14 Tactics to Make Your Website Work Harder Right Now: Tactic 14 – A Web Marketing Pep Talk

Posted by Karri Flatla November 03, 2006
A tactical overview of what it takes to rock the web would not be complete without a pep talk from yours truly, would it?

The Coles Notes Version: You shouldn’t slap up a website and wait for the checks to come in any more than you should build a restaurant on a deserted freeway and wait for the hungry crowds to bang the doors down at dinner hour.

The Lecture: Internet gold is out there if you want it badly enough. But I would say that about any endeavor for profit you might pursue in the free world. Yet for some reason there persists this idea that creating wealth on the web is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. As if optics and trickery will somehow cause the Google gods to make it rain money on your business. It’s a silly notion, but it’s a pervasive one. It’s pervasive because, at any moment in time, all of the world and none of the world is just one click away. We hunger for multiplicity, and then when we have it, we feel lost, overwhelmed, and empty. How does one ever know if they are going in the right direction when there are infinite directions to go in?

Of course, at a purely tactical level, you can never know for sure in business, can you? It’s just that online the lifespan of each success and failure is very, very short. So if you’re not paying attention, you never climb the learning curve. You just keep spinning your wheels over and over again.

I’ve always held that brilliance has little to with entrepreneurial success. What matters is a willingness to invest time and effort in the small wins, the humble victories that make the journey so very worthwhile. We’re all here to learn something, and what you do each day as an online business person is no exception. Keep putting your knowledge to the test and you’re guaranteed success.

But this is a blog post, not a dissertation, so I’ll not wax philosophic any longer.

The Bottom Line for All Business on the Web: If you are an entrepreneur at heart, the juxtaposition of opportunity and obstacle—of simplicity and complexity—that is the Internet should spur you on to be a better business person, not a lesser one. How two-dimensional to think that a digital brochure will build a business! In fact, the Internet is multi-dimensional and thus presents myriad opportunities for ambitious, talented, and yes, just plain hard working folk to make a living at something they might not otherwise be able to.