Author: brianjohnson

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It’s Arrogance and Ignorance to be Too Idealistic About Yourself

I’ve only just started to realize as I get older how much of self-idealism is really just arrogance and ignorance.

When you’re young you think you’re always going to have perfect self-discipline in all areas and that where all other falter, you will succeed. And that was me for most of my life. And probably to a large extent still is.

But over time you see that you keep failing in the same ways. That you can’t just overcome all of your own natural instincts and desires and accomplish whatever you want whenever you want.

And finally you realize that you were just arrogant and ignorant. Arrogant because you thought you would succeed where everyone else repeatedly fails. Ignorant because you hadn’t learned the full extent to which we are all animals who, in many ways, are still just slaves to our biology.

You only have so much willpower. You can only push yourself so far. You will sometimes give in to temptations. You will fail yourself in countless ways that you haven’t even imagined yet.

To think anything else, and especially to plan for anything else, is to be like an arrogant and ignorant child.

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Plan the Work for your Future Self to Do

It’s simple enough, and it seems like you’re sort of tricking yourself… But it works!

I’ve realized that it’s much easier to plan your work and actions — and, by extension, actually do it — if you know you don’t have to do the work right away.

I think the reason for this is that, let’s say you know you have some large task you’re going to do. If you decide to come up with a quick plan to get it done, and then immediately do the work, it seems like a huge investment of effort. And I think that’s because you’re essentially committing a project that is unknown (because you haven’t planned it yet), and you kind of just assume that it’s going to end up being the worst-case scenario.

Whereas it’s super easy to just commit to planning. Especially for something where the planning isn’t going to be that complicated.

You just set aside a few minutes, write it down, and you’re done! There might be some tricky decisions in there but it doesn’t take much time, so you can commit to it easily.

And then when it comes time to actually do the work, you already have your plan and you know exactly what it’s going to consist of. It’s much easier to get started and just go and finish it.

So I think going forward, it’s important for me to create plans for most tasks ahead of time. If I plan it, and I have a set of steps to complete, I know that I’m going to do it.

And it’s almost always okay if it doesn’t happen the same day.

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Work With the Right People

So I had an experience this week with a new contractor. I had a project that was running behind schedule, because my go-to contractor was not available to put forth any hours.

Long story short: the new contractor did an amazing job. The quality of work was pretty good, but the best part was she built this entire site in like 8 hours of billable work. Including designing it.

Sure, she’s more expensive than most I’ve worked with by a long-shot. But that’s just the hourly rate.

I would have expected this to take something like 20 hours for another contractor. But instead it was only 8. So not only will I pay her less overall than others, it also came through much, much more quickly.

It makes me realize that I’ve only experienced a handful of people to work with me. And having two of them resign in a short time frame put a bad taste in my mouth.

That was one of the biggest reasons I sort of didn’t want to build websites anymore!

But with a contractor like the one I’m now working with… The sky is the limit! She could literally be putting in only 20 hours per week for me and we could be pumping out 6-8 websites every month.

So now I’m quite interested in actually taking on more of these projects. I think we could bust through them super quickly and it would be mostly profit. And she would be happy because she’s making good money.

Moral of the story: maybe I need to put more thought into what type of work we want to keep doing, and I shouldn’t write-off these types of projects. There are always great contractors and employees out there, you just have to find them!

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Past the Hump for a New Habit

So I said I would update things here for new habits that I’m working on forming. So I am!

The habit I’m working on now is waking up without using the snooze button. The old habit was some 20 years in the making and is quite difficult to break.

But as discussed in the past, snooze sleep is terrible sleep, and I absolutely need to stop doing it.

For for the past maybe 3 weeks, I’ve been working on never hitting the snooze button. And so far I’ve kept to it! While I have physically hit the snooze button, I have not gone back to sleep a single time after my alarm has gone off.

It’s been hard. In particular, I think was hardest up until a few days ago. I’ve heard that new habits are harder and harder to keep up with right up until a certain point, and then they start getting easier. I’m happy to say I think I’m at that point!

I’ve been getting up way earlier, and it hasn’t been as much of a burden. Previously I’d have so much willpower depleted that I’d just sit on my phone, sometimes for literal hours. Obviously that’s not much better than sleeping through the snooze, but I was still building the habit.

Now I’ve gotten down to where I wake up easily and don’t even spend that much time on my phone. Work has been way more productive, which is amazing. I’ve had so much more time!

And this morning, mere moments before my alarm went off, I was half-awake, and I thought to myself, “I actually think I might be rested enough, I could probably wake up!” and I got up.

And weirdly, I don’t know that the sleep has even been incredible. I’ve been a little restless. But I’m not tired during the day. I’m thinking that maybe I actually don’t need nearly as much sleep anymore if I just don’t use the snooze. Maybe the reason I feel like I only am rested after like 10 hours, is because the snoozing has messed up my sleep cycle so much.

So I’m excited to see how this plays out. I’m hoping that within a month, it will start to be effortless, and I really won’t need to ever snooze again!

And once that habit is established, I can move on to another.

I’ll keep posting updates here.

