If you’re a solo entrepreneur online odds are good you feel like you aren’t doing everything right most of the time.

In fact, you might feel like your task list looks like a bowl of cooked spaghetti noodles just out from the water: a hot, squirmy mess of stuff going in every direction. Nothing’s neat and orderly about it. And these are just the tasks related to maintaining your reputation online:

• Posting something good on your blog at least once a week
• Keeping up with status updates on relevant social networks
• Staying up to date with your newsletter, if you have one
• Making sure your blog version is up to date and all the wonderful little plugins are behaving nicely
• Looking at 1001 emails an hour
• Reading yet another “why your business sucks and will never earn money” post
• Keeping up appearances via Klout by being a socializing maniac on Twitter
• Alienating yourself from normal society because you’re so busy socializing online
• Checking in on all of your Google alerts for your name and brand name
• Feeling bad because you haven’t set those up and are too afraid to stumble through the unknown
• Self publishing all those eBooks you intend to circulate on Kindle
• Asking brilliant questions on Quora and keeping up with the relevant responses
• Boosting your SEO so your site gets listed higher in the rankings
• Rewriting that generic sounding About page you worry about so much
• Rewriting that outrageous sounding About page that you worry about so much
• Creating a business page on Google Plus
• Keeping up with your analytics
• Reviewing the latest monitoring tool
• Finally installing that fancy landing tab for your Facebook fan page
• Updating your tired, inaccurate Twitter background
• Deciding what your one and only call to action will be for each page and post you write
• Getting guest writing gigs on influential blogs
• Writing those quality guest posts while keeping up with everything else
• Becoming a LinkedIn expert in every discussion group
• Lots, lots more

Oh yes, and you actually have something you DO or CREATE for to sell? Silly duckling!! Who has time for that? You do!!

Here’s how:

1. Remember you don’t have to do all this stuff, only what contributes to YOUR strategy
2. Farm out as much as possible of the stuff you don’t know how to do or hate, even if you have to take it out in trade. If you’re a brilliant writer and have more technical buddies, trade off!! Odds are good their copywriting doesn’t do much to spotlight their abilities and you hate digging into all those technical settings anyway. Let somebody do it who enjoys it, for crying out loud. You’ll save time, money, and (dare I say?) hair coloring services from your gray hair prevention efforts. Not that I know anything about gray hair, not me. Not at all. (They say to never trust too many denials. This is good advice…)
3. FOCUS ON WHAT EMOTIONALLY ENERGIZES YOU, whether that’s technical, creative, or anyway else.

The secret to keeping your chin up and getting lots of great stuff done:

If you look for weak areas you’ll find them. Posts capitalizing on fear to get more traffic will help you to feel more like a dumb@ss. Trust me. I know. If you look for areas that energize you and play to your strengths then you will get many times as much more done, feel great, make more money, probably look sexier, and be able to hire out the odious stuff that actually does contribute to your bottom line.

I believe in you as you embrace what energizes you.

This is the kind of stuff that takes you further into your dreams. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Odds are good you’re doing a lot better than you give yourself credit for doing.

 

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