Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Are You Doing Too Much or Too Little to Succeed?
Ask one hundred business owners whether they think they're doing too much to make their online businesss succeed or too little. You'll probably get a nearly unanimous answer that they must be doing too little.

The reality of why your business isn't living up to expectations, though, might surprise you.

It's not a matter of doing too little. Nor is it a matter of doing too much. The answer is that you're likely doing both!

Now, how can you be doing both too much and too little at the same time? The reason this puzzles us is because we usually look at all work activities the same way and don't judge them on what they accomplish.

Let's say your day went something like this:

You spend an hour checking email. After filtering out the spam, you find most of them either want to sell you something or want you to do something for them. Not a single one puts a dollar in your pocket, but they take an hour to get through.

Among the non-spam emails you read, there are three that tout new, can't-miss marketing products. You read the sales letter for each one (another half-hour) and find one that really grabs you. The product will force you to learn an entirely new marketing technique that you have no experience with.

The sales letter sounds so compelling, though. Why not learn it now? You buy the product, download it, look it over for a half hour or so. It's everything you hoped it would be!

But you've been putting off creating that new set of pages for your website for weeks. You promised yourself you'd do something about it today.

So you set the can't-miss product aside and make a mental note to get back to it as soon as you can. You prepare to create those long-delayed pages.

But just as you're about to start, you figure you'd better check your email before you dig in. Among the new emails is a newsletter you subscribe to. You find some great tips in it on Google AdWords. It reminds you that you haven't checked your AdWords ads for a couple of weeks.

You log in to Google and browse your ads for a half hour. You hadn't realized how poorly they were doing.

You spot a couple of places where the tips you just read could improve them. You consider changing them, but decide it's better to make the changes when you really have the time to do it right instead of doing a quick patch job.

You really need to get those pages up. So you go back to that. But you suddenly remember that...

Sound familiar? If your day at all resembles this one, are you doing too much or too little? Now do you see that the problem is that you're doing both too much and too little?

The day I described is filled with activity. There's no lack of things to do.

But it's a day that is also guilty of doing too little—too little that actually puts money in your pocket.

It's a day spent jumping from one half-completed project to another, interrupted only by starting a few more.

Is it any wonder that a business run this way gets nowhere?

So what's the solution to this management style? Do more by doing less. But I'll get into that next time.
Jeff