Patience

• May 10, 2009

Someone told me a few years back that this is one of a few businesses where you can do and worry too much. One of those businesses where you can actually fine tune yourself right out of business. There are usually two things that cause this to happen. A drive for perfection and no patience.
A drive for perfection can be very dangerous when doing what we do. Most of our surfers could care less about whether or not our blogs are "perfect". They tend instead to care about the content quality and quanity. For the most part the more "bells and whistles" you add to your blog the less productive it will become. The design and the functions become more important than the posts. The special gadgets and places to visit in the sidebar pull the surfers away from what you WANT them to see in the sidebar (your ads).
Perfection makes an appearence in other forms too. The constant quest for the correct keywords and SEO and the perfect trades can be just as damaging as all the gadgets. A perfection nut will tend to spend more time trying to SEO his blog than he pays in putting good content and links on his blog. It is common to see some people spend three or four times more time on the looks and SEO of their blog than they spend on actual posts (which are what the surfers are there to see). It takes an aquired mindset to look at your blog and tell yourself "this is as good as it is going to be" ad then leave it alone.
But more dangerous than a continuous drive for perfection is the lack of patience. I remember this business when all you had to do was get a sloppy gallery listed at the right site and you could expect 10 or more sales a day from it. This business started as one of those where you could make a lot of money real fast. It has not been that way for a long time now.
The adult business in numbers to the extreme. But most newer webmasters forget that numbers over a short term mean nothing. If your blog has only been up a month then you really don’t have the numbers you need to get an idea how you are doing or even what you are doing. You need long term numbers that allow you to get a guage over an extended period. How long? A year. Sometimes more–but a year is a good stopping and looking point. With a year’s worth of numbers you can look at all the averages and ratios and compare them to the "industry" norms. And over the year you will be surprised just how close to the industry norms your numbers actually are.
In general–between 35 and 55% of your visitors will end up clicking through to your sponsor. 50% of THOSE will be "qualified" click-thrus (actually interested and not just curious). Your sales ratio is going to be somewhere between 1:1000 and 1:1500 qualified click-thrus. (If you have 100 unique visitors a day then betwen 35 and 50 of them will click your sponsor links and between 17 and 25 of those will be "qualified". You SHOULD have a sale between 40 and 59 days.)
But you have to be patient enough to wait and see the numbers develop. Some blog owners get lucky and make 3 or 4 sales in the first week on no traffic at all. Some can go 6 months without a sale. But in the end the numbers will show that both those webmasters are surprisingly close numbers wise (one sale for every 4000 to 5900 unique clicks to the blog). Sometimes a webmaster will get lucky and his numbers will be much better–this year. Next year when he averages the two years out he will be close to the industry norm. And some webmasters, usually the perfectionalists, will see numbers much worse but, again, over the long term the averages tend to play out.
This business requires the ability to work at a frantic pace and the patience to wait for results. In that way this business is just like every other business. You will find that you can survive your constant drive for perfection but your lack of patience will drive you slowly insane.
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