Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Distractions
Man, it's getting hard to stay focused. My mailbox has gotten clogged lately with suggestions from one person or another that I do business with urging me to check out this new free training video or that new forum. I've also come across some new tools that look like they might be a good fit for the type of people who visit my site.

But the reality is that I can't afford the time to test all these great things out. Job #1 for me right now is to grow traffic. I've spent a lot of time building up useful content for people at the neglect of promoting the site. And I'm gratified to see a lot of key indicators growing: traffic keeps growing, average time on site per visit is way up, people bookmarking the site or signing up for the newsletter are growing.

But I'm to the point where I need to focus on reaching out to others and letting them know what's available for them instead of continually building more content and leaving the search engines to do all the promoting for me.

Search engine traffic is only one tool in the promotional toolbox. And its time to start using more of them. It can be easy and comfortable to sit back and hope that people will stumble upon you, but that's not what business is all about. It's about getting out there and building relationships. It's the scary part of business, the part that we'd all too often avoid.

But without that effort to put yourself in front of the people who could benefit from what you have to offer, all you have is a vanity site.

So the great new tools will have to wait for a while. There's a whole lot of gettin' out there to do.
Jeff