A Personal Story about How to Lose Your Fear of Hitting Publish

The Transcript

A Personal Story about How to Lose Your Fear of Hitting Publish

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Pamela Wilson: We’ve covered a lot of ground so far in Hit Publish, but I have to tell you, there’s an elephant in the room, and I want to address it right now.

This week’s episode is going to be a little different. This time you’ll just hear from me. Our topic is How To Hit Publish fearlessly. As a bonus, you’re going to come away with a new appreciation for the name of this podcast, and the importance of hitting publish in your own life.

Welcome to Hit Publish, where I cover simple ways to get better results with your online business. This is Pamela Wilson of Copyblogger Media.

This week, I’m sharing an answer to one important online marketing question that will show you how to build a business that grows your profits.

I want to thank you for downloading this podcast, and I want to thank Rainmaker.FM for hosting it.

Are you ready to tackle your fears head on? Let’s Hit Publish.

Hit Publish is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. If you’re looking to easily build a powerful sales and marketing website that drives your online business, head over to rainmaker.fm/platform right now and sign up for a free 14-day trial to see if it might be a fit for you.

Rainmaker handles all the technical elements of good online business practices for you — design, content, traffic, and conversion. Get over to rainmaker.fm/platform now and get back to building your online business.

What Working the Line at a Barbecue Joint Can Teach You About Compassion

On the day this podcast launched, someone sent me a tweet that read “Great show. A friendly suggestion: it needs a new name.”

That’s when I realized that I needed to share why I named this podcast Hit Publish, and why it couldn’t possibly be named anything else.

I’ve had an online business since 2010, and in the early days of my business, one of the biggest challenges was just putting my work out into the world for everyone to see. It was nerve-wracking.

Here’s a little bit about me.

My very first jobs were babysitting for neighbor families. I’d get to their homes in the late afternoon, I would take over caring for their kids, and feed their kids dinner and get them to bed while the couple went out to dinner and spent some quality time together.

After I did this for a few years, I knew I wanted to graduate to a real job. I was living in San Antonio, Texas at the time.

It turned out that one of my babysitting clients was part of a family that owned a chain of barbecue restaurants.

In one of the earliest examples of finding work through networking in my life, I was able to get a “real” job — and I’m drawing air quotes around real — a real job working on the line behind the counter of a walk-up barbecue restaurant.

It was work. It was really tough.

The meats and all the side dishes were sitting under heat lamps, and I had to take heavy pieces of beef brisket, load them onto an industrial-sized slicer, and then slice off pieces of this slow roasted beef, all the while trying really hard not slice off a finger.

At the end of every shift, I was exhausted. Those shifts often included things like wiping down tables and counters, and working the cash register. The one thing I noticed was that my clothes — no matter how much I washed them — retained the smell of barbecue forever.

But I did learn something very important.

Ever since I worked that tough restaurant job, I’ve had so much compassion for people who work in that environment. Whether it’s the neighborhood sandwich place, or even a five-star fancy restaurant — restaurant work is not easy, and now I know that firsthand.

It’s the same thing with publishing content on your website.

One of the most important things that I learned in the early days of my website was how incredibly difficult it is to publish content online.

You feel vulnerable. You feel nervous. You feel like you’re wearing your heart on your sleeve for everyone to see.

It gave me a lot of compassion toward people who do that every day. A lot of compassion for people who are able to push past those fears and get their content out there.

Four Mindset Adjustments that Will Make You More Brave About Hitting Publish

You know, hitting publish is where everything begins when you have an online business.

Online businesses are built on content. Content that attracts, content that informs, content that hopefully once in a while entertains — and content that keeps people coming back to your website.

I want to share some tips for hitting publish on a regular basis. Hopefully, they’ll help you to feel braver about getting your work out into the world.

The first tip is that your website isn’t you.

You have to do your best to separate your ego from the work that you produce. Your work is just something you do. You can always make more of it.

There are always more ideas where the first one came from.

Another idea is that your website isn’t permanent.

It can always be tweaked. I’ve spent over 20 years in the print design field, and believe me, you get a little paranoid about mistakes that are made when there are tens of thousands of dollars on the line because that’s what your client is going to pay the printer to bring your work to life.

But online, it’s a completely different story.

You put something out there and if you find a mistake, you just fix the mistake and you re-publish it, end of story.

Nobody loses any money. Nothing has to be reprinted. No stickers need to be applied to the brochure that you send off to the printer, which is every designer’s nightmare!

The other concept is that you won’t really know what works until you hit publish.

The only way to gauge if your blog post or your opt-in pages or any other content that you create is going to work, is to actually publish them.

I know that sounds way too obvious, but it truly is the first step. You don’t get any kind of usable feedback until you publish and get it out there.

Compelling Reasons You Should Ignore Your Fear on a Regular Basis

The last idea I want to share is that in the early days, no one is watching.

That can make the early days very frustrating, because you feel like your work isn’t getting the attention that it deserves.

But the flip side of that is that it’s great because you can spend those early days working out your style, and setting up a process for producing your content.

You can do all that while almost no one is watching. I encourage you to embrace that.

Our online marketing journeys start the day we hit publish on our very first piece of content.

We build our online presence every time we hit publish.

This is Pamela Wilson.

I want to thank you for being one of the many brave Hit Publish podcast subscribers.

Take a look at the show notes for more information on today’s topic. If you haven’t yet, please leave a review for Hit Publish on iTunes. I want to hear what you think about this show.

Bye, bye for now, and remember to take action, and Hit Publish.