By Danielle Brown, Two-Brain Business
When I opened my affiliate in 2011, I wrote every day. And I mean every.single.day.
I wrote about every topic you could imagine; from proper shoes to hand care to Paleo to pull-up technique and everything in between. I wrote feverishly and delivered to our tiny community every day. I had no fear back then. Maybe because my audience was a lot smaller and I knew that most people reading our blog were complete beginners to our sport. Maybe it was because blog articles were all I knew; the box I began CrossFit with also wrote informational articles every day, and I refreshed my web browser ten times six nights a week around 7:30pm just to read them. Sometimes I looked forward more to reading the article accompanying the blog than I did the actual workout. As a complete noob to CrossFit, this information was paramount. It was like reading a foreign language, and I wanted to know as much about the culture as I could soak in.
Fast forward a couple years, and like it did for all of you, life at the gym got busy. I went from napping at the gym to dreaming of naps. And my writing seemed to fall the wayside. Six blogs per week turned to three, and eventually three turned to one- on a good week. And in that time, lots of gyms were opening all over. And putting out good content. Like real good content. I suddenly started comparing my writing with all of theirs. How could I compete with the Invictus blog or the Verve blog?? I’m probably not even writing the right stuff anyway… Then I got the bright idea to just publish links to all those other blogs for my members to read. Needless to say, I really could’ve used some Coop advice back then.
My problem wasn’t that I didn’t know the information. It wasn’t even that my stuff wasn’t perfect. My problem was the cycle I got myself into: the perfection – procrastination – paralysis cycle. I used to get so caught up in thinking I needed to have these long, well thought out blog articles that rivaled Glassman and Amundson. So I’d think and think and think and never end up writing anything. It never occurred to me that I was doing myself, my business AND my members a huge disservice.
So what to do?
To be honest, I still struggle with this cycle. But mostly, I remind myself what Chris has been saying to me for two years: the idea that writing something is better than writing nothing. I read a great quote a few months back and I can’t remember where it came from, possibly from one of Gary V’s videos, but the quote was “if you aren’t embarrassed at your first prototype, then you launched too late.” I chuckled to myself when I heard that, at myself.
Being a little self-conscious is okay. In fact, it’s the norm. Every single one of us feels the self doubt creep in when we’re about to put ourselves out there. But the more you do the easier it becomes. And as I’ve learned, the less you worry about other people. Heck, most of them are still stuck in the procrastination phase like I used to be.
Here’s my homework for this week: put your fingers to the keyboard and write down three topics you think your members might be curious to read about. Make it easy on yourself and think about it from a CrossFit beginner’s perspective. You can even steal my topics from above. Then start writing about them. And don’t wait to publish, because there’s lots of us looking forward to reading them.
Menu
