When was the last time you put something off until tomorrow? Have you ever had an amazing idea and decided the timing wasn’t quite right and put it off for a few months only to see somebody launch a near identical website before you get the chance? These people are the sort that make money while you stay on the sidelines, hoping that one day your time will come. Make 2008 “your time”. Stop procrastinating and start taking action.
Stop refreshing your stats 15 times a day, stop looking at your Adsense earnings all the time. Refrain from continually monitoring your vanity feeds to see who has linked to you. Ditch your RSS reader for one day a week or only use it in the mornings. Being a reader isn’t going to make you any money, start being an entrepreneur instead.
Today I managed to read a weeks worth of feeds in 2 hours and yet I spend hours every day reading the same feeds usually. The fact is that you just don’t need to read every feed every day.
I’ve been guilty of not taking action a few times in the past. When PayPerPost launched in 2006 myself and Johan decided to create a competitor, pretty much along the same lines as ReviewMe. The site would allow bloggers to command whatever fees they wanted and allow advertisers to buy posts on whatever blogs they wanted. Needless to say we didn’t get round to it (although I did register a good domain for it, blogstorm.co.uk) and when ReviewMe launched I decided that it would be too hard to create a product good enough to reach critical mass.
In March 2006 I had big plans to create a paid version of Squidoo where people could buy a page and fill it with their own content. The site would have a blog to help the domain gain trust and I hoped people would start link building campaigns to their own pages. After a few months thinking about it the project got sidelined as I imagined thousands of spammy links being pointed at the domain and the thought of treading a tightrope between ranking highly and ranking too highly to force Google to evaluate the domain eventually stopped me going ahead. A few months later the milliondollarwiki and its counterparts started up and, although my concerns are valid, they seem to be making good money.
The lesson to be learned is that no matter how good or bad your idea it is important to go ahead with it, take whatever criticisms you get and use them to build a better site. If the worst happens and nobody uses your site then cut your losses and sell it or move it to a new domain.
If you don’t try you won’t succeed.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Good advice. It’s all about just getting on with something rather then thinking about it.
Another good post, Patrick. I need to follow this advice.
By the way, milliondollarwiki.com is for sale over at SitePoint.
Thats quite true….you won’t believe I had the idea of a youtube like website even before youtube launched…but the problem was that i didn’t have the technical expertise and the vision to go ahead with it…currently I am contemplating launching a blog by Feb and I hope I am succesful in that(infact this time I am not just thinking…
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Funny you should mention that. My website’s turning 10 next year, so we’re using that opportunity to kick off some new crazy stuff. But the point is yes, there’s never a better a time that right freaking now for anything.
The one thing I’d add is a variation on the “go ahead with it” part of your post, and it’s something I learned from writing my novel: get a first draft down. Doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish, it’s a lot easier to edit rubbish than it is to edit white space.
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