Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The 14-Day Challenge - Looking Back
Now with my 14-day challenge behind me, I figured it was time to look back with some final lessons from it. First of all was the need to overcome my perfectionism.

Overcoming perfectionism
Ironically, this morning I came across an article on this exact issue. The writer said that you should never wait until a project is 100% perfect before rolling it out. Instead, he said you should roll it out when it is 70% perfect. He said you can always go back later and fix the other 20%.

And, no, he wasn't math challenged. His point was that no project is ever perfect. Get it out there when it's good enough. Then go back and make it better. And keep going back and making it better. But never expect that it will ever be perfect. Just keep making it better.

My perfectionism displayed itself in this project in some ugly ways. I'm sure I would have discarded the project multiple times if I hadn't been committed to completing it in some form or other. I had a strong pull to drop it because it wouldn't live up to my perfectionistic vision of it.

Knowing that I was accountable for getting it done played a big role in me sticking with it. And I saw ways that my perfectionism slowed me down greatly along the way.

If I were to do the project all over again, I would have simplified it even further. Looking back, I didn't need to do as much as I did. I could have put the infoproduct up on my current site and left the new site for later.

The whole idea that I needed to put up a thirty-page site just to roll out a new infoproduct was total overkill. It was part of my typical overly ambitious thinking.

In another sense, though, I'm glad I did get the new site going. Now, with a lot of that work behind me, it will be less intimidating to pick it up and finish it.

The importance of systems
The second lesson I already touched on during the challenge: the need for systems. Having structures I could pull out to follow would have made things much easier than having to do everything off the top of my head.

This project actually represents my first time planning a strategy all the way through instead of performing unrelated tasks. I need to keep that way of operating as I move on to promoting the ebook.

My ongoing goal is to first start promoting and selling the ebook from my old site, then solidify the new site, create a companion ebook, which will cover ways to increase traffic by borrowing it from other people's sites, and finally, to make the new site a front end for a membership site on traffic generation and conversion.

I also have planned specific steps for promoting this infoproduct. Granted, some of it falls into that overly ambitious category again. But completing the project has taught me more about how to recognize when I'm drifting off into distracting pipdreams.

The importance of having done it before
Which brings me to the final, and most important lesson from this 14-Day Challenge: being able to say, "I've done it." With each time you actually complete a project, you gain a little more experience. And with that experience comes knowledge. And with knowledge comes confidence.

When faced with similar projects in the future, I can draw off of knowledge of what I did this time instead of dealing with the paralysis of knowing that several dozen ways exist that I haven't done before and will have to learn from scratch. Having the experience itself is a tremendous advantage.

The best way I can explain it as the difference between being able to say, "I suppose I COULD do this," and, "I CAN do this."
Jeff

Labels: start business