Let's move our discussion up a few years and talk about what's happening with you right now.
Your personal, economic, and family circumstances will profoundly affect your content marketing success. Let's take a glance at each of these in turn, then discuss how they affect the creation of your Content Marketing Hurricane.
Personal circumstances
The age-old axiom states, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
While that's certainly true, that 10% can be a powerful force.
Just consider a few examples of personal circumstances that can have a huge impact on your life.
All of these areas could easily slip right under your radar... until something serious happens:
You see, for obvious reasons your current personal circumstances have a direct impact on how you feel, how you interact with others, your level of stress, and your ability to create.
How does this affect your content marketing?
Your personal circumstances directly impact your supply of the most important resources you can give to a content marketing program: time and effort.
If your personal circumstances are such that, with a little maneuvering, you can set aside a few hours a day to dedicate to creating and distributing content, you're going to be in a prime position to make a go of this endeavor.
If you can only dedicate a few minutes a day, you can still make positive strides, but you need to realistically understand that it's going to be slow-going for a while.
And if you simply can't afford to spend any time or effort on creating or distributing content... well, then you may as well stop reading right here, at least until your circumstances change a bit.
Don't worry, I'll be right here when you come back.
Economic circumstances
Just as your economic background left an indelible impact on your psyche, your current economic circumstances can and will do the same.
If you are currently struggling with money problems, you're probably stressed. Your time is being absorbed by working extra hours or looking for more work. Your relationships may be suffering for either or both of these reasons.
Strangely enough, people who are very wealthy will sometimes fall into the same trap: to maintain their lifestyle or continue to grow their wealth, they end up working too much, neglecting their health or family responsibilities, and succumbing to stress.
These are just rash generalizations, of course, because many affluent people lead very balanced and healthy lives, and many people with little materially still maintain positive and productive outlooks.
But the fact remains that your economic circumstances will likely have an effect on what you can dedicate toward new projects.
How does this affect your content marketing?
Your economic circumstances will have a direct impact on how much time, money, and energy you can invest in a content marketing program.
Being short on funds causes stress, and makes you feel desperate. You can make poor decisions and rush to take action without thinking it through appropriately.
On the other hand, financial stability offers a foundation on which to base well-planned strategy and calculated risk. It allows you to take a longer view of the future instead of focusing strictly on short-term turnaround.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that will not provide instant overnight success. While it can, theoretically, begin generating leads from the outset, it is far more likely to receive almost no response as it first begins to coalesce. After all, it's still out over the ocean in the middle of nowhere, and it hasn't built up any steam yet. No one's paying attention.
If you're currently working a job and considering starting a business in the future, start building your Content Marketing Hurricane now while you have reliable income so you can concentrate on creating the best strategically viable content without worrying about ROI at the beginning.
If you are currently running a business and are desperate for leads and paying customers to cover next month's operating expenses, it may not be the best time to start a content marketing program.
Or, if you have the discipline to do so, you can start working on the program without looking at it as a source of income at all. Simply add it to your daily administrative tasks that do not fall under billable time and leave it at that until it starts producing fruit.
If you can adjust your economic circumstances for the better without derailing your content marketing program, absolutely do it. The more stability you have going in, the faster your Content Marketing Hurricane will gain momentum, and the stronger it will become.
Family circumstances
While closely connected to personal and economic circumstances, the family demands a few moments on its own for the simple fact that if you have a spouse and/or children relying on you, your time and energy is necessarily divided. They must come first if there's a conflict, and their needs and desires have to be on your mind as you're planning any adjustments to your routine (such as implementing a content marketing strategy.)
How does this affect your content marketing?
Content marketing is a time-consuming effort, and it requires persistence and commitment over a long period.
If your family commitments are such that doing so will hurt one or more family member, not only are you morally obligated to adjust your priorities, you're also unlikely to be able to put your all into whatever effort you can muster.
In every way, it becomes a losing proposition.
Of course, people of every walk of life are making a success of content marketing, so I'm certainly not implying that, say, a single mother of two who puts together a powerful Content Marketing Hurricane is somehow neglecting her responsibilities. Or that a husband who does so has, by definition, neglected his wife.
On the contrary, these individuals have likely learned how to effectively adjust their priorities to the extent that their family responsibilities are fully cared for while also allowing for dedication to building the content marketing program. This is not impossible by any means.
But it also doesn't come automatically. It requires concerted effort.
Of course, anything worth doing takes effort, right?
Exercise #4 – Brainstorming: Your Circumstances
1. Think about your personal, family, and economic circumstances as they are right now.
2. Write down pros and cons of your current circumstances.
3. Write down ideas as they come to you that could lessen the cons and accentuate the pros.
4. Read the next chapter.