Hamsters on a Wheel

I’ve got a headache. Why? When I visit webmaster forums I feel like I’m watching a group of hamsters on a wheel. It’s simply amazing. The same questions, the same wrong conclusions, and the same return to the same questions.

Maybe you’re one of those hamsters. I sure hope not. If you are, jump off your little wheel now while you can and come join the party.

I’ve come up with a theory as to why certain people go in circles. They fail to plan. Rather than list specific goals they end up all over the place. And no, “make more money” or “build some sites” aren’t specific goals.

If you have been trying to do business on the Internet for more than three or four months and you’ve yet to make at least $100, I want you to stop and think. What are you trying to do? Nine times out of 10 the problem is you’ve not set concrete goals and you’ve gone off on tangents. It happens to everyone.

For those just beginning, use this as a wake-up call. If you don’t have concrete goals—and stick to them—in the Internet business world, you’ll waste lots of time and you’ll get eaten up.

Today’s task is to spend 10 minutes to multiple hours clearly defining what you want to do. I’m not just talking about the end game. Define measure points along the way. Here are some examples.

• I want to buy a domain name for my fishing site.
• I want to build my fishing site. It should be simple and use templates for the design.
• I want my fishing site to have five pieces of content, so I can start marketing it.
• I want to write one article and submit it to five article submission sites. The article will link to the home page of my fishing site and to two internal pages.

The above is a basic example. Those items could be even more specific and laid out even better. Notice that I didn’t just say: “I want to make $100 monthly with a fishing site.”

In fact, I would recommend breaking that content goal down to specific what each of the five topics will be, their word count and so forth.

Without a plan to follow, it would be easy for me to go off on tangents—getting lost in the noise of the webmaster world. Next thing I know, it would be months later and I’d still have issues. When you have a plan of action, you can follow it precisely, and you’ll end up completing goals faster.

Don’t be one of the hamsters on a wheel. Those guys will be there for years—until they tire out and die off.