To begin with I should say that I believe all of God’s creatures have value and place on the Earth.

I Don’t Like Flies

The notable exception to this would be flies (and possibly mosquitoes). I rather strongly dislike flies. Whether it be at a picnic in the park, or at a family barbecue, or (like today) they are buzzing around my head while I am trying to work, they really irritate me.

Today as I was working on my laptop there appeared out of no where three obnoxious flies buzzing around the room, occasionally landing on the table and on my arms. Someone must have left a door open and a gang of three flies had trespassed into my house.

I Was Distracted

When I turned on some music on my laptop the flies were attracted to this and began landing on my laptop. There’s nothing more distracting than having a fly walk on your computer screen as your are typing.

Frustrated by this I went in search of the fly swatter. I looked in all the usual places: the hall closet, the coat closet, and under the kitchen sink. But it was no where to be found.

So I decided to try to ignore the buggers. I had a lot to get done and didn’t want to spend the 20 minutes to go buy a fly swatter at the nearby Walgreen’s. That turned out to be a mistake.

For nearly 2 hours I was distracted by the little buggers. They continued to harass me while I spent my working time trying to find new substitutes for a fly swatter. None of the things I tried worked mostly due to my lack of hand-and-eye coordination.

And guess how much work I got done. Very little.

I Finally Took Action

I finally got fed up and took the 20 minutes to go buy a fly swatter. That was the best decision I made all day.

The new fly swatter and I came home with a vengeance.

Walking in the door I announced to the flies that I was back and I had a new friend. With a smile I asked the flies if they had any last requests. They declined to respond and then the slaughter commenced, complete with karate like “hi yah” sounds.

The cost of purchasing the new fly swatter was a measly $0.95 plus 20 minutes of my time which isn’t much considering I wasted two hours trying to kill or trap the flies. (I should mention I was successful in trapping one of the three in the upstairs bathroom which left two to tag-team against me.)

Now if I had been smart I would have realized that this problem wasn’t going to disappear or go away and that trying to ignore it wouldn’t do anything except significantly decrease my productivity. I should have stopped my work and addressed the distraction immediately.

Everyday we encounter numerous distractions that seriously hurt our productivity.

In my field of software development distractions cost companies huge sums of money. And the worst part is that companies usually have no way to account for the cost!

We Face Many Distractions

The range of distractions we face is broad:

• Sleep deprivation seems to be a big one for a lot of people. Speaking from personal experience, 6 hours of work from me when I am well rested is worth much more than 8 or 10 hours of work when I am tired. If you are tired consider taking a short nap. It’s time well invested.
• Co-worker chatter is another distraction. What a difference headphones with noise cancellation make! It’s also helpful to ask people to take cell phone calls outside the office.
• Having a chair that hurts your back or that just isn’t comfortable kills your focus and can adversely effect how well you sleep at night. The fight to get better office chairs is long and hard but it’s worth the battle.
• Sometimes there will be a personal issue that is stealing your focus. Maybe it’s an important call you have been putting off or an apology that needs to be made. Whatever it is, take care of it so you can be productive.

Everyday we are bombarded with distractions and most of them can be prevented. So don’t try to just ignore them. Instead take action and take care of business, even if it means going to the store to buy a new fly swatter.

[Photo by John Althouse Cohen]

Are you doing what you love?

Do you have trouble getting distracted?

For a long time I wanted to make videos that showed people different traffic generation techniques but I was too terrified to take action and do it. I was afraid that my voice wouldn’t sound right or that I wouldn’t know what to say.

In the video below, Seth Godin talks about the part of our brain (he calls it the lizard brain) that causes us to be fearful of doing something new. When you are afraid of doing something because of what others may think or say, it’s the lizard brain talking.

What have you been afraid to do?

I have several traffic e-books and guides that are in various stages of development but are not complete. Watching this video helped me understand that if I want to be successful and “ship” then I need to overcome (or at least ignore) the lizard brain.

