Posted: February 18th, 2008 in General »
I don’t post here very often, as it is with a lot of my little projects. I set up the WebmasterChick.com domain to use for my email, since I was collecting too many different email addresses on various domains. I thought it would be a good place to keep track of different tools and plug-ins and articles that I don’t want to see lost in the bottom of my bookmarks too.
And it is. It’s all of those things. It’s just not finished.
Just like the rest of my many, many half-completed, vastly ignored projects, it had the best of intentions!
Working 9 to 5
Since it’s so easy for me to get wrapped up in new projects, race around researching ideas and then run out of steam before I ever, you know, actually finish the damn thing, I’ve decided to get a reign on things (things being primarily my own brain and work habits) and start working a regular schedule. Just like one of those *shudder* 9-to-5ers.
One of the best/worst things about being self-employed and working from home is that I can set my own hours. It’s great for being able to accommodate other people’s schedules, beating traffic and taking advantage of spontaneous outings. It’s not so good for ever feeling like you have time off.
Since I have a TO DO list a mile long, my evenings and weekends are often spent working, planning, researching or thinking about work. Even when I’m watching TV or out with friends, I feel guilty about the work I could be doing. Should be doing. At the gym I try to listen to marketing podcasts. In the mornings while I’m eating my cereal, I’m reading industry blogs. It never stops. My brain gets no real time OFF.
In an attempt to give my brain (and guilty conscience) a break, I’m going to try to force myself to work a normal schedule. One with real start times and real days off.
Work time, it must be noted, will no longer include the following:
Work time will be defined only as actively building, writing or otherwise creating content OR getting traffic. Submitting to directories, seeking out link trades, all the boring stuff that I love to put off because the project isn’t “finished” yet? Yeah, that’s what WORK actually is!
The Dreaded Time Sucks
Futzing around with Wordpress plug-ins? Does not count. Necessary? Maybe. But it’s a huge time suck and one of the things I love to get caught up doing. Well, I can’t start working on the marketing part of this site because the design isn’t quite right.
Guess what? If no one ever visits your sites, no one will know that your design is good, bad or breaks in IE!
One of my worst time sucks is searching for new niches and then the corresponding keywords for those niches. There is absolutely no reason I need to have a list of the best 50 keywords to target before I even start a new project. I could spend 10% of the time, find a handful of decent keywords and get building. Once the site is established, humming along, hopefully bringing in some cash, THEN I can pore over my Wordtracker results searching for the holy grail keyword phrase that will deliver me thousands of hits a day with only 2,000 competing pages. But who knows if I’m even going to like the niche? Or if they’re buyers? Or or or.
Get your feet wet, do some testing and if the niche is a go, then go back and do more keyword research. But for Google’s sake, don’t get stuck in that analysis paralysis where you never actually DO anything.
After 6 years online, I’ve finally learned that none of my sites will ever be finished in my mind. Time to let it go and get on with the business of just *doing* it.
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