The Art of the Start - Part 6
Posted On: 2007-01-31
Survive With a Little Help From Your Friends
At the start of this month I wrote a few columns that provided some random suggestions on making the right start in this business. And making the right start is very important if you want to have the best chance of success. You really do need to start in the same way you intend to finish and not by taking one step forward and two steps back.
Back at the start of the month I thought I'd covered just about everything that needed to be said but a couple of days ago I watched something interesting unfold. That reminded me of one more thing you need to do right from day one if you want to have any hope of succeeding.
Having said that, let me also say that there are some people out there in this industry who have survived without doing what I'm about to suggest. However, if you're like most of us this is one step that really is important and it took an exchange of emails between Steve and another webmaster on the other side of the world to remind me of how important it can be.
In the exchange of emails Steve and the other guy were discussing how twitchy he and I become when we're separated from our computers. We do feel uncomfortable when we can't get online but most teenagers and adults don't feel like that at all. In passing Steve mentioned that when the power goes out here - as it often does during storm season - we become even twitchier because we don't know when it's going to come back on.
The other guy mentioned that the power often goes out where he is too so Steve told him about a small generator we plan on buying this year. This particular model can be wired straight into the switchboard of the house so that if the power goes out all we have to do is fire up the generator and the whole house has power again. Steve even sent him a link to the Honda page that talks about the particular model that we're interested in.
The reply Steve got was a surprise. Not only had Steve supplied a solution to the problem of staying online for this guy but he had also supplied the solution to a dilemma the other guy was facing about keeping some new farm equipment operating through the power outages that he suffers too.
Networking - it can give you answers to problems that you haven't talked about with anyone. It can provide you with answers to questions you haven't even thought about yet. Quite often one of the people we network with will mention something that becomes important to us months down the track. We might not remember what the answer was but we usually do remember who was talking about it.
Networking can also be about watching each other's back. Your networking buddies can sometimes spot problems with your sites that you have missed. If you're a content provider your networking buddies can alert you to people who are looking for your services and they can even recommend you to people who are making inquiries on boards.
One of our networking friends lives right here in our town. We occasionally bump into him in the supermarket or down at the mall but hardly a week goes by that we don't have some contact with him online. He has a lucrative little sideline going in domain sales and we've been able to send interested people to him. In return he's recommended us many times on the boards and directly referred people to us too.
Networking is important because it's going to help you make money and save money too. So it's something you need to be working at all the time. A friendly response on a message board or polite approach in an email can be the start of an online friendship that will be beneficial for years to come. Privately sharing research with another webmaster is also a great way to make things happen.
Steve and I do that with several Webmasters and, even though they are our competitors, we have seen more value in sharing information than hoarding it for any commercial advantage it might have given us. While major companies out there in the real world may not share information little people like us really do need to just to survive.
The Beatles knew all about networking and they even sang about it. The understood that while some people can be lone-wolves most of us are only going to get by with a little help from our friends.