This time last year I was all about local search being the “thing” for 2010 and it surely was (and still is). What makes me wince is that most “advisors” out there are setting up their businesses and doing it the hard way. They are trying to sell “potential” to a local business owner by promising to create a site that will rank highly in Google for their local search term. Only a few smarties are doing it the right way. What is the right way? Creating an asset that meets the needs of the small business owners and THEN presenting it to the small business owner. You can’t argue with someone who already owns the #1 spot in Google and is ready to lease it to you, or sell you the leads from that site.
Which brings me to what I think should be the focus for 2011 – asset creation and business fundamentals
No matter what happens with Google, new technologies or global financial markets – the basics of wealth creation remain the same. Accumulate a portfolio of (diverse) assets and you are covered for most eventualities. The best assets generate income or increase in value, or both.
The beauty of the internet is that you can create those assets out of thin air, yet so many people choose spend their time creating steaming piles of crap. Probably because they do not look at what they are doing as “being in business” rather they are succumbing to greed and opportunism and hoping the get-rich-quick thing will actually work for them. In some ways they can justify it to themselves with the current mantra of “doesn’t matter how crap it is, just ship it” but they have that all wrong – the assumption for the ship-it-now-mentality is that you are trying to create something of value as the end goal, not constantly ship crap.
I honestly think most people think it is OK to create internet crap because many of those that teach internet marketing (or whatever it is called this year) are struggling themselves to come to terms with the reality that the launch-something-new-monthly-model is not going to cut it any more. They are not creating an asset when they launch a product (as much as they want to lie to themselves or their customers) they are creating ephemera.
The internet is a platform, the basics of business are still the same – plan to have more money coming in than is going out. So few are grasping that ALL successful money making businesses follow that one simple rule. They see the Richard Branson lifestyle and forget that his Virgin businesses all follow those basics – if they don’t then they are gone.
So why aren’t people teaching this stuff as part of their thousand dollar courses? Because it isn’t sexy, and in some cases, because the teacher hasn’t learned that lesson themselves.
Here’s to 2011 and your asset creation activities. Remember – the fundamentals of business are the same, no matter where you are practicing them
and the very first chapter is about how award based motivation just doesn’t cut it when you have tasks that just need to be done. It may work once or twice, but it won’t work all of the time (and I am pretty sure all of us have fallen into the ice-cream for exercise trap where we end up telling ice-cream to go sod itself because we aren’t going to exercise today). One must look for the intrinsic value from completing the task as being the reward.
Planned and executed my exit from the corporate world. Walked away with a 6 figure payment to boot.