Short blog posts are good.

No one will read a novel.

This post is finished.

I’ve hired a virtual assistant to help out with my selling process and a few other things. As a result, some areas of my business are starting to show signs of life again. Namely, my blog. This is the kind of thing that was just never going to get done amid the swirl of other things to do.

I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I can hire a sales force yet, mainly because my pricing structure isn’t quite solidified enough to do it. But I am starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Hiring out some of my admin tasks and paperwork has taken some weight off of my shoulders so that I now have more time to focus on the things that matter.

Also, I found that hiring someone forced me to sit down and write out instructions describing how I do what I do. That has been quite insightful. I notice how many things that I just keep up in my head. Getting them on paper has shown me that it’s really not as complicated as I make it out to be.

There’s no hiding it, thanks to time-stamps that don’t lie. I haven’t updated this blog in several weeks. While I find it irritating when I see bloggers who start out their blog posts with something along the lines of “sorry I haven’t posted in awhile,” I have to acknowledge this breakdown. This is the first time since I started the blog in 2007 that such a long time period has elapsed between blog posts. I’ve had an influx of paying clients over the last several months (a great problem to have), and this has led to somewhat of a time-management crisis. Yep, growing pains.

I thought I would use this blog post to share some insights that I’ve gotten from this period of my entrepreneurial development. Here’s the low-down.

1. Being too busy to do important things is a client-repellent.

2. Getting in the zone is the way to be effective in business.

3. Managing a million tiny things is a great way to get out of the zone.

4. No one respects a person who answers e-mail immediately.

That’s about all I have time to write for the moment, which is another key point that I’ll use to close this posting. In my old mindset, I would not have written this posting, because I didn’t have more than 5 minutes to spend on it. Successful entrepreneurs do what they can in the time that they have. I used to use “I don’t have time” as an excuse for everything. I’m using this blog post to mark the end of that era.

Are you willing to shift gears in your business? What about in your writing? It’s a fine line to walk. Every now and then, it’s necessary to re-evaluate your strategy. However, it can be tricky. At some point, you have to ask yourself if you’re throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Confession: this blog post was prompted by a recent decision to shift gears on my part. I decided that I’ve lost the original focus of this blog. Okay; maybe I didn’t lose the focus entirely, but I certainly compromised it when I decided to constrain the scope to writing. When I started writing this blog in late 2007, my intent was simple. I basically just needed to rant and vent about my frustrations with the extravert-dominated sales world and its continual resistance to change. There came  a point, though, when I realized that I needed to grow past this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to return to the core fundamental purpose of this blog. Instead of getting up on my soapbox about how to become better at writing (I’ll continue to do that at EzineArticles), I’m going to be sharing about my experiences as an Introverted Entrepreneur. I hope this doesn’t bother you.

You’ve probably noticed the sea of marketing noise that’s fighting to get in front of you. If you’re in business for yourself, you’ve no doubt noticed what you’re up against. That’s why personal branding is so critical these days. Getting in front of people is getting harder and harder to do, unless they think they need what you’re selling. But that’s not all of it. Most likely, there are plenty of other people selling the same thing you’re selling. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner looking for customers, or if you’re looking for a job. You can’t afford to do and say the same things everyone else says and does. Throwing mud at the wall, hoping for some of it to stick just doesn’t work any more.

If you’re clueless about personal branding, it’s simple. What comes to mind when people hear your name? If you don’t know the answer, then it’s probably something different for each person. You want to be like Coke is to cola, and like Kleenex is to tissues. Whatever it is you want people to buy, they need to think that word when they hear your name.

How can you accomplish this? If you’re not Budweiser and you don’t have $10 million to spend on marketing, how can you brand yourself? The answer to this question is complicated, of course, and it’s more than I can cover in 100 blog articles, let alone one, but I’ll give you a simple place to start. Sit down at your laptop and start writing.

What should you write about? Where should you submit it? What audience should you write to? How will you know if it’s working? Those are all good questions to consider, but don’t let them stop you. Don’t think that you need to have that all figured out before you write anything. Here’s the reality: the way to learn branding, like anything else, is by doing it badly. You learn to sink shots on the basketball court by getting out there and practicing. You don’t learn by studying books about basketball or studying diagrams. You don’t learn by asking people for advice. These things can all help, of course, but none of them will help you at all if you don’t practice.

Writing is no different. The biggest place where writers get hung up: waiting to show anyone their writing until they’re sure that it’s perfect.

Here’s an easy formula to get you started.

1. Start a blog, and post something to it once a week.
2. E-mail five friends each week a link to your blog, and ask them what they think.
3. Read one new blog each week and see what you notice about it.

If you do this consistently, you’ll brand yourself. You’ll also get other ideas about where you can submit your writing. Just take it one step at a time.

“Small is the New Big,” by Seth Godin, started out as a collection of blog articles. “Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte started out as a collection of articles that he wrote for Wired magazine over a few years. Did they know that these articles were going to become books one day? I’m not sure. But it hardly matters.

Books are hard for one person to write, as I’ve discovered over the past several months. As I have advised every budding author I’ve met, you can’t write a book in a vacuum. It will never get done. It’s nearly impossible to maintain the degree of motivation and discipline necessary to finish the whole thing. And even if you do, you’ll most likely end up with something you can’t sell. You’re just putting too many eggs into one basket with this approach. Thomas Edison learned this lesson the hard way when he invented his automatic vote-counting machine. (He found out that politicians didn’t want accurate vote counting. Isn’t that a shock?)

They say you can eat an elephant if you do it one small bite at a time. Writing is no exception to this. But here’s the advantage to writing articles first: you can find out what the response is to each article. You can put each article out there, and see what people come back with. But more importantly, each article you complete is a finished product.

You’re not putting a whole lot of skin in the game by publishing an article. You may think that your idea is the best thing since sliced bread, and you may be surprised to discover that the rest of the world doesn’t agree. This is an easy lesson to learn with an article. Writing a book, on the other hand, only to discover that you’ve written something no one wants to read, makes for a difficult pill to swallow.

Finally, articles are easy to organize. Books are complicated. Writing one article at a time takes the sweat out of compiling materials. It gives you a higher degree of freedom, since you don’t have to worry about how the puzzle pieces will fit together. When you’ve finally generated enough quantity of material to compile into a book, you can just throw away the unwanted pieces.

The moral of the story: if you’re thinking of writing a book, but don’t know where to start, start by writing some articles.