Remember when you first made the decision to pour yourself into internet marketing? Maybe you’ve felt the rush of quitting your 9-to-5 in favor of starting off on a venture where success or failure rest squarely on your shoulders and yours alone, where earning potential is virtually unlimited and the possibilities seem endless. It’s an exciting moment, to be sure… but are you still excited?

Far too many marketers find themselves ambling down a boring dirt road that started out as a gold-paved promenade. In other words, they burn out. They get discouraged as they hit a ceiling, or maybe they just get bored in their routine. Whatever the reason, it’s always important to have a few tools for getting out of a rut on hand.

For starters, the biggest obstacles are always mental: While you want to be constantly learning and getting smarter from your experiences, you don’t want to lose sight of your original vision and mindset. There’s a talent to learning from experiences without letting them make you overly cynical or discouraged. Remember how excited you were to be your own boss? Remember how excited you were to bring your business/product/vision to the world? Good. Now be that person again.

Of course, it also helps if you’ve got the concrete routines and systems in place to help foster such mindsets. Often, the hardest part about working for yourself is, well, making yourself work. Having a strict daily schedule in place can help you stay on task. Many pros use their first few actions of the day as a psychological trigger and launching pad for the rest of the day. For example, you might begin each day by doing a 30 second speed organizing of your workplace, then a 5 minute email blitz, followed by brewing your morning cup of coffee. Repeating your process each day can get you in the mood to work.

Don’t be afraid to expand. Sometimes, you’re starting off with next to nothing and have to do the grunt work for a while, but even someone with the smallest of starting capital (or none at all) should be looking to move to delegation and expansion as soon as possible. A couple of years ago, article/content marketing was huge. The people who made a substantial living off of it, however, weren’t those writing articles day in and day out. Instead, these people quickly hired a writing and website team under them to allow for rapid growth. Or perhaps they started a large writing outfit to cater to the marketers working with content volume. Either way, they were running a business, not a self-employment hobby.

In a business, you would work toward hiring and expanding, and that’s exactly what you should do. Take stock of your resources, and look at which tasks can be quickly contracted to someone else to help give you more time to plan company growth. For many, the first task to go is content creation. For others, it might be SEO efforts. Whatever isn’t exciting to you and is within budget to hire out, do it.

Finally, don’t be afraid to adapt. You may have started your IM venture two years ago, and a lot changes in two years these days. Constantly be learning, researching, and ensuring that your own methods are still considered the best practice today; never mistake comfort with effectiveness.