CopyHour

The critical first step to killing Shiny Object Syndrome

by

Derek Johanson

If you can kill Shiny Object Syndrome you can easily 2x a business (or 10x or even 100x a business if you’re just starting out).

Why am I confident in saying this?

Well, think about what it means to have Shiny Object Syndrome. It means you can’t help but bounce from course to course, idea to idea. The most common things solopreneurs will bounce between are:

  • Business models (Freelancing, coaching, agencies, courses, SaaS, etc)

  • Growth strategies (Social media, paid traffic, SEO, etc).

    When you bounce around it’s quite obvious that you never go DEEPLY enough into a topic to fully understand if your business model or growth strategy works (or doesn’t). You never gain enough experience and hard data to make good and necessary decisions that drive a business forward.

    In other words, most often all that an online business needs to go from zero to 6 figures is to focus on ONE simple business model and ONE marketing channel for growth.

  • One Business Model: If you sell courses, only sell courses. That’s your one business model. Don’t add coaching or do freelancing too.

  • One Marketing Channel For Traffic: If you’ve picked LinkedIn to drive traffic, don’t think about YouTube or paid ads at all.

    That’s it. Going deep into ONE business model and ONE marketing channel is how you double a small business.

And I’ll let you in on another secret: Going from 6 figures to 7 figures really isn’t much different. You still only want 1 business model and 1 marketing channel. You just add a bit of scale to either. (Ie, you can add more courses, but you don’t want to add coaching and muddle your business model. Or you just increase your ad spend or posting frequency.)

Now, the problem obviously becomes how do you pick ONE business model and ONE marketing channel and actually stick to it without getting distracted?

Let’s dive in:

To Cure Shiny Object Syndrome You Must First Focus On "Your Beliefs"
Mediocre results caused by Shiny Object Syndrome are actually just a symptom of the deeper issue of belief in the models and methodologies you’re using to start or grow a business.

You simply aren’t giving yourself the necessary runway (aka time) to actually believe – know deep in your bones – that a strategy will work.

Say you decide to start doing SEO for your business. You write a few articles and get them up on a blog. You check the stats after a week and notice that 5 people, including you and your mom have seen the article.

This is where most people give up, their Shiny Object Syndrome kicks in, and they move onto a different traffic source. It’s so easy to see when it’s spelled out like this that you simply haven’t given yourself enough time. What this means is that you don’t actually believe, longterm, that SEO will work for you.

Now, there are really only 2 ways to fully believe in your chosen strategy:

  1. Experience.

  2. Surrender to a coach’s experience.

    You’ll often hear entrepreneurs talk about how the real game of business is to stay in business. The real magic happens 5 or 10 years into an endeavor. This is true for many, many entrepreneurs.

    Time in the game = experience = true belief.

    If you grind it out and give yourself enough time to gather data and feedback, you’ll eventually stumble into something that works. And when you see it and experience it working with your own eyes, you’ll believe.

    For example, it took me a long time to fully believe that working with affiliates was a viable, longterm growth strategy for CopyHour.

    If a coach would have told me from the start: "Just focus on affiliates, nothing else" I could have saved a whole lot of time and avoided all the Shiny Object Syndrome I’ve suffered through the years.

    Some smart folks will surrender their ego and believe in a coach’s experience – this is the only real "shortcut" to belief. You’ll still need to see results happening for yourself (have your own experiences) but you can cut years from your timeline and effectively crush Shiny Object Syndrome immediately by hiring a coach.

    Now, I had to write the above before I came to this next part – because if you don’t trust me and let yourself fully believe in the methods I’m about show you, it’ll do you no good.

I can tell you what to focus on and what to work on each day, but if you don’t believe it will work for you, you’ll fall right back into your old Shiny Object Syndrome patterns.

To recap:

  1. First, you must fully believe that your business model and strategy will work (hire a coach or put in years of effort to build the experience necessary for true belief).
  2. Second, focus on just ONE business model at a time.
  3. Third, focus on just ONE channel for getting traffic.

In tomorrow’s email I’m going to show you exactly how to pick and stick to your ONE business model (even if you’ve already got something going) and exactly how to pick and stick to your ONE marketing channel.

I’m going to give you the proven roadmap that (if you truly believe) will allow you to get out of your own way and focus deeply on business growth.

In the meantime, I think it makes sense to ask yourself: "How can I get into a state where I’ll surrender and truly believe that what I’m focusing on will work?" It’s a bit of a strange question. But true belief is the hyper-critical first step to curing Shiny Object Syndrome.

Talk to you tomorrow.

– Derek