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I don't know about you but I could cheerfully run up to the back of the office ... behind all the industrial shelving and filing cabinets and have a panic attack right about now.

Here we are ... supposedly living on the verge of another recession and yet I've had so much new work come through the door in the last three days that I want that panic attack and I want it NOW.

And for those of you who do suffer genuine panic attacks ... I do apologise for making light of what is not a very pleasant ailment ... but I've had my share of them over the years and joking about them is one way I deal with them.

So why am I worried about having so much new work coming in? Isn't that something I should be happy about? Of course it's something I should be happy about and of course I am happy about it ... I'm really very happy about it ... but where's it coming from?

On the one hand the world economy is looking decidedly shaky and even here in Australia the economists are talking doom and gloom and yet on the other hand people have lots of money to throw at expensive websites.

If I listen to the economists it would be prudent to lay off staff ... batten down the hatches and get ready for another rough economic ride. If I listen to the sound of the office continually opening and closing on new clients I would be looking for new staff and going out to expand my business even more.

Pardon me if I'm just a little confused about what I should be doing.

But I'm not the only one who is probably feeling a little confused right now. If you're new at doing business here on the web and you listen to what the gurus ... the experts ... are telling you right now you could be forgiven for feeling a little confused right.

Of course you listen to those people because they are the ones who have the experience ... they're the ones who have already done the hard yards and know how to make money here. They're the ones who can help you grow your business until you reach that point where you too can claim guru status too.

But what do you do when you get conflicting advice. What do you do when one well-respected expert says one thing and another expert in the same field says exactly the opposite? Perhaps even worse is when one major company in this industry says one thing and at the same time says the exact opposite?

And don't think that it can't happen because this week I've seen two gurus in each of three different parts of this industry totally disagree with one another ... and as we all know Google is forever disagreeing with itself and if it were a human being it would probably be confined to a psychiatric hospital.

What do you do when one expert says that the best way to get ahead is to copy what other successful people in the industry are doing while another says that you should never copy anyone. One says that if you copy others then you too will succeed while the other says that when you copy someone you're not really learning anything and you will fail sooner rather than later.

So what do you ... as a beginner do? Do you copy blindly hoping that somehow whatever your guru is doing will work for you? And if it does happen to work for you do you go on doing what he or she is doing without understanding why it's working?

Or as a beginner do you just go off and do your own thing because you believe that you know the best way to make money even though you have little or no experience in this industry?

Of course it's up to you to choose which path you will follow and they have both seen lots of people walk down both of them. Few ever survive to reach the end of the path taken by newcomers who do they're on thing. A few more survive the path taken by those who blindly follow what others are doing but most of those don't make anymore than a basic wage.

However there is a third path to take and those who take it tend to be the ones who really do survive and prosper and that's the path the branches off the one taken by those who follow blindly.

By all means see what others are suggesting and even start out by doing what they are doing but learn to question everything you are told and everything you see them do ... test what others say ... try different approaches ... experiment ... even do your own thing ... and ultimately see what works for you and what doesn't.

Let others worry about being confused ... you focus on your own path ... your own business ... and don't worry about what others are doing. If you're making money in hard times then you are obviously doing something right even if whatever it is you're doing is at odds with what everyone else is doing.

That's what we're doing actually doing because I'm not confused at all. Sure the economists are saying that times are tough ... but they're not tough for us so we're going to go on doing what works for us and leave our competitors to be confused and worry about what they should be doing.