Dealing With Overwhelm

If you’re an affiliate marketer you’ve probably experienced dealing with overwhelm at some point or another. Overwhelm is, well, overwhelming. It stops you from moving forward in any logical way. The result of overwhelm is non-action, confusion and getting stuck. I’ve recently been in overwhelm again and it’s definitely not for the first time. It often happens when you’re shifting gears from one strategy to another. Or, if you have got caught up in shiny object syndrome, it’s when you jump from course to course looking for the “easy way” to make money online.

But shifting gears is a gradual process. If you attempt to move too quickly while shifting gears, it’s like trying to push a freight train off course. It simply doesn’t happen easily. You need to give yourself some room.

I’ve recently been investigating a free Facebook marketing strategy and I’m not really into the habits with it yet. My previous habits are blogging, and I’ve just begun posting on Quora again. See my post how to use Quora for affiliate marketing for more on this strategy.

While juggling a part time job and blogging and posting on Quora and learning a new free marketing strategy, I find myself sitting doing nothing. It’s quite frustrating really! But I’ve realised that I need to go back to my daily routine which is well established, and gently add the new Facebook strategy over time!

Dealing With Overwhelm – Doing One Thing Well

Trying to do everything in your affiliate business leads to overwhelm and inaction. So if you find yourself here, a good thing to do is to focus on a single daily action step you can get into a habit with.

My single daily action step has always been to write a blog post. So here I am, taking some action again. No matter how small your daily action step feels, it’s always good to establish a routine where you are taking at least one daily action step with your affiliate business. So no matter what your marketing budget looks like, you can always take some positive action regardless.

There’s magic in taking action steps because it fires up your enthusiasm, and prevents you from procrastinating yourself into a corner.

One single action step is far better than a week of frantic procrastination and spreading yourself too thin among many different strategies. When you spread yourself too thin, nothing much happens because you never gain any traction in any area.

With blogging, my “go to” daily routine, I’ve managed to keep it going for several years now and have built a huge volume of blog posts on this website alone.

Dealing With Overwhelm – The Cycle Of Confusion

There’s a cycle of confusion within affiliate marketing and it explains the around 95% drop out rate in the industry. You join a course, get some training and then it comes time to choose a marketing method and get to work. But you don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t. If you have a marketing budget, you can start out running ads and testing different marketing campaigns. If you don’t have money for marketing, you’ll need another strategy, such as blogging, video content or using social media.

The problem with any kind of marketing method is that nothing is guaranteed to work, especially the first time you try it. But particularly with free social media tactics and content creation, it takes a long time before you see any results from it. So you need to be confident in your daily action steps and persevere, often for weeks before you see the result.

The worst thing is, before you take action, you procrastinate. You wonder whether the action steps will work. You want proof that it works! But there is no proof. The results are only waiting for the action takers who put themselves on the line – both with paid advertising and content generation.

Dealing With Overwhelm – My New Facebook Tactic

My new Facebook tactic is only just underway and I’ll share my results in a later post once I’ve given it some time to generate traction. But at the moment I’m running into problems with it. What invariably comes up is doubt and scepticism. I wonder whether it’s worth my time at all. My old habits of blogging, sharing content with my list, positing on social media and answering Quora questions are more established, and therefore easier.

By taking action on a new strategy, I’m taking time away from my old strategies. Should I stick with my old tactics or switch to Facebook? Will Facebook actually work? These are the questions which fill my mind and while they do, doubt arises and I’m not actually working on anything!

I also mentioned my new tactic to someone who queried it, which led to me querying it! Now I’m doubting my new tactic already before actually starting it properly. It also gave rise to this post on why you should’t tell anyone what you’re doing before it’s done!

Now there’s two sides to this coin because some say you need to be held accountable. Telling someone your goals for example makes them hold you to account. But, if you’re unsure of something, sometimes it’s worth keeping it to yourself before you tell anyone what you’re up to! Anyway, I’ve shared my new tactic here so I hope you can hold me accountable to it. Sign up to my list and you’ll get my future post on the tactic once I’ve proven to myself that it actually works!

Summary

So if you’ve found yourself dealing with overwhelm, unable to think or act, it’s probably worth choosing a single action you can do every day without thought. For me it’s posting a blog on my website, but it could be running an ad, uploading a video, posting on social media. That action becomes your daily staple and you can build on that over time.

When you switch to something else, especially after establishing a routine, your mind rebels. It wants to remain in your old patterns of behaviour. It’s easy to remain the same. So cut yourself some slack if you’re going through this. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Change takes time. Make a daily habit out of one simple action step you can get into a groove with, and build on.

That’s far easier and more effective than jumping from course to course, or strategy to strategy, looking for some magic pill. A single step towards your goals is much better, no matter how slowly you move, than staying in a state of overwhelm and confusion.