What things have you been putting off because of fear?

Building a business and getting traffic takes a lot of time, effort, and patience. Do you have enough of each of these?

Are you frequently distracted from what you should be being working on? Darren talks about how to get over distractions.

It seems like a lot of people these days are saying the competition is bad in that it brings out the worst in people.

In this short video Gary Vaynerchuk weighs in on the debate.

One of the most important lessons I have learned in life is “Don’t re-invent the wheel.”

The idea is simple: Don’t work really hard figuring something out when you could look at someone else who is really successful at this thing and do what they do.

If you want to play basketball like Michael Jordan then look Michael Jordan and figure out what he has done to be so successful. What does he eat & drink? How much sleep does he get? How do does he workout and how often?

If you want to lose 50 pounds and keep it off, then go find someone who has lost 50 pounds and kept it off and figure out how they did it.  What did they eat or not eat?  And how much?  What about exercise?  How long did it take?

Sounds simple enough, right?  Let’s apply this to getting traffic.

Traffic from Google AdWords

If you want to write killer ad copy for your Google AdWords ads on Poodle Manicures then go search for Poodle Manicures on Google and see which ads come up top.

A large component of an ad’s placement is how often it is clicked on; more clicks means higher ad placement.

Search for Poodle Manicures everyday for a week. There will be be some changes in placement and yet it won’t take long to notice that some ads will keep showing up somewhere near the top.

Most likely these ads are getting lots of clicks. Pay close attention to what these ads do or don’t do in their ad copy.

YouTube Traffic

If you want to get traffic from YouTube then go to YouTube and search for videos in your niche. Be sure to sort by views so that the ones with the most views show up at the top.

Take a look at the videos with lots of views and carefully examine what they are doing. Watch some of their videos and look at how they direct traffic to their site.

Twitter traffic

If you want to get traffic from twitter then find examples of people that are doing this already. Typically these people how lots of followers and so it’s not hard to discover who these people are.

Follow a few these people and ask yourself a few questions:

• How often they tweet?
• What times of the day do they tweet?
• How often do they get their stuff retweeted?
• How often do they place ads in their tweets?
• How often do they interact with people on Twitter?

Ranking high in Google

If you want to have a top ten rank on Google for the search term Poodle Manicures then search Google for Poodle Manicures and take a close look at the sites that come up in the top ten. These are your competition.

It doesn’t matter that 5 gazillion other sites also come up for that search phrase. These other sites are examples of what not to do, examples of how not to get to the top, examples of failure. Don’t waste your time on them.

What matters are the ones that made it to top ten. They are your case studies.

Ask yourself:

• How many pages do they have?
• How often do they update their content?
• How many incoming links do they have?
• How long do they have their domain registered for?
• How much do they interact with their visitors?
• Do they have an email list?
• How do they use Twitter, Facebook, etc to get traffic?

Figure out exactly what they do and do the same!

Hopefully you get the idea here.

It’s so simple and yet so often overlooked and under utilized.

The gurus of marketing out there will give you all sorts of advice.

Just never forget your (successful) competition and what you can learn from them.

Today’s Quote

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
- Sun-tzu: Chinese general & military strategist (~400 BC)

I would change one word in the quote so it reads:
Keep your friends close, and your competition closer.

But shouldn’t we ignore the competition?

I had previously written a post advising people to ignore their competition. I still believe this is good advice except when you’re first starting out.

Let’s say you want to build a website all about poodle manicures and get lots of traffic to it but you have no idea where to start.  In this case it would be good to spend time analyzing your competition to see how they are doing things to get traffic.

Once you have a recipe for getting traffic then you can ignore your competition and focus your time, energy, and focus on building your own site.

There is a power in having a mastermind group.

Listen to what Eben Pagan says about building your own mastermind group.

Having a group of like minded individuals can greatly enhance your success with your business.  I know I am trying to build a group of friends online that can help each other out.

Here’s the video