottom line.

Since it is not always reasonable for small businesses to spend lots of bucks on social media marketing, they can do it by their own in order to keep customers connected with the business or brand via social media. Hence, giant businesses and brands often pay for SMM services in order to maintain a good balance between paid and organic reach. In this article, we have gathered some actionable steps to boost your social media strategy for greater brand exposure and customer engagement.

Set your Social Media Goals

Having solid and easily chase-able goals and objectives is always vital in order to land success on your way and you must also set social media goals before you kick start promoting your business or brand on social media. In simple words, you will not be able to measure or develop your social media strategies if you don’t have solid goals and objectives to get started. It is also vital that your social media goals should align with your marketing campaign to get more from your efforts.

As the visual below reports, people with a goal in mind are going to see upwards of 10X more success. However, if you actually take those goals, write them down and put them into action, you are more than 30X likely to see such goals come true.

With so many moving facets of social media and online marketing, it’s almost a requirement to always have your goals written down. Otherwise, you will likely forget them and miss out on the great ideas and opportunities you had in your mind.

Tailor Your Content Accordingly

Posting the same content on different social media platforms is one of the worst social media marketing mistakes that every business or brand should avoid in order to get more exposure. When you share same content on all your social media profiles, you are failed to deliver excellent and unique user experience that social media users are looking for. In results, same content shared on social media simply will not deliver the outcomes you want from your social media strategy. For instance, Pinterest and Instagram users are more interested in visual content and will provide you more exposure for your brand or company when you share high-quality images, videos and graphics to tell your story.

Decide on a Posting Schedule

Posting content on social media platforms randomly is not a characteristic of a great social media strategy. On another hand, posting with consistency can greatly intensify expectancy for your social media content, interest in your brand, and overall user engagement. Having a posting schedule at place can help you convey your message more effectively. For example, if you are using Instagram as your favorite social media platform to get reach target audience, you can schedule Instagram posts according to your posting schedule in order to get them published with consistency. In this way, orderliness is easier than ever and time is also saved for other productive things.

Social media scheduling tools like Postcron have made this process extremely easy. Everything is done right through their drag and drop platform, with no coding and logging back and forth between social accounts required.

Engage Commenters Quickly

As most of the social media networks rely on their unique algorithms to determine the reliability and usefulness of the content about whether to display prominently or not, keeping commenters engaged as quickly as possible is the best way to get more exposure for your business or brand. Always be quick to respond your commenters if you really want to keep them engaged as well as to boost customer trust by replying their queries in real time.

On Facebook, posts with more comments are often displayed more prominently to the users. You can easily keep your commenters engaged by having a dedicated social media professional who is ready to react and respond to user comments.

Also, if you want to see the fastest engagement and social response from your audience, try using a meme or pics of an animal. These always work like are charm, and are the basics of social media marketing 101.

Develop a Multichannel Approach

After the growing popularity of Twitter and Facebook, now it seems that Instagram is the much loved social media platform for marketers to reach more users. That is they reason, a brand or company must have a multichannel approach when it comes to promote products or services via social media marketing because it is not sure that which social media platform will be favorite of social media marketers.

Most of the marketers and small business owners use a variety of social media networks to reach more target audience. The problem with this scenario is being able to effectively grow your follower count and postings across each of these platforms. We already talked about the importance of social scheduling, but the concept of pre-loading accounts with new followers, likes, and shares is also an option. This is somethings brands like Famoid.com have offered for a while now and have seen a lot of success.

There are many pros and cons to buying social growth and engagement, but it’s also one of the best ways to give your campaigns and reach a kick-start. It was also proven through various online reports and studies that a great majority of celebrity followers are either fake or purchased through various social services.

Measure Strategy Success through Analytics

On-site and off-site analytics can be a great way to determine whether your current social media strategy is working properly for you or there is need to make some alterations for better outcomes. Most of the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter provide on-site analytics to check things like follower growth, user engagement and distribution etc. that can be used to plan things in future. A lot of off-site analytics tools are also available nowadays that can be used for different social media platforms to measure the performance.

Remarketing to Your Social Audience

With so many different opportunities available for advertising and marketing online, it’s amazing that more individuals and brands aren’t taking advantage of what social media and remarketing/retargeting has to offer. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all offered targeted advertising campaigns that allow advertisers to show ads to site visitors, email list subscribers, and many other custom audiences.

If you aren’t currently taking advantage of these targeted ad campaigns, not only will you be wasting time and money, you will also be missing out on HUGE conversion jumps as well.

How to Get the Best Social Media Results in 2019

In summary, if you want to grow your reach and following on each of the major social platforms, you are going to need to put in some quality time and effort into the following areas:

• Content creation
• Scheduling and automation
• Outreach and engagement

Each of these elements play a huge role in your eventual success on each platform. The brands that are seeing the best results, are the ones that have mastered these three elements and built a custom content creation and marketing plan for each social platform.

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How to Choose the Best eCommerce Platform for Your Business

When it comes to making money online or starting a successful business, there are plenty of options for you to choose from. As great as affiliate marketing is, there are some associated costs and competition hurdles that usually get in the way. For this reason, ecommerce is quickly becoming the go-to solution for starting an online business.

