How To Pick Up The Pieces When Technology Knocks You Out

When I say “technology knocks you out”, I’m not talking about a small little glitch that you’re stuck on, or not getting a good internet connection, or unable to download a document, or any “how to” situation.

I’m talking about a total KNOCK OUT.

For example, I’ve had 3 total business knock outs since 2007. They were all devasting.

The first two were in 2010 and literally put me out of business.

YouTube. YouTube issued me a permanent and lifetime suspension of my account.

Why? Don’t know.

I followed the rules, I was teaching and sharing fun lifestyle vacation stuff with the family, I had a huge happy following with 600+ videos.

Then one night, I received an email from YouTube suspending my account. There’s no appeal process other than I had a dinky little space on a form to inquire and the response I got back several days later said I spammed thousands of YouTube accounts with a bot.

A Bot? Spammed? HUH?!

Uhhh… newsflash! I would never do that and I wouldn’t even know how to do that! Bots? Really? I have no clue! I surely didn’t do that!

I’ve tried many times over the years to plead that I never did that and to let me get back on, but no go.

To market my brand and business, I was always a big video marketer. That was my bread and butter. It generated lots of daily leads and sales with multiple streams of income. YouTube shut that down. It was gone. Just gone. This lead and income faucet was shut off.

Google Adwords. Because YouTube is owned by Google, I was also told I was also permanently suspended from advertising with them. My ads were disabled. It was gone. Just gone. This lead and income faucet was shut off as well.

So in a nano second YouTube/Google removed my free and paid way to share my value with the world and build my business.

THAT’S A KNOCKOUT!

Then, in August of 2017, I got my 3rd knockout. I lost three years of creative and artistic work on this blog as well as my travel blog with ALL my travel experiences and my best commendations and pictures, all compliments of GoDaddy hosting and an employee that didn’t know what they were doing.

I was devastated! The last three years of work x 2 blogs!

You should of seen the tears I cried! I grieved the loss! I stayed away from my blog for 6 months because it was so messed up it felt overwhelming to me to pick up the pieces and fix stuff.

Then, I wrote a blog called It’s Time To Get Rolling On This Messed Up Blog

And such the story goes. I’m now blogging again.

So how do you pick up the pieces of a technology knockout in your home business?

Like anything else in life… you make a plan and take action.

Make and Plan and Take Action

When things go wrong, unless it’s quit time, it makes sense to have a plan to move in the right direction, right?

So that’s what has to be done. No if, and’s or butt’s about it.

Once you have a plan to move forward, it’s time to take action.

But thinking about taking that action can be overwhelming especially with residual feelings of anger about the knockout you just went through. There’s resistance in getting started again, at least there is for me which I talk about below. But nonetheless, it has to be done.

In terms of my checklist to getting back to blogging, I could do one of two things.

Just start blogging again and don’t fix anything else.

Or,

Start blogging again but also set aside time to fix the things that are messed up. That’s what I’m going to do but I’ve decided I’m not going to push myself.

My first week back, I updated my menu and menu pages except the contact me.

The Next week, I’ll set aside a few hours to:

Install plugins
Add widgets
Fix the contact me page

Then The Next Week, I’ll install a slider on the home page

Each week I’ll take 2 hours and focus on the surviving blog posts to edit and update the links inside of them to make sure they go where they should go.

Yep, it’s gonna take me months and even to the end of the year but I’m not going to fret.

Ironically, I had taken the first 6 months of 2017, just 2 months before I got knocked out, and updated all my hundreds of blogs going back to 2007! So you can image how it feels to not only lose the last 3 years of content but to have to re-do 6 months of editing! Ok, ok…ok… (note to self… no more ranting about it)

Additionally, I’ll create a new piece of content each week and just keep moving on. So that’s my plan and it’s up to me to take full responsibility to take action.

3 Things To Do To Keep Moving Forward

#1 Watch Your Words!

The words “I can’t” are critically powerful. It sets the intention to do a thing or not do a thing. When I threw my hands in the air after my blog mishap and yelled out loud, “I can’t keep doing this!“, my mind said, “Ok, you can’t. Walk away, you’re done. Over.”

I already know the power of thoughts and words but for whatever reason, I jumped ship in that moment and what happened was it manifested immediately.

