How To Cope If Your Online Business Isn’t Going Well

photo credit: Haags Uitburo

As my regular readers probably remember, I’m a keen dancer. My wife and I love ballroom dancing, and I’ve found it’s a great way to relax and keep fit after a busy day online. Dancing is a kind of intuitive thing for most of us – as soon as we hear a decent rhythm or a great song we’ll usually find that our feet start tapping to the beat even without realising it.

The reason so many people like to dance is that it’s a really ‘in the moment’ activity. When you’re whirling around a ballroom, moshing in a metal pit or boogying at a disco, you absolutely can’t be miserable or despondent about anything.

All that exists is the music, and your response to it.

This got me thinking – imagine if we could take some of our approach to dancing and apply it to our blogs?

By this, I mean that sometimes we need to throw ourselves in to the present moment of our online business, and be positive to weather tough times, even when our instinctive response is to step back, and worry.

Why we are worrying more about our online ventures

There’s no question but that online entrepreneurialism has got a bit tougher over the past few years.

In the good old days when most people saw the internet as a foreign being about to invade our lives and should be avoided at all costs, entrepreneurs only had to throw up a site with an animated gif on it to wow their customers in to making a purchase or two. Nowadays, we need to be much more focussed, targeted and strategic if we want to earn a decent living through our blogs.

The other change is that earning money online these days seems to take longer, be more challenging, and require a real leap of faith in order to weather the initial storm and make a success of the business.

Every single person I know who has established a new company goes through a period of self-doubt as they suddenly panic that their idea won’t take off, they won’t get customers, or they’re going to lose out to a bigger, stronger competitor in the same industry.

How dancing can teach us to focus on our Online Business goals

While these fears are useful to a point, because they keep us focussed and make sure we continually work to improve our service, products and platform, it’s never a good idea to let panic get in the way of progress.

If we get to the point where we’re so concerned about things that aren’t going well, we’ll be absolutely incapable of taking positive, proactive steps to ensure the future success of our business.

Sometimes, losing ourselves in the moment and having the ability to concentrate on one day at a time, doing all of the things that we know will make our blogs grow in strength and our customers return to us, is the best strategy we can have.

We may have lost the fresh-faced idealism that we started out with when we considered blogging as a way of making a living, but one thing hasn’t changed. We still have the ability to make a success of our venture. We need to keep faith that hard work, persistence, competence and customer service will win out in the end, no matter how slow our initial start-up may be, or what hiccups we might encounter along our blogging journey.

As the great Nat King Cole said, ‘there may be trouble ahead, but let’s face the music and dance!’