However, just like affiliate marketing and blogging, you are going to need to right tools and resources to make sure your site and online business is running at full speeds and capabilities at all times.

Today we are going to highlight some of the most important things to look for when deciding on the best ecommerce platform for your business, CRM, and/or platform for your business.

What is an eCommerce platform and why do I need it?

First thing first, we need to understand what ecommerce is and how it works — specifically in the aspect of why you need to choose a platform to run your site.

As you likely already know, the concept of an ecommerce business is to sell products online. More often than not, affiliates are finding great success with dropshipping, as they don’t need to hold any inventory.

An ecommerce platform is required in order to make sure your site customers, products, purchases, and management all connect and talk to each other so you can run a successful business.

There are many platforms and solutions out there to choose from, but like affiliate marketing, blogging, or web design — everyone’s needs will be different.

In short, there are two different ways to set up ecommerce for your site:

1 – Build one from scratch

Unless you are a coder that is looking for headaches, this is probably the worst solution to after. Why build something from scratch when there are already so many other options already on the market?

2 – Using a WordPress plugin

WordPress is awesome for building sites, but it still has a lot of work to do if you want to create an ‘easy to use’ ecommerce solution on the platform. There are plugins out there if you want to invest some time in researching what they offer. However, these may also require some programming, design, or customization skills.

3 – Going with an ecommerce solution

With so many platforms now catering to an ecommerce-focused audience, there is a great need for drag and drop solutions that are easy to use. This is usually the most sought after ecommerce CRM or platform choice for anyone just starting out or looking to grow and scale their business over time.

Which ecommerce solution is best for your business?

It’s easy to lay out each of the software solutions on the internet into three categories, but ultimately, this will come down to the needs and budget of your business.

The best CRM is often one that combines the best parts of each.

For example, if you were to look at what the majority of ecommerce sites are looking for reference to running their sites, they want to have one in place that offers a hosted solution, but also one that offers full customization and the option for being open-sourced.

With all of this in mind, there is always the thought of changing ecommerce solutions as well. Companies are always looking for the bigger, better deal… so it’s best to choose the right CRM the first time around.

Another advantage to going with a solution that is already built and ready to go after purchase, is that it will greatly diminish the amount of time it takes for your business or site to go live. With all other considerations in mind, it can also drastically lower your startup costs as well.

A 3-Point Plan for Picking the Best eCommerce Solution

As with anything in life, when you are given too many options, it’s hard to make a final decision. This is likely what you will face when it comes to choosing the best ecommerce platform for your business during these initial launch phases.

However, think back to when you first signed up for your website or blog hosting account and installed WordPress on your server. It was tough in the beginning, but then it became extremely simple and fast!

Here are three simple steps to help with the decision process.

1. Lay out your budget and launch to complete dates
2. Pick a few different solutions and compare their features and costs
3. Compare each and choose the solution that fits your budget and goals

It’s a simple method, and it works.

Also take the time to read up on customer reviews and site ratings for the different ecommerce solutions out there. It’s always best to pay a little more and go with a reliable name that you know and can trust.

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Breaking The Internet At Irvine Spectrum Center

Sally and I visit the Irvine Spectrum Center to watch Ralph Breaks The Internet and eat a gold fish shaped ice cream dessert from SomiSomi Soft Serve & Taiyaki.

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Why Your Blog Isn’t Getting Traffic (and How to Change That)

The internet is a shadow of what it used to be just a couple decades ago. In fact, we have witnessed an insane growth that most people never would have guessed would occur. Data is created and transferred at an astounding rate (about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day — wow!) and is only increasing.

Because all of this data is flying around online, it can seem like a real drag to create content for your blog. It feels almost like you’re constantly playing catch-up in an attempt to seek relevance in the online world.

Luckily, you don’t have to continue existing this way online. There are ways that you can increase your website traffic and get some serious views on your blog. We all know that views can translate to conversions, which translates to profit — so this is vital.

Let’s look at some of the ways you can boost your website’s traffic today.

Create Evergreen Content

Do you post content like news or opinion pieces frequently? This could be a huge problem and cause a lack of viewers on your site. There’s a solution to this problem, and it comes in the form of creating evergreen content.

Basically, evergreen content is content that stays relevant for years at a time. Like the evergreen tree it stays “green” read: relevant, all year long, which will help you pull in traffic.

What qualifies as evergreen content? Anything in the following groups can be considered evergreen:

• FAQs
• Case Studies
• How-to Guides
• Reviews

When you’re deciding on the type of content you want to create, you have to think about your niche and what questions people might have. For example, if you’re working in marketing, you can write marketing how-to guides, answer questions that you commonly see in your emails and message boards, review marketing software, and more.

Evergreen content is considered key pillars in any major blog. It’s worth learning about how to write this type of content if you want more traffic.

Examine Your SEO Strategy

Your search engine optimization, or SEO, strategy is absolutely vital to driving traffic to your website. Google is the gold standard for SEO, and everyone wants to rank on the top page. Consider that Google accounts for 79% of ALL internet searches, and it’s easy to see why everyone wants to rank high for certain keywords.