What was interesting was I observed my mind/body response to my affirmative “I can’t”. I felt a strong resistance, a repelling if you will, from even coming close to my blog. It was like Star Wars™ in real life fighting the force! No joke!

For example, I would grab my laptop with the intention of logging into my blog to start working on cleaning up the mess but there was like a physical barrier that pushed me away. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

My finger’s literally wouldn’t type in my login information and I could hear my mind yelling NO! My thought response to logging in was,

“You know what? That’s right, NO! I can’t do that. I’m mad. I’m upset. I’m not going to screw around with that anymore. I’m done. I’m SO done!”

So what happened was I repeated and re-affirmed that I can’t do it and I’m not going to do it and so guess what? I didn’t do it.

I was ditched to say the least. My feelings were real. My thoughts were real. The force was real.

Then one morning I woke up feeling terrible. I had allowed this to derail my business and saw myself as a cry baby. I was certainly not acting like an entrepreneur of any kind. so I changed my thoughts and words to the universe.

I said out loud…

“That’s enough. I will start blogging again and share value with people. It’s time to pull my big girl panties up and stop the whining and feeling sorry for yourself. Good Lord! Move on! Make a plan and take action and stop this cry baby stuff! I will start blogging and I will feel great about it. My blogs will help people and I will enjoy writing. I will clean up my blog and it will be no big deal. I will start today.”

And my thoughts/body shifted. Just that fast. I grabbed a cup of tea, I logged in and created a blog post with no resistance, rather a heart to serve others.

So the biggest lesson is to keep your head in the game. Because as soon as you think you can’t do a thing, you’re right, you can’t. When you say you CAN, you can.

Business is 90% your belief and 10% sweat.

#2 ReBoot and Get Back In The Game

Time for you to punch back and get back in the game!

So what is your best path?

Based on the situation, you may have to go in a completely different path, or stay on the same path.

For example, in my situation with my video and paid ads method of generating leads and sales on the two most popular search engines in the world, I had no choice but to move off of those. It wasn’t up to me. It was up to the Google Adwords and YouTube platforms.

So what I did was I moved over to another video hosting site and started advertising on Bing/Yahoo. Having done that however, you should know that there’s not the traffic or influence on those as there was on Google and YouTube. So it was still a kick in the gut.

You may have to go a completely different route and discover a completely new strategy, for example marketing on various social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Or utilize other paid platforms. Just make sure you secure a training course with those “in the know” that can show you the ropes so you can avoid the pitfalls.

You may decide to be blogger and syndicate your blog posts along with paying close attention to SEO so you can be found and rank high for keywords that people are searching for. Make sure that you have two things!

1) Security plugins and/services to prevent hacking and

2) Back up of your blog daily.

You may decide to do any number of paid and/or free marketing strategies. The good news is there’s so many to pick from! You may not even know what all is available. If that’s the case, I would invite you out each Wednesday evening at 9 EST to attend a webinar sponsored by MLSP.

If you chose to come on out for the webinars, the first few minutes you’ll hear about the benefits of their training platform (for all things marketing, inside is massive library of “how to’s” by individuals who are getting results in their specific strategy) and then you receive pure value “how to” on a particular marketing strategy. Each week you’ll learn something new. CLICK HERE if you want to check out this week’s training.

Or, you can get a trial membership and go through the library inside what strategies work today and get the “how to” to do it.

#3 Schedule time to implement your game plan.

Once you have the right “can do” attitude and have decided on what you’re going to do, it’s time to implement.

If it’s learning a new marketing path, start learning and apply what you learn. Don’t stay in the learning mode. Take immediate action on what you learned.

If it’s starting in the same marketing path, get back on the horse and get going.

Identify what went wrong in the first place and carry on in a manner that prevents it from happening again.

If the project to get going again is time consuming, get in your calendar and commit to specific blocks of time to get it done. For me, this was the plan. I have scheduled time set aside with my favorite music and tea and I’m going to get it done during those time blocks.

Wrap Up

Focus on the end results of your efforts. Focus on your WHY. Remind yourself it’s all worth it, even through the after effects of the kick in the gut.

Know that whatever you’re going through, whatever your knock out is, others will benefit from it when you share your story of how you survived.

People need hope and inspiration. Give that to them. There’s always good that can come from your mishaps.

Here’s to you always getting your train rolling again! Never give up! Never give in!

Much Love,

Debbie