Stuff That Gets Away From You
You need to be constantly vigilant when it comes to online business. The rest of your life too, but let’s keep this business-related.
For some reason, today I had a down-day with regards to productivity. That’s probably because yesterday was a big planning day and I probably burned some brain stuff getting everything sorted. Anyway, for whatever reason I haven’t been able to get it together today.
So half-way through the day’s activities, I decided to instead review everything I’m doing.
Here are some quick lessons.
Everything Is Easy
If stuff isn’t getting easier, then you’re doing something wrong.
It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about running ads, copywriting, building websites or chatting on Twitter. Over time, you should get more results for less work.
If you aren’t getting more results for less work, then something is going wrong with your planning, actions or implementation.
Now- you should make stuff difficult for yourself. You should try and push that exponential curve for results as far as you can. But this must be a decision and result of you doing more.
For instance… if you’ve maxed out your learning on SEO, then you might start PPC.
Obviously this is difficult and your business has gotten harder as you embrace a new learning curve. But the SEO portion of your business should be ticking along without you. This part should be easy and gain you more results than it was when you started learning.
It’ll be the same with PPC in a few months. You get the learning curve done. You spend some money until you generate a consistent return. Then you’re in a holding pattern until you learn something new.
Copywriting is no different – you should work to get to the point where you have a system which makes it easy to come up with effective sales pages on a whim. Again… if at one point you could write an article in ten hours and now it takes you twice as long for the same results, you’ve slipped backwards.
Don’t let it happen.
Tend The Garden
The SEO for this site has been decreasing. Hence the stuff above. This is because I’ve let it all slip. I hate doing keyword research and all of that. I hate updating meta-descriptions and the like.
This is dumb.
I like writing new articles and learning new stuff. Once I’ve worked it out, the fun leaves.
That said, with this approach I’m leaving success on the table. I need to take some time, upload some pictures and do some research.
You should have a maintenance program for every aspect of your business. This brings me on to the next part.
On Cheaper Stuff And Loyalty
I’ve had an issue with my webhosts recently. I’ve sent in support tickets and they seem to be unhelpful.
They’ve never been unhelpful, but this issue is fundamentally a pain in the neck for me right now. (I can’t reply to emails. Major pain.)
So this makes me think, “I should look elsewhere.”
It turns out that in the eighteen months since I signed up for this host, other people have upped their game. They now offer better services for less money.
So I’ll be switching soon.
The lesson here is that if you run your own business and it’s a small show, you should be constantly vetting your service providers and suppliers. If there’s a better deal, you should take it.
Loyalty to a brand is good… but they should treat you well. If you can be treated better elsewhere, then it’s in your best interests to go where you’re best treated.
Too Many Projects – Concentrate
A big problem I have is that I simply love working on new stuff.
This quickly leads to too many projects, and all my plans include doing more. I want more ecommerce sites. I want more niche sites. Tying all these things together to create a massive online empire is the plan.
Ambition is great and it’s easy to build the skills to do it… but unstructured dabbling isn’t good.
Before you expand, you should have a plan. You shouldn’t start a new project until the current project is out of growth mode and into a maintenance mode.
What I mean by that is, you need to have a plan that looks something like:
- Get current house in order
- Analyse new opportunity
- If opportunity is good, act
- Ride the exponential work curve until you’re happy with the progress made
- Establish a maintenance mode where you can check the idea every so often and otherwise only devote a few hours to it
- Then move on to the next thing
I don’t do this. I should.
Final Thoughts
This article is terribly unstructured, but hopefully there’s something to learn. In short – don’t let stuff get away from you.
Every so often, take a moment to consider what’s going on, what direction you’re going in and how best to proceed.
Everything should get easier over time. This means that you optimise and most importantly, you stop doing stuff that isn’t working and instead concentrate on stuff that’ll work. Where something isn’t pulling its weight, either stop doing it or modify it so that it will.