Being Successful – that first step is a doozey
One month ago I started a series talking about being successful. The idea was meant to both define the ’success’ and to track how successful this website is doing. I would like to approach this monthly by posting on the success and status of the website and what steps I took at each stage of it’s growth.
Success, like most things in life, needs planning. We left off last time by describing what success really means, how it, in and of itself, is not something obtainable. It is just a classification of an act. You are either successful or not successful at doing something. I am applying that to this website. The mark of success I have decided on is 1000 hits a day for a 30 day period. What I did not provide was a time limit. And I did this with good reason as we will see.
Be careful about setting impossible goals.
It really doesn’t make sense to set a goal that you are unsure if you can make. “I will be rich in 3 years”. Oh really? What is “rich” anyway? How do you plan on being “rich” in 3 years? If you don’t have a gauge on revenue streams, decreasing debt rates, expense levels, and other key concerns, you may have just established a possibly impossible goal.
What if President-Elect Obama said, America would be debt free in 4 years? Some may cheer, some may cry foul, but regardless, it wouldn’t be likely to happen. Why? Because somethings are just not possible, no matter how much we want them to be. You are not going to get out of debt in 6 months if your earnings to debt ratio is not high enough to allow it. It’s that simple. Why set a goal for yourself that you are simply going to fail at? It may just destroy any chances of you ever reaching success. Set backs to goals can be more than just a set back. They can demoralize us and detract us from the objective.
What do you do then? Set reasonable goals. Goals that you have researched. If you make X, have debt Y and expenses Z, come up with a plan to pay of a certain amount every month and stick to it. When you do the math, you’ll figure out when you can realistically expect to have the debt paid off. Make it a hard date, a real goal, something you have researched and planned for. It will make your chances of success greater.
Applying that to this website, now that I have main a success metric, 1000 visits a day for 30 days, I need to come up with the way to get there. I still don’t have a time frame as I need to do more research. I know I need to shy away from impossible goals so what I have done was let the website simply sit there. Let the content I’ve added be indexed by search engines, join a few blogging websites and see how traffic builds. It’s not stellar in the beginning I can tell you. But it will give me a trend. A means to gauge how fast websites can expect to increase traffic based on content amount and time on the internet. Seeing the slow increase, however, can be a little bit demoralizing. Which brings us to another good lesson, do not fall for ‘instant success syndrome’.
Instant success syndrome
Have you ever heard of beginners luck? Some times, some people when they first do something they do it and just get it perfect. Could be a poker game, could be a baseball game, could be anything. But when they try it a second time, not so good. This can, and does, derail people a good percentage of the time. Watch out for it. It even happened to me on this website. I joined another website to promote this one. In the first few days I was getting 40-50 people per day. I was excited. I though that the success metric for this site would be an easy target. Not so. Within a few weeks it fell to 2 people per day. I felt that sinking feeling of, “guess this won’t work”. I quickly realized i was suffering from instant success syndrome. I felt that if it wasn’t a success instantly, it must be a failure.
Truth is, that’s not true. Things take time, hard work and perseverance. I buckled down and did some research. What brings people to a site? Mostly, they say, is search engines. What are search engines hungry for? Content.
Armed with the knowledge of what to avoid, I make a plan for this month, December. I will add content and do more due diligence. Marketing strategies abound on the Internet. Blogs have been around for a while now and so have theories on getting people to visit your blog and/or website. I will be reviewing and researching many of them. The two biggest things I’ve found are content and having links form other blogs/websites. We’ll see how this month fairs. So far for November, about 300 people have visited the site. I’ve managed to avoid some pitfalls and have a solid plan for the next thirty days.