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Initial Results of Internal Ad

Results are in! I’ve had the new ad running for something like 6 days and I can see how it performed.

So how did it do?

It did… Okay. For a 4-day period Monday-Thursday, we got about 20 unique hits to the page, vs. a historical average of about 8 during a similar time period.

So that’s 12 unique visitors. Not bad, not great. That was out of 3,466 visitors. Conversion is certainly bad, but these are people who came here for very specific problems.

Theoretically, all 12 of those people are actually interested in improving their hosting. The current ad copy reads:

Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress website? Click here to learn how to fix it.

It’s in bold but just regular font.

So we know they have a WordPress site, and we know they want to make it faster. That’s fairly targeted, and a great start.

Obviously I didn’t get any new business, but I’m not sure how optimized my “WordPress Hosting” page really is.

So what’s the plan now?

I want to run a handful more tests and see if we can maximize traffic to that page. See how we can tweak the copy and ad to get more people through the door.

Once I feel confident we can’t do a whole lot better, then it’s time to revise that page (or build a new one?) to gear it towards conversion. We’ll need testimonials, maybe a nice-looking video (I can put that together by recruiting BNI people to be in it), and an enticing offer. But that’s later!

For now, I want to brainstorm some ideas for what I can try in this ad. So here are ideas:

  1. Instead of just linking them, ask them to enter in an email address to receive the secret to a faster WordPress site.
  2. Ask them to enter in their site and email, and we’ll check why their site is slow for free.
  3. Include an offer right there. “Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress site? Click here for 3 free months of lightning-fast WordPress hosting.”
  4. Wish your WordPress site loaded as fast as this one? Click here to learn how to make it happen.
  5. $25/month is all it takes to make your WordPress site this fast. Click here to find out how.
  6. Many WordPress sites can load twice as fast overnight. Enter your URL and email to see if yours is one of them.
  7. Include an image with one of these popular variations to see if it helps.

That’s all I have for now! I think all are worth testing out, so I think that’s what I’ll be doing the next couple months. It will be fun to compare results.

I think I’ll start with #1 and see how that goes. Stay tuned for results!

 

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Closing Eyes Probably Accelerates Brain Recovery

It’s actually kind of hard to name this post without the reader’s initial thought simply being: “Duh…”

My initial title was, “Resting is More Effective with Eyes Closed”. Which… Yeah. Of course.

But my actual thought is that if you’re going to have any downtime with the aim of restoring attentiveness, willpower, etc., then you should close your eyes and try not to think about anything complicated.

Here’s why. As mentioned in recent posts, when you exercise willpower or do anything cognitively demanding, you tend to exhaust your mental resources. Blood sugar drops, though I think that may be a symptom rather than the cause. And then you don’t have any more willpower and give in to temptation more.

The brain takes a ton of power just to operate. In particular, the visual part of the brain is massive, and takes more than its fair share. And it makes sense! Think about a computer. Graphics cards are known power hogs, and even they are not nearly as complicated as our visual cortex, which needs to make sense of everything it sees.

The higher logic parts of our brain are also pretty power-intensive.

So if you wanted to rest your brain, what should you do? Close your eyes to turn off all visual processing, and either focus on nothing (like when meditating), or just think of simple things like memories. Things that aren’t very visual and don’t require intense thought or concentration.

So to go along with my post about how phone use it probably preventing actual restorative downtime, I think one of the reasons this might be the case is because it’s usually all visual. You have text and info flying by, you’re reading, there are photos and video, and just in general your brain is in high usage.

How are you supposed to recover with that? It would be like jogging after a marathon in order to let your legs recover. it doesn’t make any sense.

You have to totally unplug, close your eyes, and try not to use your brain much. I suspect that even if you aren’t sleeping, the brain will recover much more quickly that way.

Try it out!

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Need to Focus Blogging on Reaching Potential Clients

I really need to start focus on blogging about topics that will attract good potential clients for my business, particularly for website hosting.

Sure, it feels good to “give back” by writing about all of the solutions I’ve come up with for difficult problems. And I’ve been rewarded with lots of backlinks and a fair amount of traffic to my site.

But that doesn’t pay the bills. If I want to grow my business, I really need to get more targeted search engine traffic.

I’m already being found for a lot of my niche keywords like “minnesota wordpress hosting” (in which I’m the first two organic results), but as I’m discovering, nobody really searches for terms like that. I don’t think they search locally for hosting at all. You know, because it doesn’t really matter where it’s located.

But what I’m good at is blogging about particular problems well, and getting a bunch of traffic for those problems. My posts about what to do if your WordPress site goes offline have been very successful at driving tons of traffic. And that traffic maybe isn’t terrible in terms of targeting, but it doesn’t convert well.

I need to really focus on things that will get my exact target client.

One opportunity is to revise and update some good performers that are already targeted. For example, my post diagnosing and explaining why your WordPress site is slow is a great example of an opportunity.

It’s already getting some good traffic, and there are money opportunities. Keywords like “Godaddy hosting wordpress slow” are extremely popular, and I have yet to capitalize on that. I could talk about each cheap host and have a little section in there. Instant traffic!

