The time will come when you’ll have to start making big decisions for your blog. You’re not just a little no-name blog anymore. You have some good, steady traffic coming in and you’re making a little money. If you want to make more money though, then you need to start thinking bigger, and that scares a lot of first-time bloggers. But fear not. Here are six practices to help you overcome your fears of playing bigger.
1. Surround Yourself With A Support System
For a lot of bloggers, the very fact that they’re starting a blogging business can be scary. They don’t have a boss they can turn to for guidance, or fellow employees they can turn to for support. And what makes it worse is their friends and family don’t understand what they’re doing. They don’t know anything about blogging so they can’t offer any support, either. You’re literally on your own.That’s why it’s so important to network with other bloggers. Only another blogger will understand everything you’re going through – the frustrations as well as the successes.
The best way I’ve found to connect with other bloggers is Twitter. You might also like Internet Marketing forums for meeting other bloggers however, I find them a little distracting. It doesn’t really matter where you make connections, just get out there and meet some other bloggers.
2. Identify Your Fears
I know I was terrified when I reached the point where I needed to start thinking bigger. But when I thought about it, it wasn’t the idea of “getting bigger” that scared me, it was all the things I’d need to do in the process. For example, I knew I had to create my own product and I was terrified about building a sales funnel because there were a lot of steps involved that I’d never done before.From there I broke it down even further and decided that what I was really afraid of was setting up and connecting a squeeze page, a sales page, a payment processor, a thank you page, and a download page, and topping it off with an upsell.
Once you identify what you’re really afraid of, it makes the monster a lot less scarier. Identifying each step in that sales funnel business made it easy for me to create a task list and give my project some organization. From there it was simple to just tackle one task at a time until the project was complete.
3. Process The Fear
Football players tell you to suck it up and push through the fear. But your blog is a business, not a game. Pushing through your fear takes a lot of time and energy. And if you’re pushing against your fear that means your fear is pushing back – which means someone might get hurt.It also doesn’t make sense to push through something until you know what’s on the other side. Fear is a natural human reaction to a perceived danger. It’s a warning signal. Take time to analyze your fear to find out what you’re really afraid of and if it’s something you want to conquer.
4. Are Your Fears Valid?
Once you’ve identified your fear it helps to test it and see if it’s valid. You might not have anything to be afraid of after all.For example, if you’ve put off creating a video for your blog because you’re afraid people will laugh at your hairstyle, go ahead and make that video and show it to a few close blogging friends. Don’t mention your concerns, just ask for their feedback.
Chances are they won’t even notice your hair because they’ll be listening to your message. And if they do say something about your purple ponytail, you’ll learn that you really won’t die because of it.
5. Look At Your Fear From Both Sides
Sometimes it helps to look at the best-case and worst-case scenarios. What’s the best thing that could happen if you succeed and what’s the worst thing that could happen if your fears are valid? How will it affect you and how will it affect your blogging business?Now, what can you do to prevent the worst-case scenarios from happening?