Be Decisive, Not Rash

One of the most important qualities that leads to success in business, is a decisive attitude. If you’re working for yourself in any capacity, then each day, including weekends and sometimes late at night, you may be “pinged” for a quick answer to a critical question. If a customer is standing by in an unhappy state of mind, every second of non-satisfaction re-shapes your company’s identity in that person’s mind.

However, there is a such thing as being too decisive for business. Let’s lay out an example.

Saying no to an important possibility might save you time now. That’s a business development decision, not a quick call. Imagine making a quick call against expanding your services in a way that’s just become available. Let’s say enacting the change would take a lot of work similar to when you first started your business. Enacting the new idea would require outside help or a costly amount of time, so you opt to focus on existing business and ignore the new option for now.

This could become a fatal error. Sometimes, every provider in a given marketplace sees a no-brainer upgrade to their operations, and enacts a change in unison. If that change means a lot of work, you’ll be completely behind the curve while you scramble to both retain customers, and enact the feature.

MySpace comes to mind in this example. Facebook took advantage of new technologies in ways that were obvious to programmers long before they became available. MySpace sat and waited. Users loved the new Facebook. MySpace started looking “dated” in a matter of weeks. Long afterward, MySpace more-or-less caught up. I bet they wished they’d acted sooner.

A quicker example. What if you web site goes down in the middle of the evening and the techies can’t get it back up? After hours of anxious back-and-forth, do you buy hosting elsewhere and hurriedly install the site? This is an obvious reaction for many people, but what if your web host could provision space on another server as a temporary fix? Making a quick call in favor of the obvious solution could mean unnecessary costs and delays – it takes two days to fully transfer a website, whereas a change with the same host can take minutes. Spending a little more time in the idea phase to a critical problem can shave days off getting to the solution.

Network, Network, Network – part 2, YouTube

Consider this our third most critical tip, at least when it comes to the chronological order in which you’ll act on our advice.

You’ve started dictating your articles and transcribing them, and that work-flow has become a no-brainer. You’re cranking out content constantly. You’re introducing yourself to YouTube, with the occasional video being uploaded here and there, as you get used to the tools. All in all, you have a strong introductory presence, and your work-flow behind building that presence is a lightweight new habit.

I`ts time to Network . This is part two – if you haven’t seen part one yet, click here. Otherwise, straight on where we left off:

Next, do the same on Youtube . The community here is a bit more tricky. More work goes into each video, than goes into each blog post. Yet, the Youtube audience is usually far less thankful. Because of this, author-viewer interactions are different, and it’s not easy to be noticed as a fan who wants to be seen as a peer. In fact, you can basically forget about getting noticed by any significant YouTube authors until you’re producing videos they’d want to watch.

Still, the process is gradual, and it’s time to start building good will within your desired network . Compliment and critique the video makers who will be your peers once you are producing videos regularly. Say thought-provoking things to them, post video responses to their videos, and you will be surprised how accessible this talented and somewhat elite audience can be.

Now, why are we advising you to promote and worship what essentially boils down to your competition? Because it’s not competition, it’s your peers in a community. The people who consume this media, both in text and video, run out of stuff to watch. Meanwhile, the people who make both text and video media, want peers to occupy the same mental spaces as they do. By networking this way, you’re promoting your own work the best way you can – by gaining the attention and respect of the people who already serve the same audience.

Network, Network, Network – part 1, Blogs

Consider this our third most critical tip, at least when it comes to the chronological order in which you’ll act on our advice.

You’ve started dictating your articles and transcribing them, and that work-flow has become a no-brainer. You’re cranking out content constantly. You’re introducing yourself to YouTube, with the occasional video being uploaded here and there, as you get used to the tools. All in all, you have a strong introductory presence, and your work-flow behind building that presence is a lightweight new habit.

It’s time to Network .

Like so many things, the internet makes this incredibly simple. Start with blogs, and then expand to YouTube. Go to Google Blog Search – you get there by clicking the “More” link at the top of the Google Search page. In that list, you’ll see “Blogs.” Click that and you’ll be able to search the web in a new way – socially.

Start searching for your topics. Start browsing blogs. Do this in a fairly high-speed fashion, keeping sites open that you like, ignoring sites you don’t. It’s better to ignore an important site in the short term, than it is to make a negative statement on that same important site. As a new blog networker, you may not know the difference, so just go with the law of attraction.

As you start reading these blogs, you can start commenting right away, but keep it simple. Don’t immediately mention your site – that is terrible etiquette. On sites that offer a link to your site with every comment you post, you might even consider withholding your address the first couple times you comment. This adds weight to your participation in the conversation, because you’re explicitly -not- marketing.

Bookmark as many blogs as you can keep up with. I recommend between 15 and 50 to start out with. You don’t have to read every post by any means – but you do want to stop by all these sites and leave a comment at least once a week. Use the same name, avatar, and style . Take part in the conversations. Subscribe to follow-up comments on some posts and genuinely follow-up.

Very quickly you will be recognized and welcomed, and by then, it’s good to put a link to your site in that home page field that almost every blog offers its comment posters. As this conversation evolves, you will strike up positive contact with some of the writers. You really don’t even have to ask about linking – you link to them as a sign of respect, and they very often will link back.

This is a two-part article. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the same effort on YouTube, which is slightly different. We’ll also wrap up with the “why” behind this method – it might seem counter-intuitive, but in fact, it’s the best way forward.