The Biggest Pitfall Of An Online Marketer (NicheShake Originals)

Online Marketing.

When you hear these two words what springs up in your brain?

Late nights? insomnia? tiredness? extremely low dopamine? 

Probably not. 

What does spring up to you is Happiness, vacations to the most exotic destinations, friends, partners, money, or simply speaking your “Dream Life”

But does just consuming content & hustling guarantee everything? 

This article is not related to the type of content you are going to find in the blog. That’s why we decided to list it under the NicheShake Originals label, where we will publish stuff that might be different from the regular stuff on our blog.

So with that said let’s begin.

Exposure

So one day while scrolling randomly through YouTube or maybe Facebook, you come across this ad that says “How I make $10,000 every month without working for a boss”.

And you say to yourself, “This probably is a scam”, but then you are curious too. But you still resist.

After some time, curiosity kills the cat and you decide to check out what’s going on.

So this random dude says you should opt for his free webinar so that he can give you *EXTRA RARE* secrets to making $10,000 every month without lifting your ass off your bed.

So you enroll and then are instantly hooked.

He is showing off some screenshots from his PayPal account that say he has over 100K dollars in his PayPal account and he made it in just a couple of months. *WITHOUT ANY HARD WORK*

So you enroll anyway (It’s Free)

And we predict here are the things that are gonna happen in the webinar you sign up for

Congratulations for successfully wasting 60 Mins of your valuable time and potentially a lot of money on a useless course.

After the webinar, you close your computer and go to sleep. And suddenly you start to rephrase what that dude was saying in the webinar. You think “Making money from online marketing so freaking easy”. You become one of many who think like that.

The next morning you shoot up www.youtube.com on your chrome home page and then binge make money online videos for hours and decide that you are going to give it a shot.

Everything is shining, and you feel finally you are going to have the life of your dreams.

Spoiler Alert: You are just falling into the trap.

The Period Of Suffering

After you complete your first round of getting yourself familiar with the basics of all the ways you can make money online, you will be even more pumped to learn new stuff about it.

You will search on Google, Facebook, YouTube and try to find out new content which will help you level up your knowledge about these marketing channels so you can make more from them.

And while doing this suddenly you will come across a video on YouTube that reads “The true meaning of entrepreneurship (Motivation)”.

And out of curiosity, we are damn sure you will watch it.

The speaker will go like “You have to work hard to succeed, people fail because they don’t work hard, getting the things in your life requires massive amounts of hard work, never give up”.

You may ask what’s the problem with this?

Well, from now on every time when you will think of giving up on a tactic, those words will hit you like a whip. You just won’t be able to let go of it even if you know it is not providing adequate ROI.

After that months will pass by, and you (probably) won’t see much growth in your business.

Why?

Well because you were foolish with how you spent your time. You measured success with the # of hours put in rather than the efficiency. Because the guru on YouTube said “You can’t give up”, “Do it when everybody tells you to stop”.

You still can’t come out of that “Entrepreneur mindset”.

You can’t give up, hard work pays off. And you keep on doing things that don’t work at all.

Costing you your valuable time, that you could have used to actually learn things that move the needle.

We ourselves did it.

Vigorously posting comments on every single Instagram post we saw in the health niche. Cause people recommended it.

And if things wouldn’t work, the angle would always be “New accounts take time”.

We did that exact same thing for 4 months and just managed to get only 345 relevant followers (we removed irrelevant ones to keep our engagement metrics top-notch). If you visit our handle @nicheshake on Instagram you will see it for yourself. We don’t have a ton of followers.

Why?

Because it isn’t a good channel to drive traffic to our website. We don’t care if a business guru said you can’t give up or you have to do it cause that’s the only way to success.

No.

We did it for 1-2 months, and we didn’t see the ROI we were looking forward to. So we stopped doing it.

Getting back to our topic.

That is what we are trying to say. Stop thinking about what the business gurus are saying. In this world, everything is very dynamic and situational. There are just too many variables to work on their advice.

Yes, their content is good, it provides you with motivation, but it shouldn’t throw you in a toxic loop.

Remember the day you feel your side hustle or blog is toxic, will be the day your interest and carrer will fade.

Heck, even top marketers like Neil Patel say it,

When you are in this phase you won’t see the bigger picture. You won’t measure anything, you will take all your decisions and come up with conclusions based on emotion, not hard data.

Realization

If you are lucky enough one day you will suddenly realize that all the advice these “business gurus” were giving you weren’t allowing you to make decisions based on your current situation and data.

Or if you are super lucky you might stumble upon a blog post like this 😉

For us, this moment came in the year 2017, after a year and a half had passed. We were believing the words of these business gurus and were not working efficiently.

When suddenly Asif decided to change the way we worked. He said, “We have to change our mindset and let data do the talking”.

And that one decision changes our trajectory.

To be honest, most of the time this realization comes out of pure frustration. Just like it did with us.

Takeaways

If you skipped the entire post and scrolled to the bottom, then we would heavily recommend you to read the entire post to get more context from the takeaways.

Takeaway #1: Let Data Do The Talking

When you let data talk you (generally) always will win. Data helps you be honest with yourself, eliminating the gut feeling from your marketing campaigns.

If you have access to strong data why would you make decisions based on gut? It’s like shooting yourself in the foot.

Use tools like Hotjar, Google Analytics, CrazyEgg, Google Search Console, Kissmetrics, etc.

And also make sure to track important blog metrics.

Takeaway #2: Don’t Let Motivation Influence Your Decisions (Always)

As discussed earlier, motivation can be sometimes more toxic than helpful. But everything in this world is very much situational. And that’s the case with motivation too.

Sometimes it might help you (especially when you feel really down). But sometimes it’s good for nothing.

Because most of the time a motivational video can give your Everest conquering courage and determination for maybe an hour or so.

Bottom line?

Don’t always let motivation influence your decision making (but sometimes you might need to break this rule)

Takeaway #3: Be calm & use your brains

Don’t just sit there and consume content. Be calm, use your brain and analyze what someone is trying to tell you.

Will it be helpful? How will it move the needle? will it harm your business? is it legit? what’s the ROI? is it like driving a ship without a radar? how does it scale & how do I measure it?

And this applies to every single content source, even us at Nicheshake.

Wrapping Up

There isn’t a lot to write here except for pitching our social networks. (Cause this works)

If you have any questions ping us on Twitter or shoot us an email through our contact page. Let us know if you would like to see more such “Out of the box” content.

Be Epic.