When you’re coming up with your SEO keywords, it’s important that you research all of the different variations of the words or phrases you want to use.

Make sure you are using all the tools you have available to make the most of your SEO strategy. For example, you can use Google’s keyword planner to identify how popular a keyword is with the internet and how often it’s used. Generally speaking, you are going to want a keyword with a high number of searches and low competition.

You’ll also need a tool to check to make sure that you’re using your keywords properly on your blog posts. Too many keywords and you can be flagged for being spammy, too few and you’ll have trouble ranking. It’s vital that you get help implementing your SEO after you’ve decided on keywords.

As you start to rank your keywords, you’ll see your traffic increase. The closer you get to the top of the first page of Google, the better chance you have at getting found.

Brand Building

One major problem that blog owners run into is they don’t spend enough time building their brand into something great. You can write all of the content in the universe, but if you’re not using all of the other tools at your disposal, no one will ever see any of your content.

How do you build your brand?

Well, the first thing you must do is create and establish social media platforms on all of the major sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like. Once you’ve established your platforms, put them to use. Share videos, interesting facts, your recent blog posts, engage with your audience, stay active.

Social media platforms generally have an algorithm that equates to more active users being shown to more people, and Marketing Sherpa states that adults between 18-34 are 95% more likely to follow a brand if they encounter them on social media. If you want to supercharge your brand, you can also consider using tools like Facebook Ads or Twitter Ad manager to reach a wider audience.

Don’t Forget Links

As you’re developing content, you should always make sure to include reputable links to data that you cite. If you are the source, make sure to mention show and try to include media that you recorded when applicable. Including media and links will help build your reputation online.

When your audience and reputation grows, you’ll be able to cast a wider net and diversify your content to expand your blog’s traffic.

We know it can seem discouraging at first when you’re getting almost no traffic and have been grinding for weeks. The good news is if you take this tips into consideration, you should begin to see an increase in your daily visitors.

Every business is a little different and requires specific types of marketing, content, and social presence. As you begin to build your brand you’ll start to get a feel for the type of content that gets shared on your social platforms. You’ll learn what kind of posts your audiences love. Eventually, you’ll be able to grow your blog audience beyond your wildest dreams.

Stay patient, and don’t give up. Every successful blog started with just one post. Every house starts with one brick. You have to build your legacy from the ground up.

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Why Inspiration Is For Amateurs

As bloggers, vloggers, social media influencers and online content creators, we are constantly searching for the next big, fun and potentially profitable idea. I’ve always said that overcoming writer’s block isn’t really a valid excuse, because writer’s block is the default status and not the exception. You need to be consistent and you need to deliver quality, time and time again.

Something that I hear a lot from beginning bloggers and other people who want to post content on the Internet is that they’re just waiting until inspiration strikes. They’re waiting until they feel inspired to create something truly unique, valuable and hopefully popular too. And so they wait. And they wait. And they learn and they read and they watch. But they don’t create, because they’re not feeling inspired. And that’s how they get stuck in a rut as amateurs.

Revered American painter and photographer Chuck Close is best known for his massive scale, photorealistic portraits. He once said this about inspiration:

Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.

It may sound utterly cliche, but simply showing up is the hardest part. And it’s not just about showing up once or twice, now and then. It’s about deciding that you’ll show up every day and put in the work, even when you don’t really feel like it, because you have faith that it’ll all pay off in the end.

Simply waiting around for inspiration will get you nowhere. True, the work that you put out — whether it’s a blog post, a YouTube video, an e-book, or even an Instagram post — might not be the greatest and you’ll probably create some utter garbage along the way. At the same time, all it takes is one home run (or even a simple base hit) to get you back on the board. You miss all the shots you don’t take, so you may as well take as many shots as you can.

We all have to start somewhere, so don’t worry if you can’t quite measure up to the pros just yet. Have faith that you’ll get there and the simple act of showing up, consistently and diligently, with the same effort and passion on the 10th day or the 100th day as you do on the first day is how you’ll move that needle forward.

Chuck Close continues:

The belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great [idea].

When I look back at some of the blogging I did in my earlier days over a decade ago, I cringe. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t all that great, but it was good enough to “kick open other doors” for my freelance career. That’s how I came to cover massive tech events like CES in Las Vegas and how I came to become a regular writer here on John Chow dot Com.

Just showing up and putting my work “out there” consistently and reliably was enough to get noticed and that’s how I’m able to eke out my humble professional existence today as a freelance writer. There really is no replacement for putting in the time, regardless of how much “inspiration” or “talent” you have driving it all.

The belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you [did] today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.

On some level, success is predicated on a little bit of stubbornness. Call it tenacity or perseverance if you want to be a little more positive about it, but the truth is that you do need to be stubborn to succeed. You need to stick with something even when it doesn’t really look like it’s working. Just keep putting in the hours and work to improve what you do.

Don’t wait for inspiration to come knocking on your door. Instead, you’ve got to kick down that door yourself. It just takes time.

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