One marketing lesson I literally had *beaten* into me …

Of all the sparring partners in my karate class, I feared Adam the most.

I was a skinny teenager, maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. Adam was a college student, about my height but built. He had at least 60 pounds of muscle on me.

One evening we were squared off, circling each other and throwing feints. I knew he had me in the strength department, so my strategy was to compensate with speed. I usually held my own.

Suddenly, I saw him start to twist away from me, and I knew what was coming.

Instinct kicked in, and I did … exactly the wrong thing.

I took a quick shuffle-step back.

As Adam rotated on his left leg, his right leg shot back and upward in a powerful “mule kick.”

My quick backward shuffle had left me directly in the power zone of that kick. It landed squarely on my solar plexus.

The impact lifted me up off my feet and threw me five feet backward.

The chest guard I was wearing absorbed a lot of the shock, but the fight was over. I gasped for 10 minutes before I could start to breathe normally again.

###

There’s a famous quote from Bruce Lee: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Adam didn’t develop that powerful kick from mixing it up in the sparring ring. Every class, we spent the first 30 minutes performing our “basic exercises,” a boring, repetitive series of drills where we practiced basic punches, kicks and blocks.

Like the mule kick.

His mastery of that one weapon made Adam a fearsome opponent.

###

When I first got started marketing my books, I was like the guy practicing 10,000 different kicks. There are sooooooo many different tactics out there for getting traffic–SEO, guest blogging, Facebook, Twitter, podcasting … I was constantly stressed out that I wasn’t using all of them.

After a while, though, I realized that I was spreading myself too thin. By jumping around, I didn’t give myself the opportunity to master any of the techniques I was trying.

I decided to focus all of my efforts on one channel for driving traffic to my site: Twitter.

This has allowed me to experiment with different tactics over time and see what works and what doesn’t. I’ve learned how to grow my followers, then convert those followers into email subscribers and (eventually) customers.

Now I’m taking that knowledge and applying it to paid Twitter ads, with great success.

This month, it looks like I’m on track to break 10,000 clicks on the website I use to promote my books. And I’m still picking up steam…

That’s only possible because I decided to pick one approach–one “kick”–and keep practicing it.

Which “kick” will you choose?

Josh Earl

P.S. If you’re interested in using Twitter as a platform to grow your audience and market your stuff, check out Pluggio (affiliate link). Pluggio’s advanced tweet scheduling features have helped me grow my Twitter account from around 5,000 followers to more than 12,000 over the last year, and it only took on average 20 minutes per week.

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