74. The Pressure to Be Perfect

Stephanie Royer (00:00)

Do you have a stack of draft blog posts waiting to go live because you just don't feel like they're ready? Or are you waiting to start pinning for your business until you have a queue of perfect pins ready to go? Let's talk about it.

Welcome back to the podcast and welcome back to No Pressure November. This month, we're talking about common sources of pressure that we feel in the marketing world, especially this time of year. I don't know about you, but I have a lot of people in my inbox telling me "There's still time to reach your 2025 goals." And then I have other people telling me, "Go ahead and start planning 2026 so that it will be the best year ever for your business."

But no offense to those creators. I'm just over here surviving my daily to-do list. But I think that one thing that stands in the way of us crossing things off the to-do list and moving on to the next thing is the pressure to be perfect. We want to have everything just so before we hit that publish button.

As with our first two episodes this month, we're going to talk about where this pressure comes from and what you can do about it. I'm also going to share a little of my own journey with perfectionism.

This is definitely a pervasive element of online marketing. Everywhere you turn on social media or marketing podcasts, you're being bombarded with lists of things you need to do in order to be seen online. If you want to blog and pin, you need to do it this perfect way.

I also think the pressure to have everything perfect before publishing is an internal pressure. You have worked really hard to build your TPT business into what it is. It makes sense that you would want to continue to put your best foot forward with your marketing efforts. Your blog and your Pinterest feed are reflections of your business. And so I totally understand the desire to have things exactly the way you'd want before publishing a piece of content.

Like most of the pressure we experience, it's often rooted in good intentions.

It is true that if you want to write a blog post for your business, it's best if you stick to some best practices in order for that blog post to perform well. If you want to publish some pins for your business on Pinterest, it's best if you optimize your pins for that platform.

The problem is when perfectionism leads to a backlog of good content that never sees the light of day. We always hear the expression that "some is better than none" in regards to battling perfectionist procrastination or analysis paralysis. It's better to put something out instead of nothing and, to a degree, this is true.

But in other ways, it's better to put your focus into other marketing efforts if you plan on just publishing content because some is better than none. My own journey with perfectionism in blogging is a great example of this.

When I first started my blog, I didn't know anything about Pinterest marketing, but I had used Pinterest as a user and I had this feeling that if I could create pins, I could get people to my new website. So I dove right in. I didn't know about the legalities of stock photos. I had never heard of Canva. And so I created my first pins in Google Draw because I was afraid of getting into copyright trouble. And those pins were hideous. But you know what? Those ugly first pins continue to bring traffic to my now monetized blog. Those hideous, imperfect pins still literally earn money for my business. If I had waited until I felt like I knew everything there was to know about Pinterest marketing, those first pins would have been delayed at least a year and might not have been able to become so ingrained on Pinterest like those first pins that are now legacy pins, much to my embarrassment.

But on the other side of the coin, I wish I wouldn't have been so intimidated by the thought of Google when I first started my blog. I decided to wait on optimizing my posts for Google until I had time to learn the ins and outs. I created so much content that truly has no shot of ever being found on Google because people just aren't searching for that type of content. And to be honest, they aren't really searching for it on Pinterest either.

And so I spent hours and hours creating blog content that will never see the light of day. I decided to churn out content as a new blogger without really paying attention to things like user intent. But am I glad I created the content anyway? Yes, because some is better than none. I do get trickles of traffic from those old posts even now.

I also learned a lot about blogging and pinning from trial and error. But there were things I consciously decided not to learn about at first because they felt too intimidating. I didn't want to have another list of things that I needed to do perfectly before I could hit publish. Knowing myself, it would have been too much pressure to get content out the door. I didn't want perfectionism to get in the way, but my avoidance of best practices created more problems for myself down the line.

So what do you do to relieve some of the pressure to be perfect? I have three things that you can do right now to rip off the band-aid of perfectionism and get some content published. First, it really is important to learn the best practices for the platforms you're using to market your business. I recognize that those best practices are often shifting with the latest update, but I'm not talking about chasing the latest and greatest shiny object of instant traffic.

I'm talking about the foundational best practices. What makes a solid caption on Instagram? How do you format a blog post to encourage TPT traffic? How do you find a blog post topic that people will actually be searching for on Google? How do you create pins for both clicks and saves? Because those two types of pins aren't necessarily the same.

And so these are the best practices that you want to have under your belt as you create content for your business. A lot of the rest is helpful, but it's not necessary. And it's this distinction that I help my students with in Bring Your Own Traffic. It's not a flashy course. It's just full of the best practices that will help your content rank without having to chase the latest and greatest algorithm changes.

And what I teach in that course is to this day the same strategy that I use for my clients. And they rank on page one regularly. I'm not pushy with this course. My marketing is not perfect. I don't have launch windows. I don't have a big fancy sales page. It's always available, so it's ready when you are.

That's all I'm going to say about my course for this episode, but I just wanted you to know that getting some of those basic best practices under your belt really can go a long way in relieving some of that pressure to be perfect.

So my second tip is to mute any creators that make you second guess yourself. If there are big TPT sellers who seem to always have the perfect Instagram feed, the perfect blog posts, and everything seems to be at the perfect frequency, go ahead and mute them for a little while. Take a break from their content if it's constantly making you feel like you're not ready to hit the publish button, that you shouldn't even try because you can't compete with those sellers. Go ahead and mute them. It's okay. If there are podcasters or Instagram business bros who make you question whether your blog content is really ready to publish, unfollow them or unsubscribe, whatever you need to do to cut down on the noise. These loud voices in the marketing space likely have an intense sales funnel to show you all of the things you're doing wrong with your content and how it can be solved by purchasing their suite of products. Six months from now, there will be a new product for a new thing that you're doing wrong. It's 2025, and I, for one, don't have the time or budget for that kind of marketing. Yes, I want to learn how to improve my content, but no, I don't need people who are constantly finding more of my pain points to leverage for sales.

The third thing you can do if you're feeling the pressure to be perfect is to schedule a time to go through your draft blog posts or your idea bank. I've talked about this in a previous episode, but there are so many reasons why scheduling this time is helpful. But one of those reasons is to prevent yourself from creating a bottleneck in your business.

You don't want to put effort into posts only to have them sit unfinished in your drafts. It's time to get your ideas out into the world.

By scheduling a time to revisit your half-finished drafts, you'll force yourself to get over that hurdle of perfectionism and hit the publish button.

I hope that this episode has given you some tips for relieving some of that pressure to be perfect. While it is important to pay attention to quality and best practices, you don't have to wait until you have everything figured out.

The next time you hesitate to create pins for your business because you don't have the perfect designs, just remember that I've made thousands of dollars from my ugly first pins made in Google Draw.

Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that this podcast is now available on YouTube. Those who enjoyed today's episode on video were given the privilege of seeing my embarrassing first pins. Head over to the Stephanie Royer Solutions channel on YouTube if you'd like to take a look and subscribe to my channel. the show notes.