Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Life gets in the way
The last couple of days, that's pretty much been the theme of my days. Starting with my kids' track meet Thursday, car repairs Friday and a whole lot of driving kids to and from school, work, activities and other things—and, oh yes, spring yardwork—the last few days have been considerably less productive workwise than I had hoped.

I have my next newsletter nearly ready to go out tomorrow, but that's been about it for these last three days.

It's all part of life, though. Life is more than just the work we do.


Hey, is it just me, or does everyone see tonight's blog in serious danger of devolving into a whole string of cliches? "Gotta play them one game at a time." "It's not over till it's over." "Life is more than just the work we do." Yecch.

I'm tired. The yardwork today seems to have taken a lot more out of me than I thought it would. And I find myself feeling like I'm just going through the motions tonight on the blog.

So what's going on? A slight dry spell? The first excitement of having the One Stop site up wearing off and the recognition of how much I still need to do in promotion of it? Or is it sitting here after writing my lead article for tomorrow's newsletter and feeling that there should be more to it?

I've got to have the longest newsletter in the business as it is right now, and I feel there should be more to it? C'mon!

The article is a list of seven suggestions for how to get additional one-way, incoming links into your site. As I wrote it, I found myself looking at my list and thinking, "Wait, I should have an entire article just on this suggestion alone. I can't leave them with just saying, 'Do this,' and not give them more detailed information on how to do it, or at least refer them to an article on my site that gives more details."

And add to that the fact that as I went through my article notes, I found myself thinking, "Oh, yeah, I should be doing more of that myself."

I'm getting impatient with myself. But I'll have to settle for doing what I can at the moment and not beat myself up because I don't have two years worth of completed work done already on my one-month old site.

Like I say, I'm tired tonight. But tomorrow's another day! (Sorry, I just had to get one more cliche out of my system before closing.)
Jeff

So, Jeff, what do you want to do when you grow up?
Um, isn't 51 is a little old to be wondering that?

But I've been noticing lately that I'll set out to write an article and it eventually turn more into a personal development article than a technical article on specific techniques for Internet businesses.

Maybe a lot of that is that, after the wild, wild, crazy journey my life has been, personal development is a subject that I've been forced to confront to an even greater degree than the Web marketing I make my living at.

I've worked in some very unrelated careers and dabbled in a few others, and I've found some common threads through them all. And they come back to how poorly we often utilize the most valuable resource that any of us has: ourselves.

I guess I'm not going to be able to shake that focus and make this site a plain, vanilla, marketing advice site. What each of us has experienced in our lives shapes us in unique ways. And that's what distinguishes us and what we do.

I'm beginning to see that making itself felt in the way I approach this site. And, although it takes me in a different direction than I expected this site to go, I have to follow it.

And it promises to do something that makes this site different from all those plain, vanilla marketing advice sites out there. It gives it a personal voice.

I'm still pondering what all this means for the site, but I trust it will bring about a stronger site with greater value to its visitors. And that's what it needs to be.
Jeff

Just keep doing it
Someone I talked to today mentioned a curious fact about people's reaction to his love of running. They ask him, "How do you run such long distances?"

He says, "I just put one foot in front of the other again and again and again and just keep doing it until I get to where I want to be."

They usually look at him puzzledly and say, "That's all? Isn't there more to it than that?"

People like to think of difficult feats as, well, more dramatic than that, as coming from some simple secret that, once revealed, makes the whole process fall into place without effort.

People looking to start a business often fall into the same trap. They look at the goal of a successful business and hope to find some simple secret that makes reaching that goal a snap.

The fact is that there is no simple secret. Unless you do what my friend does with running and "put one foot ahead of the other again and again and again and just keep doing it until you get to where you want to be."

The secret is in taking one step after another after another after another day by day toward reaching your goal. And the secret is to just keep doing that until you get to where you want to be. It's not dramatic. But it works.
Jeff

Feast
I've found it ironic lately that during the time while I was working 100% for my client and leaving my eBay store pretty much on autopilot, I was getting modest but steady sales in without any effort. Then as soon as I moved to working half for my client and half on my own site, my eBay sales went south.

I made a dent into that slowdown today with my single biggest sales day on eBay ever. It was gratifying to have to break off from my billable work regularly to answer questions and process orders.

I recognize that I can't take this as the way things are going to be from now on. Business usually is feast or famine. Sometimes you do great and others you're in the toilet. You can't get too high during the feast periods or too low during the famines. But I'll grant myself a bit of personal satisfaction at this feast. Hey, isn't the thrill of accomplishment a major part of what going into business is all about?
Jeff

Directions
I settled down tonight to catch up on some newsletters I hadn't gotten a chance to read, before running out to pick up my son from work. The newsletters still sit unread. I got a call from my daughter, the actress, feeling down about a number of things in her life and wondering what direction to take.

That's one of the most wrenching things as a father, helping one of your children sort through the box they've put themselves into. And as has happened with increasing regularity lately, I found myself trying to articulate to her my thoughts on how we get ourselves into these boxes and what we need to understand about ourselves to get out.

It seems everywhere I turn, I keep bumping into that same need to get these insights developed into a more articulated form. I know it will take quite a bit of time, and offers no hope of short-term income (although it lends itself well to a series of future info products). So I keep putting it off until my income from my site is steady enough to support a more long-term project.

But then I turn around and another situation slaps me in the face with a need to get this going. So my daughter's need for help with the direction of her life gets me questioning my own direction again. Is it better to work at building a business out of doing what many others are doing or take a further risk on something unique that I alone can offer? Don't answer that. I think we both know the answer. Ah, but accepting it enough to act on that answer is the tricky part.
Jeff

No great insights tonight, either
Went to church, a church meeting, and a dinner. Came home, checked up on the NFL draft results, ran some errands, cleaned up a few odds and ends of billable work. Not the kind of day that inspires great insights.

Well, tomorrow I hand off another bit of routine work (his reciprocal linking) to my client and get that off my shoulders. I've written up some directions on how he or someone else in his office can do it. I'll still need to write up some detailed directions on how I check to make sure that I'm getting an honest reciprocal link from the other site (and I'll share that on One Stop, too, once I write it up), and some tips on finding some more link partners (another article I'll share on One Stop).

It'll be nice to get that into his hands. Really, the only reason for outsourcing a reciprocal link campaign is to save the time. And, frankly, considering how junky most of the requests I get from most reciprocal link outsourcing companies, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable outsourcing if I was planning a reciprocal link campaign.

At any rate, it will be a relief not to be in link building anymore other than for myself. And, if you've taken the time to check, I'm not doing any reciprocal linking myself right now. My goal is to build link popularity strictly by one-way, incoming links. Time for this old dog to learn some new tricks.
Jeff