There is an old saying in Japanese, "The nail that stands out will be hammered down". It will not be wrong for you to consider the adage to be one of a bygone era, yet interestingly enough a large percentage of people I know are afraid to stand out. When I first told others that I want to be a writer, some people I love even bowed their heads because they were embarrassed for me. Maybe it was because I asked them to read my early works, which were really bad. (That was the reason I added English grammar drills into my website. Most of them are problems that I used to have when I first ventured into writing, and a few are ones my students experienced). On the other side of the equation are relatives who were absolutely supportive. One introduced me to a publisher and the other invested a small fortune in my website.
If approaching people in the real world is difficult because of your shyness, then one way to overcome this is to promote yourself in a blog or a website. Mind you, for people who have a hard time expressing themselves, a blog is a good way to test their ideas. The advantage is that you can use a pseudonym, so your mother don’t find out. Or you can choose to have your own website, which can be in any form or in any name you wish it to be. This advantage usually comes with a price tag although there are ways around it. For example, Global Domains International uses a multi-level marketing approach. This means that you can be a user plain-and-simple, or you can get a commission for introducing someone else to the service. You can also join advertising programs like Adsense and put up ads in your pages. However, both systems only work if you have a lot of traffic coming into your site.
You don’t have to be a movie star to get traffic into your site. Over the years, I learned that the best way to bring in visitors is to socialize on and off line. It is only fair, since nobody will want to know you if they don’t know that you exist. You don’t even have to search deep in the internet if you have a free e-mail account, because all the major ones now include forums and groups in their services. Start there, lurk about for a week, then post comments or replies and start making friends. Also look around at the different social network sites and decide which one best fits your purpose.
I have met a lot of good people in forums and writing groups, who have become fast friends, and found a lot of old friends in the social network sites. Not only did their comments encourage me, their criticisms also empower me because I learned what needed to be fixed and how it should be fixed. Then when I found the courage to critique their work, I also learned to be assertive and found out that I am not the only person with problems. That being said, you will bump into rude people so don’t get sucked into their black hole.
In addition to your core purpose, you should also join groups that carry subjects which interest you because this will add depth and interest into your products or service. For example, if you are doing direct sales for health foods, joining a group that deals with aging may help you learn about health issues which you can use as ice-breakers when you meet potential clients. You will learn what part of the subject people are interested in and why they need certain products or how they use them. Who knows, you might even come up with a new idea for an old industry like Sir Allen Lane did. He saw a need (limited reading materials at train stations) and filled it (founded Penguin Books). In the four years I studied in Waseda, I had read dozens of paperbacks commuting from home to university, so much so that the subway commutes became my highlight of the day. So be social in the industry you are interested in. Know what people want before they know it and if people like your ideas, they will visit your site
Please do not to stand in your own way. When I first decided to get my website, I only had 3 articles and maybe 4 stories. I was terrified of asserting myself but I went ahead anyway, and I found that once I was committed to write, I became more focused and more sensitive to my surroundings. Ideas were easy but writing was still hard. It was so hard, I became depressed, but I still kept on. Friends ignored me, strangers criticized me and a little voice in my head called me names. But I guess the idea of running a website that someone else had paid for was the very thing I needed to keep writing. So the lesson here is, if anxiety hits you, upload your article or opinion into the World Wide Web anyway, then switch off your personal computer and hide under a blanket if you must. Guess what, someone may comment or no one will say anything, and you will find that it is not as bad as you think. After you have survived your first article, put up a second, then a third, and as many as you wish, because once your confidence kicks-in, you will be able to produce work that you never thought possible. That alone will be the biggest motivation you need to keep doing what you want to do.
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