Where Do I Start
Posted On: 2010-05-31
Ok so it's Monday morning and here I am, at my desk, looking at my computer screens wondering where on earth I should start.
It's not that I don't have anything to do ... in fact it's quite the opposite ... I've got lots to do. I've got some advertising to add to our own sites ... there's a couple of domain names to transfer and renew for some of my clients ... we're part way through building an important website two other clients ... there's keyword research to be done for yet another client and some analytics to review for a totally different client.
Yes ... as I said ... it's not that I don't have anything to do. It's more a case of having so much interesting stuff to do that I'm a little overwhelmed and don't know where to start. That means that today could be a total waste of time if I don't actually make a start on something.
If that's the sort of day you're facing then maybe you need to do what I normally do in a situation like this. I look at the simplest job ... the one that won't take hours to finish ... and I jump in and do that job.
It might not be the most important task I have to do today ... it may not be the task that will make me the most money today ... but indirectly it will help me get to those jobs that are important and will make money because doing that first simple job tends to get me focused and then all the other tasks just seem to fall into line all by themselves.
So if you're facing a day with lots of interesting tasks to complete and you don't know where to start what's the easiest ... the simplest ... job on your list? Once you know what that job is then make a start on it because it will help you get through all the others.
You might even find that once you have some order in the list of jobs you have to do the amount of work that needs to be done to finish that list of jobs is nowhere near as great as you first thought it was. It's funny how the human mind sees things that are jumbled as being much bigger than they appear when there's some order to that jumble and you never know ... there just might be some spare time hiding away in that mess of things you have to do.
Sadly ... even when there is some order in my list of things to do ... there's not going to be any spare time.
Don't believe everything you read
One thing I have already achieved today is to throw a spanner in someone's carefully crafted piece of fluff about how it's a waste of time to even think about targeting any other search engine other than Google. To support their argument they trotted out some figures that suggested that Google now accounts for 97 percent ... yes they really did say 97 percent ... of all traffic to websites from search engines.
I'm sure a lot of people believe that fairy story but the reality ... as I showed the person who wrote that piece ... is something quite different.
While they were a little vague on where their figures were coming from I was quite specific in the verticals where my figures came from. I won't mention them here but suffice to say that the verticals my figures came from are ones that are very popular with the average computer user and my figures showed for one site in a major vertical nearly 20 percent of traffic came from Bing and another site in another vertical was getting around 10 percent of it's traffic from Bing
So, as I've said before, don't be in a rush to follow the stampeding herd and think that pursuing traffic from Bing is a waste of time because it isn't. It's especially not a waste of time when you consider the type of person who is using Bing to conduct their searches.
You should also consider the amount of money that just one visitor from Bing might spend on your website or the website you're managing for a client.
In some situations a good listing in Bing can bring lots of sales for a reasonably priced item and that makes spending a few hours working on a good listing in Bing worthwhile. In other situations just one visitor from Bing who reaches for his wallet can be for more worthwhile ... especially if what you're selling is worth many thousands of dollars.
So don't believe everything you read about which search engine sends the most traffic and don't ignore the fact that sometimes just visitor from Bing who wants to buy what you're selling can be worth for more to you than ten thousand free-loading tire kickers from Google.
Ok so that's the easiest job now done and dusted and I can see what my next task needs to be so I'm off to get stuck into today's work.