I Tried to Reinvent the Social Media Wheel: This is What Happened
I don’t know if you’re aware, but I think awfully highly of myself. You kind of have to when you’re a strong advocate of the legendary James Altucher’s Choose Yourself mindset. However, it’s fine to think highly of yourself; to back yourself; to go for those horns and do your very best to grab them — but when it leads to ego, then you might have problems.
Enter: My consistent desire to reinvent the wheel because I’m dead sure I can do it better.
Thank God this little quirk of mine doesn’t rear its ugly head very often. The last time was several months ago when I decided, with no prior experience, and with no real desire to spend vast quantities of time learning the many intricacies of social media, that I would rewrite the system — reinvent the wheel of how social media sharing works, and develop a process whereby little minions from around the planet would do everything for me.
I spent months on this. Every detail. Every nuance, I had accounted for. Then, I made trainings! Yes! Trainings! So that I could swiftly swap out employees at will whenever anyone caused my wrath to flare like a recurring rash, or simply wasn’t up to the task. (This systemizing process I use in all of my businesses, as a result of the tremendous advice in Michael Gerber’s priceless tome: The E Myth. No, it’s not about anything electronic. Confusing name. Great book.)
Once the system launched, I had everything in place. Except, I really needed to be like Bert in Mary effing Poppins. I was tooting all the horns, banging all the cymbals, thumping all the drums and singing all the songs, anyway. It was a total and absolute pain in my ass that the whole thing collapsed within a week or two after I “spat the dummy” (Australian colloquialism implying that not even a pacifier would pacify me) and just walked away from the whole thing. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t keep my eyes on all the balls in the air, and all the spinning plates.
The system I’d created sucked balls and just made the whole damn thing more work — not less.
ENTER: THE HERO
Months later, I was willing to try again. But, if the #selfmastery journey is summed up in a simple step-by-step process, it is The Four A’s:
- Attempt
- Analyze
- Adjust
- Again
I’d already made my first Attempt. It failed. (Not a huge surprise there. Most things do, initially. Nothing to feel bad about.) I’d Analyzed the heck out of it over the previous months. I’d come to realize that it was just too much. I hadn’t made anything simpler for myself. I had made the flaws magnified and was exploiting my own weaknesses. Namely: my interest in continuing on when in “the grind” of a process. I hire people to do that for me. Not make it worse for myself, thank you!
Now, I needed to Adjust. But how? I went searching. Why I didn’t go searching in the first place? Well, that comes back to my belief that, despite the fact that I had no kind of training or interest in getting the training, I could do it better than those who have both.
I’d been using CoSchedule’s free headline analyzer for a while. I considered it quite priceless in the composition of my blog titles. So, they were front of mind. I’d been using Hootsuite to do all of my social media posting/scheduling — but it was just a part of that huge, messy system I’d created. I’d implemented them into it. So, they were more foe than friend. (Sorry, Hootsuite.)
I checked out some reviews. Some perhaps a little biased because CoSchedule actually does have a killer referral program. (That’s why I’m writing this blog. It gets me 50% off the price. And, since I’m a blogger anyway… But, you should know, I was in love with CoSchedule during the trial period before — and I want to stress that it was before — I found out about their referral program.) But, prior to knowing about the referral program, I didn’t realize that they could be biased. However, if I’m anything, it’s a strict researcher. I checked reviews. I looked at side-by-side comparisons. I checked simple feature videos.
The bottom line? When I tried it (free) I was blown away. It’s the system I was trying initially to duplicate. It’s the wheel I was trying to reinvent. I spent a lot of time trying to do that, but that’s not a bad thing. It helped me to understand what I want in a system. Which meant that when I found CoSchedule, I knew damn quickly that it was the answer to my problem.
Now, you get the benefit of all this experience, for the simple time it took to read this blog post.
Click the link. Sign up for the free trial. There’s a free CoSchedule WordPress plugin and everything. You’ve got nothing to lose — and remember. All systems have their flaws. None (not even CoSchedule) are 100%. But when you’re scrutinizing their operation, remember my experience.
Then, sign up. Share the word. Write a blog post, and get it heavily discounted.
But, only after you love it.
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