Giving your business a shave with Occam's Razor.
March 13, 2008
Albert Einstein stated a principle in 1933 which is often paraphrased as "Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." Occam's Razor is a similar principle of logic that can be summed up as "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." Then there's the principle more people are probably familiar with: the KISS principle ("Keep It Simple, Stupid").
As a computer programmer and web developer, I've found all three principles to be very true. When an algorithm or piece of logic in my code starts getting too complex, I try to step back and see if my fundamentals are wrong. Almost inevitably, I find a simpler, faster, better way to solve the same problem. It's also taught me to be able to let go of hundreds (or thousands) of lines of code that took me hours (or days) to write. As painful as the wasted time may seem, I try to view it, not as a loss, but rather as simply the steps it took for me to find a better method.
This has helped me tremendously in my business, too. When things start getting too difficult to manage easily, I make the same kind of assumption I would make if the code I'm writing starts to get too muddled: I've got some fundamentals wrong. My willingness to make drastic changes for the sake of improving the way things work has been rewarded handsomely in this regard as well.
Unfortunately, it is not human nature to do this. By nature, we take the path of least resistance, and that means continually doing what we're doing, even if it will ultimately result in failure. Making drastic fundamental changes in our methods or routine is scary. What's behind the door of change is an unknown, and unknowns make most people very apprehensive.
To illustrate: let's say that you start a link building campaign, but after a few months you're still not seeing any good search engine rankings despite having the same number of links as your competitors. At this point you have two options: you can keep doing what you're doing in the hopes that getting more and more and more links will eventually get you ranked, or you can step back and examine what it is about the links you're getting, or the way you're getting them, that just isn't working very well.
In this particular case, if you choose to just keep doing the same thing, you might eventually see some results. That's what makes continuing with a flawed plan so dangerous. Because you did, in fact, see some results, you might continue going about your link campaigns in the wrong way, expending far too much time and too many resources on a flawed method over and over again. However, if you choose to step back and figure out where you went wrong, it might take longer to see good results this time, but going forward you've got a better method that will more than make up for the added time and expense.
I've never really agreed with the mantra "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Just because something is working does not mean it's working well, and it certainly doesn't mean it's giving you the best return on your investment. Where would technology be today if all of the great inventors took that stand? We'd still be driving Model-T cars and manually washing our clothes with a bucket and a bar of soap!
Thomas Edison first patented the idea of the electric light bulb in 1880. That light bulb lasted a whopping 13.5 hours before burning out. If he'd stopped his work then, we might be changing a lot more light bulbs around the house! But he didn't stop. After a few more months he created a filament that lasted 1,200 hours. A drastic improvement indeed, gained because he didn't believe that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
A better philosophy is, "If it's simple and works well, don't complicate it." The key here is that it has to "work well." Only you can judge what's working well for you and what isn't. You have your own unique set of strengths and weaknesses, and you need to be willing to assess them and make decisions based on that assessment. You also have your own unique goals, and no one else should dictate what you should and should not accomplish. Set your goals to meet your needs, and go from there.
I can't overemphasize the importance of changing your view of the "lost" work that comes with making changes, either. It's not lost work — it's gained knowledge and experience. The sum total of all of your failures is what fuels the success that will come, if only you keep at it.
Thomas Edison failed ten thousand times before finally making a light bulb that worked. It's true that, had he quit, somebody else would have eventually made the discovery, so the world probably would not have lost too much. Edison was not the first person to experiment with electric light, nor would he be the last (in 1994 General Electric created a light bulb that will burn for 60,000 hours). But think of what Edison would have lost! And think about what you will lose if you give up and stop working to improve your business.
So if you're finding your daily routine full of drudgery and difficulties, perhaps it's time to take out Occam's Razor and give your business a shave.
Please post your thoughts and ideas below.
Position your business for today AND tomorrow.
February 19, 2008
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.
Work ON your business, not IN it.
February 11, 2008
I once made the mistake of hiring a company that specialized in handling technical support for online businesses. The single person assigned to my (smallish) account at the time was a member of MENSA. She was a true-blue certified genius with a technical background.
Who could ask for more, right? Wrong! The woman turned out to be completely unable to handle the support for my business, and after a couple of months of fighting and hoping for the best, I fired the firm.
From that point on I became a bit of a control freak about my business. I mistakenly assumed that if a certified genius with a technical degree was unable to handle my tech support, that I just needed to give up and do it all myself.
After about 18 months of that I was at the point where 80% of my time was used up handling support requests. My business stopped growing. I was chained down by support requests, stuck working in my business instead of on it.
Not long after that Mike Filsaime asked me to give him a call, which I did. We had a long conversation about outsourcing things like support requests.
Mike laid the bare truth on me in a way that only he can. "Jon," he said, "you have two choices: you can burn yourself out doing everything yourself, or you can hire out and watch your business grow."
"But Mike," I protested, "nobody is going to be able to give my customers the kind of support I can! I created these products."
"That may be true," he replied, "but not even you can do what you do for an endless number of customers without killing yourself. At some point you simply will not be able to handle it."
He was right, too. I was already at the point of wanting to chuck it all because I just couldn't keep up with the support requests the way I wanted to — forget about growing my business!
So I did some hard thinking about what I was going to do. Mike told me that he managed to get a very happy customer of his to do support for one of his products in return for a percentage of the profits. That worked very well because the person was not just an employee, but was actually invested in doing a good job.
I decided to give that a try, and ended up hiring Amin Motin, a very active member at one of the support forums I ran. I had already made him a moderator at the forum because of his freely dispensing so much good advice and support to folks there. It seemed only natural to have him do support for my other products.
Amin is also invested in my business. His "salary" comes from a variety of web sites and services which turn a profit for both of us. And you know what? I was very wrong when I said that nobody could give my customers the same level of support that I was giving them. Amin is better than me, more patient and helpful with my customers, and I've read more praise directed at him than I have room to share here.
After bringing Amin on board I suddenly had a huge amount of time to devote both to personal and business pursuits. My net monthly income has increased 40% because of being free to work on other projects and toy with ideas I'd had in the back of my mind — and this increase has come despite Amin's share of the profits and me working fewer hours than I did before (I devote a lot more time to my personal ministry work now).
You see, I had the wrong outlook on my business. I was so afraid to let go of a piece of my business that I had been burned on before that it was strangling its growth (and stressing myself out beyond belief). I also had the mistaken notion that I couldn't afford to pay somebody to handle the support for me. What Mike helped me to see, and what indeed has proven to be true, is that I couldn't afford not to have someone else doing support.
Now I outsource everything. My site design, graphics and logos, my support, my content creation. You name it. If it can be outsourced, I try a few folks out until I find the one who fits the bill and I stick with them.
Doing this has dramatically increased not only my bottom line, but also my peace of mind. My family and I travel on vacation, and I'm not stuck doing support tickets in the evening while we're away. I don't stress about how support is going to get handled, because Amin is so fantastic at it. I never worry about how my next web site or product is going to look, because the guys at GraphicsGenie.com do such a fantastic job on every product I put up.
You may really not be able to afford to hire out just yet, and that's understandable. I was in that position at first also. But I promise you, I promise you, that as soon as you can make room in your budget to start hiring out the services that you do not absolutely have to handle yourself, you will find your business blossoming into something much greater than you could possibly make it by yourself.
Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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