Ignorance is Definitely Not Bliss.
Filed Under Unemployed |
Which is worse: a) having a mediocre business or b) having a good business but not knowing why?
B is the answer. That was a one question quiz, so I hope you didn’t blow it.
A mediocre business is easy to improve; almost anything you work on will make the business better. On the other hand, if your business is doing well but you don’t know why, you run the risk of messing with key systems inside your company for the sake of “progress” and then seeing those changes wreck the whole money-making machine. You fix what ain’t broke.
The cost of ignorance.
Let’s look at a worst case scenario here: You own a blog and over time you’ve established a steady reader base of several hundred per day and you’ve starting to see the ad revenue come in. You’re making around $10 per day from adsense, and now that your PR has jumped over 5 you’re doing some Pay Per Post for extra money. You’re not getting rich, but hey, how many people can make a car payment with their earnings from the web? Not many, so you’re giving yourself a big pat on the back. “If this keeps up,” you say to yourself, “I’ll be a full-time blogger in no time.”
The savvy business owner would stop right here and ask him/herself the question: What is(are) the key(s) to my current success? If you’re smart, you’ll spend a few hours or days looking back a few months and noticing landmark events in your blog’s growth.
Look at the different spikes in traffic or rss subscribership. What led to those spikes?
Look at jumps in your adsense conversion rates. Can you find anything specific that you could attribute the better coversion to?
Look at which posts got the most comments or were tagged on the social networking sites. Do the topics have something in common? What do your readers love about you?
Don’t Leave it to Chance
If you don’t ask yourself these questions you’re leaving your progress to luck. What would happen if you messed with your ad placement? What if you changed topics on your blog altogether? What if you dumped your current theme?
Would these changes help or hurt you? You probably had a gut reaction to all of those as you read them, but the fact is you don’t know if your instincts are right without testing. Any one of those things could either destroy your progress or throw it into hyperspeed, and the only way to know is to test.
I’ll talk about the testing process tomorrow. In the meantime, ask yourself this: What has gotten me to this point?
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