Position your business for today AND tomorrow.
A little boy was at the street trying to sell lemonade. His stand was well built, and he had distributed flyers across the neighborhood to let everyone know that if they wanted a refreshing glass of lemonade, his house was the place to get it. It was mid-afternoon now, and the boy had been manning his stand since early that morning, but made no sales.
A few minutes later a neighbor came by, walking his dog. The neighbor was wrapped up in a heavy coat, pulling it tightly to him. Even his dog had a sweater on. The neighbor saw the boy with his lemonade stand and was shocked.
"What are you doing?" the neighbor asked the boy. "It's below freezing!"
"That's true," the young entrepreneur replied, "but in a few months it will be warm, and I'm planning for the future!"
I can't tell you how many webmasters I've heard from who are trying to sell lemonade in the middle of winter. By that I mean that they are trying to out-think Google and build their sites around what Google may or may not do in the future instead of what is known to bring results right now.
Don't get me wrong -- you need a long term plan. Without long term goals your business has no direction for growth. But countless webmasters are sacrificing the short term profits that will help them achieve their long term goals by ignoring what works today.
One big example is link building. After my Search Engine Myths Exposed report was launched I read a few blog posts from people saying, basically, 'It might work to get off-theme links now, but at some point Google is going to stop counting them.' Their point was that because Google might take some action in the future, you should ignore the benefits gained from receiving off-theme links today.
It's beside the point that I completely disagree with those who claim that Google will one day ignore off-theme links. The point is that those folks are encouraging people not to do what will help their bottom line today, because they think it won't work tomorrow. Meanwhile, their competition is out-ranking them in Google by getting off-theme links.
Look at it this way: if the creators of the VHS video tape knew that one day the DVD format would come along and blow them out of the water, would it have been a wise decision never to go forward with VHS? Hardly! VHS was the format of choice for well over a decade. Billions of dollars were made with that format before DVD finally did come along as the wave of the future.
Let's extend that even further: Sony's Blu-Ray has officially won the war against Toshiba's HD DVD format. If Blu-Ray eventually replaces DVD, would the creation of the DVD have been a bad idea from the get-go? Of course not! Again, billions of dollars later, it was hardly a bad idea just because the future may turn a different way.
The same thing applies to your business. You want to have long term goals that take into consideration the winds of change, both with search engines and other traffic generation techniques. But you should also have short term goals that exercise the methods known that work right now.
The key word here is "balance." Don't put all of your time into your long term goals and miss out on today's profits, but don't focus so completely on short term methods that, if they ever do stop working, you're dead in the water. Put time into both. This, of course, is much easier once you are at a point where you can outsource the daily grunt work tasks.
You see, the problem with the winds of change is that they are by nature very unpredictable. Who can foresee precisely what will or will not happen next month, or next year, or five years from now? There are far too many variables. Weather forecasters have long since demonstrated that the more variables there are, the less accurate your prognostication will be.
So the best thing you can do as a business is to have more general long term goals: "I want to achieve one million visitors per month to my web site in the next 3 years," or "I want to create a new product in my market each year over the next 5 years." As you get closer and closer to those deadlines, you mold and craft your goals to fit more closely to the actual climate and environment of the time you're in. Meanwhile, the profits from your short term goals are helping to make those long term goals a reality.
Yes, the boy with the lemonade stand would have been better off selling hot chocolate during those cold winter days, and in the evening working to perfect his lemonade recipe, or improve the design of the flyer he intended to use come summer. Had he been selling hot chocolate, he would have had the money he needed to really launch his lemonade business when the time was right. As it is, he'll have exactly what you would expect a person selling lemonade in freezing weather to have: nothing at all.
Please leave your thoughts and comments below.
