It seems to me that many successful types on the Internet have mastered some part of it, be it marketing, coding, design, writing, SEO, or they are a great manager of others that can do that stuff. Sure they can understand and handle all those other things, but it comes down to “Where should I spend my time?” Some of us gravitate toward our niche and can proclaim “I am a great graphic designer” or “I have SEO down cold!” or “I write 2 great articles every day before I’ve finished the first pot of coffee!” or “I find great ways to make money on line every day!” or “I can program anything!” or “My business is so organized I can’t fail!”
New Idea-itis
Others, like me, dash from project to project, learning our niche topic, setting up multiple types of sites, troubleshooting and writing bits of code. We submit for links, buy links, post in forums. We read forums voraciously, trying to learn everything about everything, especially SEO. At every turn it seems we need to come to grips with another twist on .htaccess or robots.txt or learn a new program for graphics or file renaming or figure out why a cms module won’t behave or why a site is screwed up in a different browser.
Can’t Stop Trying New Things
A couple years ago I think I installed every major CMS, Blog, Forum script out there, along with countless, video, image gallery, directory, social network and you-name-it script. I used Frontpage, Dreamweaver, NetObjects and loads of other site building tools each with their own learning curve. I have servers with 3 completely different types of hosting control panels. I’ve moved databases from Excel to text to Access to mySQL and even did a couple projects with Filemaker. I write on all kinds of subjects like nutrition, music, politics, gardening, relationships and spirituality. I may tweak a graphic in IrfanView, Fireworks, Publisher, Image Ready, Animation Shop, Paint Shop Pro even Gimp. I’ve bought articles for article directories, I’ve done article spinning, link exchanges, link networks, and a few other schemes along the way. I’ve run all kinds of affiliate marketing scripts, and I’ve joined every affiliate network under the sun. Okay, I’m sure you get the idea; and I realize of course, I’m not unique in this experience. But there are times when my efforts seem so spread out, it’s hard to make progress. In fact, not only is it hard to say what kind of webmaster I am, I’m not even always a webmaster, since when it’s warm out I manage a garden center too!
Keep it Simple
If you are anything like me, you understand you can succeed with basic SEO, great content and a bunch of links, but we still can’t help but add layers of complexity that need built and maintained, drawing us away from doing basic SEO, great content and building links. I have only gotten a little better at this. If at all possible, now I use wordpress for a new site, and I’m looking to convert some old things to wordpress. If I can do it other wise with html and php includes, then that is solid too. I really don’t need to be spending time fussing with different scripts and updating them, if at all possible. I try to do some fairly repetitive things as I listen to talk radio and news in the morning. Things like directory submissions, organizing resizing and naming graphics, check my stats etc. Then there is usually a more taxing project of the day, working on ads, upgrading things, the usual site development and SEO stuff. This is the danger zone for me! I will have an idea for another gadget or a new domain and poof! I’m gone for a couple days! So I try to reign it back in later in the afternoon, (I even have an alarm that goes off at 3) and get back to the fun creative work of writing articles and product descriptions.
Hello, my name is Lee and I’m a PHP gadget script addict
But a couple days ago, I fell off the “Keep it Simple Stupid” wagon. (Maybe if I just called it a KISS wagon I would be more tempted to stay there) I got it in my head that having an onsite search engine would be a great thing for one of my tacky “virtual mall” sites. Sounds simple. Find a free script, set it up, include the forms in your pages and you have searching the way you want it! I can add a blog about products and pop in a link to search results that show stuff from all my different advertisers. (notice the snowball effect of yet another project) I won’t retell the story details, but I ended up spending days reading related topics and trying different things to get my crawler to behave. Forcing myself to read the most God awful tutorials in hopes of finding solutions, learning all I can in one area before becoming convinced that way won’t work then jumping to another strange subject. Learn, learn, learn…experiment. failure. Learn, learn, learn…experiment. failure. Learn, learn, learn…experiment. failure. Learn, learn, learn…experiment. failure.
You reach a sort of obsession with solving the problem, putting effort into it far beyond what it is worth. I mean I could have slapped a Google search unit on there, or said “good enough” with the spider crawling almost the way I wanted. But it always feels like “I’ve almost got it figured out” or “I just need to learn how to do this…”
Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
Don’t Lose Sight of the Important Stuff
It might be fortunate for me my ISP started flaking out on me this week and yesterday I started losing my connection for a few minutes here and there. During one of those outages I noticed my left foot was swollen. Whoah! One too many days stuck to this chair! I bolted out of the house mid day and was hiking around well into evening. Toying with new scripts not only pulls me away from and endangers my bread and butter activities (content and links); but it’s also a literal danger to my health!
But I live and learn. Like most guys I have trouble resisting new gadgets. I travelled playing music solo in lounges for many years. I kept adding lighting controllers, synthesizers, guitars, keyboards, digital effects, mixers and amps. It took me 4 hours to set up my stage, but at least I was getting exercise from that! If I were to perform now, I want to be able to walk in, hookup, and jam. With websites I’m “performing” on multiple stages. Maybe I can get by with less equipment.
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