I can use SEMrush to find other similar opportunities as well.

And of course, I need some sort of great CTA in there so that I actually convert the traffic there into paying visitors, as mentioned in previous posts.

I think a great thing to do is focus on the problems and symptoms had by people using cheap hosts. Think about their pain points and what they might search, and cater to those. Think keywords like:

  • Why is wordpress (cheap host) slow?
  • host where I don’t have to sit on the phone
  • better wordpress hosting support
  • pages take forever to load
  • plugins running out of memory
  • 100% cpu wordpress

Those are just some ideas. I think SEMrush will actually be invaluable for really narrowing this down. But I can write smaller, targeted articles that really hone in on some of these and then link them to my main pages, thus improving their rankings.

In conclusion, it’s great that I’m getting traffic and that I’ve got some nice blog posts that are truly helpful to people. But now it’s time to get the right people through the door and sell to them.

 

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Resting Instead of Phone Use

I have a bit of a theory. What if our constant viewing of entertainment was actually robbing us of all our willpower?

In reading ‘The ONE Thing’ again, I’ve been thinking about the chapter on willpower. He basically calls it a finite resource that needs to be managed.

Studies have shown that taking a break and having a snack or meal or resting tends to restore blood sugar and also seems to increase levels of willpower.

But what do I (and everyone?) tend to do when I don’t feel like doing anything? Sit on my phone immediately, and find some entertainment. No, we’re not using up any willpower to do that, but what if we’re preventing it from replenishing and starting an endless loop?

I think I need to try literally just taking 20 minute breaks where I maybe have a quick snack and lay down to rest my eyes for a bit. Often times my phone binges last way longer than that anyway, and if I had new willpower, I could get back to doing whatever needed to be done!

For the moment, I think it’s at least worth a shot. So I plan on doing that, and reporting back results.

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Choosing the Top Ways to Get More Hosting Clients

Last week I brainstormed a list of things I could do to get more hosting clients. Now that the brainstorming is done, I want to try and actually things down and pick the top options.

I feel like it’s key to balance the difficulty of implementing something vs. the potential it has. For me, I think it’s somewhat inextricably linked. For example, it’s possible (and likely) that cracking how to optimize Google Adwords would by one of the most scalable and effective options available to me.

But it would take an extremely long amount of time and I may not even have the resources to ever succeed at that. So it won’t rank highly.

So something that won’t be that hard to implement and is likely to start working quickly is something I’m going to put at the top of my list.

Last week I came up with a list of 12 ideas. now I’m going to rank them in order of best to worst. The top ideas are the ones I’m going to work on implementing.

  1. Developing some code that inserts some kind of hosting-related ad directly into all of my blog posts, for instance right after the first h4 element
  2. The same thing but manually adding CTAs on all of my popular blog posts
  3. Increase conversion by making compelling offers on the site – free month of hosting or something like that.
  4. Start trying out Facebook and LinkedIn ads
  5. Carrying through with the plan I had to offer services just to them and have it all be automated
  6. Post hosting articles on Facebook or LinkedIn
  7. Visiting other BNI groups and promoting hosting, especially with great CTAs or offers
  8. Buying more businesses
  9. Generally promoting services to IT companies
  10. Try some Google ads for highly targeted things and see if I can get clients that way
  11. Going to other types of networking events, such as chambers
  12. Reaching out manually to IT companies

Well, this feels pretty conclusive! The first one was an idea I’ve had for a while, and I feel like it won’t be hard to implement and will potentially be quite effective.

Since I get about 4000 visits to the site each week, I’m genuinely hoping to get something like 0.025% conversion, which would be one single client.

That could be optimistic, though, since they aren’t on my site to look for better hosting. The rates might be more similar to random impressions on other sites.

I’m going to need a really compelling offer, and I think I need it to not look like an ad. It should stand out against everything else.

Optionally, if it doesn’t work, I could try a different CTA, such as having some sort of free site speed analysis or something, and then we could market to them directly.

I just really need to make the website start working for me, and I need to actually convert some of this abundant traffic that I have.

So let’s get moving! This should really be my “One Thing” for the week. Make it happen.

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Need to be Laser Focused on Business-Improving Activities

I started reading the book “The ONE Thing” again (which is something I really need to do every single year), and it really has me thinking. I’m currently spending little to no time on activities that improve my business, and all of my time on things that simply operate the business.

The book goes into detail about how most people are simply putting out fires and just going through the motions, when really they should be focusing all of their time on the select few activities which make everything better.

I need to spend a lot of time thinking about what those activities are. To start, analyzing what I’ve done that has worked would be good. Then brainstorming how to improve.

I’m not sure exactly what I need to be doing yet, but I know that right now I’m spending very little time on the most important things. I’m spending a lot of time simply operating the business and it feels a little bit like I’m going through the motions.

I should be done doing any work on my house soon, and when that happens, I’ll have a lot more time to commit to these types of things.

Although even that is a bit of a cop-out. I should be doing them now. I need to be constantly improving and always focused on the most important items. Otherwise I’m never going to improve.

So right now, the most important thing for me is to start constantly thinking about what the most important thing is.

That’s a start.