Perfection Is the Enemy of Progress

This website isn’t perfect. I’m not going for perfection today. These first blog posts are probably not going to win me any writing awards. I haven’t written anything online about myself and my services for years because I’ve been too busy, and now I’m riddled with insecurity about the quality. But I’ve taken myself on as a client, and I’m making myself do what I would encourage a marketing client to do: just get started. 

If you scroll back chronologically through the content of any successful creator or business on any platform, you will be able to see the evolution of how they express their ideas. In the present they are in the groove, experienced, connected to their community and probably better funded than they were on day one. Their oldest content won’t epitomise perfection; it will likely look amateurish and clumsy. What they were doing then might differ dramatically from what they are doing now in terms of theme, tone and production. If you revisit this site in a year, and if I’ve stayed consistent with publishing, you might find something far more polished. 

It’s hard to start publishing before you’re positive that it will look as good as you want to and resonate as effectively as you’d like. I can promise, based on years (decades) of experience, that delaying the start until everything is just right is expensive. If my less-than-perfect blogs reach one small business owner who wants to know how to leverage blogging, social media, email marketing– content marketing in general– in service of their business goals, they’ll have done their job. And that’s my priority for publishing now: lead generation. 

As I sit in my living room in Berkshire, dogs sleeping next to me, preparing for an appointment with an eager learner who wants to put content marketing to work for themselves, I feel confident that being able to show that person that I walk the walk will be valuable. When I tell them not to shell out a fortune for the first iteration of their website before they’ve had a chance to put into practice any of their ideas about what their business and clientele will be, I will be able to show them this. When I reassure them that getting something serviceable up is a satisfactory starting point, I’ll be able to share a link to this blog post as proof. When they express fear or worry about putting themselves out there, I’ll be able to point to this to say, “I did it, and it was uncomfortable but worthwhile.”

Unless your goal is to generate income directly from content, like an influencer, the job the content needs to do is helping your target audience find you and understand what you’re offering. Its job is not perfection. It is lead generation, lead nurturing and showing each facet of your offering, one at a time. Going viral isn’t the goal, unless that virality also generates viable leads. Connecting with the exact right people and compelling them to enquire further is the goal. Educating your existing community about aspects of your offering they may not yet have experienced is the goal. 

It is rare for any business to enter the marketplace fully formed. There’s so much to do at the beginning of a business journey, and at every growth point thereafter. Ticking every box to perfection regarding the practicalities of offering your product up can be overwhelming. Marketing the business is one of those practicalities, and it shouldn’t be treated either as a box to be ticked in a one-size-fits-all manner or as an intimidating venture to be approached with extreme caution. The truth is somewhere in-between, and taking a reasonably researched step without waiting to know if it was the perfect step is great– as long as you make a conscious effort to learn from each step along the path and integrate those learnings into subsequent steps.