Last week, I had the opportunity to interview Digital Copywriter’s Reality Blogger, Suzanna Fitzgerald.
It was a great conversation about goals and risks, forward momentum, and balance. Toward the end, I invited Suzanna to turn the tables on me and ask any questions she had.
One of the questions she asked was about what scared me when I was just starting out.
The answer was easy.
When I was first starting out, I feared rejection… but not just any kind of rejection. I was scared of being a bother, of having someone spend time talking to me and deciding I had wasted their time because of my lack of experience, lack of confidence, or even lack of knowledge. I hated the idea of looking ill-informed or unprepared and having someone decide they didn’t like me because of it.
That made prospecting a slow game for me. Fortunately, I did understand it was necessary, no matter how uncomfortable it made me. So I kept at it, and slowly but surely, I built my business.
It took about two years to reach a point where I was making a full-time income that more than paid the bills, but I got there.
It’s easy now to look back on my fears then as silly. It’s easy to think, if I had just understood that most businesspeople are too busy to be judgmental, that most “no” responses happen because the prospect simply doesn’t have a need at the moment, that no single client conversation is ever a make-or-break moment, that I would have succeeded faster.
But those are all insights I earned from experience. Even if I could recognize their truth at the time, it was only experience that taught me to believe them.
In the moment, when you’re just starting out, those fears feel real and relevant. They aren’t easy to talk yourself out of.
I think the most important thing I learned was that it’s okay to feel afraid, to be uncomfortable. The key for me was to feel those things and take action anyway. That’s how you get better at the things you don’t feel good at yet.
Anyway, if you weren’t able to join us for the live event on Thursday, I hope you find a bit of time to listen to the interview. We covered a lot of ground, and there were a lot of things I found helpful right now where I’m at, and others that I would have found helpful when I was just getting started. So, no matter where you’re at, I think you’ll find it worth your while.
New on the Site
Quick learning and deep learning. These are two different approaches to gaining new knowledge and they’re both useful to you as a writer. Quick learning can help you get up to speed quickly about a new topic. Deep learning is what you need if you want to become an expert in an industry, on a specific channel, or at writing a specialized project type. In this week’s featured article, I give you techniques to approach each kind of learning.
QR codes have been around for a while, but until the pandemic, they were generally favored by just a few industries and more or less ignored by everyone else. As the pandemic forced us to get creative about a lot of things, QR codes became more commonplace. Which is actually a good thing because QR codes give us a lot of ways to be creative in our marketing. If you want to get more familiar with QR codes and how you might use them, give Andrew Murray’s latest Tech Corner a look.
You’re a human person, which means you have good days, and you have bad days. The problem with bad days is they have a way of sucking the momentum out of your writing progress… and that can lead to more bad days. In her latest Reality Blog, Suzanna Fitzgerald looks at how she used to handle bad days and how these days she handles them much more productively. If bad days tend to derail you, you’ll want to give this a look.
Mark Your Calendar
March 3 (Thursday!): Our next Monthly Member Update is this week. During this webinar, we’ll look at how to write better email subject lines, whether you’re writing them for clients or to clients. We’ll also review top content added to the site, we’ll take a sneak peek at what’s coming up, and we’ll finish up with a live Q&A. I hope you’ll join me!
March 10: Many of you tried your hand at our newest Practice Assignment, to write a blog post. The live review of selected submissions is scheduled for March 10. Even if your entry isn’t selected for review, this is still a great way to hone your blog-writing skills. If you want to write blog posts for yourself or for your clients, you won’t want to miss this.
Around the Web
Promoting your blog or a client’s blog through social media? These nine tips can help you enjoy the process and see more success.
Marketers are having to make a big shift from third-party data to first-party data. This is something that could come up in your discovery calls, so it’s good to be informed.
Have you ever wondered what, exactly, a Content Marketing Strategist does?
That’s all for now. Make it a great week!
