Shut Up and Put In Your Reps – James Clear.
Shut Up and Put in Your Reps – James Clear.
I love this. It is too easy, especially in business to be always chasing the new thing, the shiny thing, the sexy thing, or the thing that is slightly less boring than yesterdays thing, but people who succeed put in the reps every single day, and that is what they focus on. Make the sales calls, go gym – put in reps, show up, do work, repeat for a long time, and things somehow manage to work themselves out. Reps always count more than constantly trying to hit home runs,
After being a Small Business Consultant for ten years, one thing I can tell you is that small business owners marketing efforts tend to go in spurts. They are highly inconsistent. And not shock – so are their sales. In Small Business Marketing – Consistency over Brilliance should be out aim.
Now, to be fair, there are a lot of reasons for this inconsistency.. Being a small business owner requires you to wear many hats, and things come up every day that tend to derail a business owner’s best intentions.
Should you happen to be brilliant marketing idea, you will still need consistency, or that brilliant idea, is never going to see the light of day. In Small Business Marketing – Consistency over Brilliance should be our mantra.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the same way. You can’t just put up a website and expect it to stay on top of Google. Not any more. You need to be updating your website (as well as your Google Maps Listing) at a minimum of once per week, but twice per week would be idea. Over time, Google will start to see that something is happening on your website, and begin sending traffic to you. But if you are haphazard about it, you won’t get that traffic.
I am into fitness. I always have been. And what I have found is that getting up early, and doing something, even a small something, every single day is the MOST important thing. Over time, effort adds up. But you know what else can add up? Your failure to show up and put in work every day – those daily failures add up as well.
There are so many marketing “teachers” out there bombarding small business owners with articles and ads, but let me tell you, most of the time, you don’t need any of that fancy stuff. What you need is to find one thing, whether it is social media, blogging, emailing, or networking that you are comfortable and confident (both) doing, that you are willing to do all of the time; and once you figure out what that thing is, do it a little bit every day. You see, if you are going to try and do facebook, and Instagram, and LinkedIn, and do blogging, and do e-mail marketing – chances are, you are going to all of them poorly rather than doing one of them supremely well. If you own a large business, sure, you’ve got an entire team working on each of these things. But when you are doing small business marketing, you don’t have the time to do all of this well. So pick one or possibly two, and execute around that marketing every single day.
Then if you find that thing is going consistently, then maybe consider adding something new, or experimenting.. But your first aim, should be consistency. Nothing done haphazardly is going to drive real success, and in the rare event that it does, you won’t be able to replicate it later, because you will know you just got lucky, and luck, although great, and necessary, never lasts.
Success comes down to small daily habits. I personally love Atomic Habits by James Clear. = in his book he outlines excellent ways to begin making success a habit, rather than a hope. He talks about How to Get 1% Better every day. Here is a great video link on Youtube:
Tim Vaderkamp is co-owner o Stay Wild Digital Marketing, a small business marketing agency located in Salt Lake City. Learn More About Our Services.
e-mail: tim@timvanderkamp.com
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