Whether you are just starting your blog or you are an experienced blogger, this one thing has the ability to slow down your blog. It can affect your content creation, your social media marketing, and even your blog layout and design. Let’s talk about what this is, and how to move past it to grow your blog faster.
What’s Stopping You from Growing Your Blog Faster?
Perfection has a nasty way of blocking blog growth. Perfection sits there demanding to run the show. Yet, it really has no idea what it’s doing. It wants you to focus all your time on one insignificant thing, instead of looking at the bigger picture: a functioning blog.
How Perfection Gets In The Way
Perfection gets in the way of productivity. Here I will talk about three examples of how it has the ability to become a roadblock for blog growth.
1. Comparing your blog to others.
It’s easy to look at your favorite blog, and feel subpar because your writing or photos aren’t as good. Or perhaps you wonder “Why can’t I have 90,000 Facebook followers too?” It’s common to compare yourself to somebody else because let’s face it, we always seem to want what we don’t have. Comparing your blog to someone else’s hurts your blog. Each blog has a different set of circumstances, and not meeting someone else’s idea of perfection is a dangerous thing. It can easily thwart you from writing a new blog post because you want it to be perfect or stop you from marketing your blog because you don’t have enough followers. Comparison and perfection are sabotaging you and all your efforts. Get inspired by others, but don’t compare.
2. Taking a break from your blog and not picking up where you left off.
You missed doing a post because you were occupied. It happens. Whether you had a vacation or a family emergency, life gets in the way sometimes. This is fine; however, if you find yourself thinking, “I missed writing that post and I’m ruined now,” just remember that’s the voice of perfection chiming in when nobody asked. It’s okay that life got in the way. Just pick up where you left off. It’s quite possible that the only one who noticed you were gone was perfection. Even if the break was longer than you expected, again just pick up where you left off. Maybe your readers did notice that you were gone and maybe it affected your overall viewership, that’s fine. Your ideal reader is happy that you are back and once you get into the swing of your regular schedule, your viewership will make a comeback.
3. Focusing on the wrong things.
You just started designing your blog and found the perfect theme, but you’re focusing too much on the layout rather than producing any content. If this describes you, know your blog doesn’t have to look perfect. The only thing it really needs is to look simple enough that your ideal visitor can read and navigate your blog with ease. Content should come before design. Your visitors are not coming to your blog because you have a great blog design, they are coming to your blog because you have something great to say.
What Are the Consequences of Not Being Perfect?
So you wrote a blog post and uh-oh, you spelled something wrong, your SEO is not is good as it could be, you linked something improperly, you didn’t include any internal links, etc. The list can go on and on, but what are the consequences of this really? One person might notice your misspelled word, but the consequences of not perfect are pretty minimal. For the most part, the only one noticing your blog’s imperfections are you.
On the other hand, if you listen to perfection when it butts in, the consequences are big. Perfection can easily send you down a five-hour path of finding the perfect color scheme for your blog. It can delay you for months from even launching your blog in the first place because the design isn’t quite right. Whereas, if you spent that time you were deliberating about the layout, font, etc, you could’ve been creating some killer content that could be attracting some lovely traffic to your blog right now.
Know your blog is never going to be perfect. Your blog is a growing and ever-changing thing. With each post, each page, and each idea your blog morphs into something new. In the eyes of perfection, there is always something to fix. If you have blaring errors, sure fix them, but know you can’t fix everything. Instead, let’s talk about a few ways to sidetrack perfection and help grow your blog faster.
How to Grow Your Blog Faster and Stop Listening to Perfection
Perfection disguises itself as help, but it gets in the way of what’s important. If you feel like you are getting nowhere, take a step back from what you are working on and ask yourself, “Why am I stuck?” If you realize that’s its perfection sneaking its way in, I’ve got a few steps to help combat it.
1. Whatever blogging task you are working on, set yourself a deadline.
Deadlines force you to get through a task. Setting a deadline helps you to focus on the goal at hand, and allows to be more productive. Deadlines create a sense of urgency and help you to finish your task quickly, and not linger on the unimportant.
2. Find your momentum and create the habit of posting regularly.
This is big! Knowing how often you wish to put out a blog post, whether it’s twice a week or once a month, is important. Having a posting schedule that works for you will help you gain your momentum. Once you’re in the habit of keeping to your regular posting schedule, creating content will come with ease.
3. Find a different goal.
If you know you struggle with perfection, make an effort to focus on a different goal. Don’t let perfection be your goal. An example of another goal could be to write 300 words for your upcoming blog post every day and don’t edit it as you go.
Or if you are just setting up your blog, breakdown setting up your blog in actionable tasks. Write down everything you need to do to set up your blog. Each day sit down and pick a few of these tasks to accomplish that day. Breaking down each thing as a goal, makes you more productive.
4. Find tools to help you.
If typos and grammar are one of your downfalls, use a free writing app like Grammarly to make sure your posts are mistake-free.
If you struggle with keeping on top of your tasks, use a free productivity app like ClickUp or Trello to keep you organized with your blog posts, goals, and even planning out your social media.
5. Celebrate the small wins.
It takes guts to be a blogger, putting your words out there for whoever to read. Celebrate the little things! Whether you celebrate your 10th blog post or your 500th, a product launch or even another follower on Pinterest, it’s important to celebrate the little accomplishments. Celebrating the little things helps keep what you love about blogging your focus.
What are your strategies for forgetting perfection?
Share below in the comments.