It shouldn’t surprise you that as a kid I watched a lot of cartoons. And in cartoons, when someone planted a seed and added water it only took seconds for a fully-grown tree to emerge. But even as a kid I knew that it just doesn’t work that way in real life.

At an intellectual level, we all understand this. On an emotional level, and when it comes to our businesses, we REALLY still want that seed we planted to sprout right away and we get nervous when it doesn’t.

There’s a reason that the word “organic” is used so often in conjunction with online marketing: it takes time, often months before we see real growth.

That nervous frustration you feel when things don’t start happening right way is very dangerous — you feel like you want to react impulsively, blow up what you’ve done and change tactics. But you need to remember when you’re a few days or even a few weeks into an organic online marketing initiative that you might not be failing.

You may not have given yourself a chance to succeed yet.

To continue the gardening analogy, when you plant a seed, you can’t tell if anything is growing or not until that first little bit of green breaks through the soil. And then you can easily see how your plant grows daily. Marketing is similar — nothing happens overnight and the first signs of progress are going to be invisible.

Don’t let your reactionary instincts blow up what could grow into a very successful marketing strategy and don’t let fear outsmart you. You know that becoming successful at anything requires a lot of time, effort, practice and experimentation. Marketing is no different and we all know that we tend to make bad choices when our reasoning is colored by impatience and impulsiveness.

Let your strategies play themselves out and give yourself enough data to make good decisions about where to take the next phase of your marketing plan.