What have you got to lose?
I’m guilty of procrastinating, I put things off because I don’t want to do them or I think it’s too big of a task to tackle today so I put it off. What I’ve found is, it doesn’t go away and it doesn’t get any easier, often it gets worse. It drives my wife crazy.
The other reason, I want it to be perfect. There’s often a lot of complexities in things we do and I want to understand it all before I do it, the end result. I don’t do it and I use the excuse of I’m researching it or I need to understand it all first. To me they’re just excuses and something I still do now although I’m making a conscious effort to try and change that.
This blog is a perfect example that we can all see. As you can see, it’s far from perfect, it’s sloppy and nowhere near where I would like it to be. The old me wants me to get everything perfect and then launch it. The new me, just get started. I don’t want to bore you with the intricacies of how websites and traffic works but I’m going to provide a brief overview so that you can get an idea.
A website needs to be user friendly, visually appealing and have a traffic source. It then starts to get trickier, listing on google, keyword research, optimising pages, subscriptions, calls to action, navigation menus, SEO, the list goes on and on and I know this and it’s overwhelming, so much to do and so little time. I could spend a month full time getting it to where I want it to be, ready to launch and the outcome would be 0. No views, no visitors, no traffic. All I’d be left with is a very pretty website that doesn’t fulfil any purpose. Knowing all this, I decided to just get started.
I made a very rough plan and got to work knowing that as time goes on it will get better, my writing will get better, the website will get better, the visitors and views will get better. There are tools available that let me monitor how the site is doing and what areas to improve, so with that in mind my plan was created.
- Start writing posts and pages and publish them.
- Monitor the website analytics for views, new users, returning users and bounce rates. A bit more boring website stuff
- New users shows me my website is getting out there
- Returning users shows me people are coming back
- Views shows me what pages get the most views
- Bounce rate shows me how many visitors come to the website and do nothing
- Adjust the website based on the above metrics.
It was really that simple for the new me. I knew all these about websites and the intricacies of how to make them successful and I chucked them in the virtual bin, in pursuit of just getting started. If I didn’t do that, this website would be very pretty but not online in the pursuit of perfection.
What are you going to chuck in the bin today in order to get started?