Flogging A Dead Horse Or Building Mountains Of Grain?

So far this month, I’ve been busily adding content to websites, but with limited success in terms of immediate returns. Some sites I religiously update daily and at the moment the returns would suggest I was flogging a dead horse or three.

I keep telling myself that content is king, you’re building for the future, 80% of sales will come through in the last quarter of the year, blah, blah, blah, but sometimes it isn’t easy being creative with content when you are seeing no immediate returns. Especially when sites you spend no time on whatsoever are making money!

For example, I’ve got a one page website that promotes just the one product.  Nice domain name with type in traffic, but I don’t think I’ve worked on it at all this year.  It has a couple of banners supporting about 100 words of text and a logo.  That’s about it.  Took me about an hour to make towards the end of last year and this month it’s my best earning site, having brought in £240 since the 1st of May.  If I could only find another ten of them . . .

It’s all too easy to throw in the towel when you don’t see the returns you want – and I think that’s why a lot of businesses fail.  People bail out far too early.  I keep plugging away, day after day on my websites because I believe in a year, two years, five years time, the rewards will be well worth my investment of time now.

You’ve no doubt heard the story of the grains of wheat and the chessboard.  If you were to place wheat on each of the board’s 64 squares so that one grain was placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third and so on, doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square, how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard when you had finished? The answer is an almost unbelievable 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of wheat!

Building websites page by page is a bit like adding grains of wheat to a chessboard.  Initially you only see small returns, only a few grains on the board, and it’s almost impossible to believe that it will amount to anything worthwhile.  If you give up after even a dozen squares, you would have barely a mouthful of grain to show for your efforts.  But if you persevere, and then persevere again and again, the rewards from developing websites can be just as mind-boggling as those 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of wheat.

If neither traffic or income increases with time, then chances are you are flogging a dead horse, but if either or both are increasing, keep on going.

I’m seeing traffic and income increasing across all the sites I work on.  Not as quickly as I might like, but if both are heading in the right direction when the economy is on its knees, things will really start to flourish once the recovery comes. And come it will once the credit cycle turns.

Another thing I’ve been doing this month is dip my toes into the murky waters of datafeeds.  Usually I’m wise enough to leave all this techie stuff alone, but I liked the look of a web application I came across called Datafeed Studio and at only £79.00 to use it on an unlimited number of sites it would have been unwise not to at least give it a spin.

Basically it allows you to integrate datafeeds into an existing website or will indeed function as a standalone website too. Not only does it allow you to build online stores filled with products found in merchant’s datafeeds, but you can also create price comparison websites too and even product price comparison pages.  In fact for less than £100 it could revolutionise a number of my sites and help build my grain mountain which is pretty incredible really.

As with all things, there is a learning curve, and the more time you spend getting to understand Datafeed Studio and how it works, the better results you will be able to produce.  Support is first class too – a real bonus, particularly when you are the start of the learning process.

If you want to see it in a very basic state, check out Genuine Spare Parts which took me less than a day from start to finish.  I’ve no plans to really develop the site – I’m looking to sell the domain name – but just wanted to see how easy it would be to use without letting it loose on one of my established sites.  I am now integrating it with a site that I started earlier this year and will let you know how things go with it.

I wish you well with your own mountains of grain.