Don’t Let This Mistake Kill Your Business

At some point, this one little thing affects almost everyone building authority for their business online whether that business is content marketing or something else.  

It’s called “Perfectionism” and it affects many new writers, developers, and freelancers.

We tend to spend far too much time attempting to perfect our site and our content, yet not enough time propelling the business forward.

Imprefection sells

Unless you are an existing corporation with an established brand, don’t let this fear take hold. Get started. You can always come back and fix things later.

I attended the Authority Rainmaker conference in Denver, which was a fantastic conference on content marketing. Much of the content centered around building authority. Chris Brogan was one of the keynote speakers and his presentation was dynamic.  If you’ve ever seen Chris speak, you know what I mean. My biggest takeaway from Chris’ keynote was this:

Imprefection sells.

(Lest you think I typo-ed – this is how it was printed on the slide for effect. Get it?)

So even the mighty Chris Brogan tells you don’t sweat the small stuff. If you have a typo or a mistake, who cares? It shows you are human.

Building authority includes imperfection

This dovetails nicely with another point he made:

Non-converting media builds warmth & trust that earns you the right to promote converting media.

I know that’s not specific to perfectionism (or overcoming it), but the connecting point here is the imperfection makes you human. And that helps work toward building warmth and trust.

(Also, the other part of this is the importance of “non-converting” media. Not everything you do on your site needs to be content to convert, especially if you’re selling yourself. That’s all part of building authority.)

Imperfection builds trust

Content marketing is successful when you engage the audience. You engage the audience when you gain their trust. You gain trust by being honest, vulnerable, and yes, imperfect.

We often spend too much time worrying about perfecting a design or a blog post. Eventually, you just seize up and shut down. The result is lost productivity.

In business, and especially content marketing, lost productivity means lost revenue and opportunity.  You can’t publish fresh content consistently if you are constantly succumbing to the fear of getting it exactly perfect.