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Knowledge, Experience, and Insight – Turning Mazes into Staircases

In reviewing my old blog posts, I came across this “classic”. And I had some new insights.

In it, I argue that most real-life goals can’t be attained in the same way as climbing a simple set of stairs to get to the top. Instead, there are countless maze-like paths to choose from. Some will get you there eventually, some won’t. Some might even have tons of extra obstacles you’ll need to overcome.

I still agree with that, but I missed out on discussing something that I think is really important to note: with increased knowledge, experience, and insight, you can effectively gain an overview of those “maze” paths and make things much easier.

I know I’m going to risk taking this analogy too far, but I think that with enough knowledge, experience, and insight (I’m just going to say KEI from now on), you can really simplify everything.

Imagine that the maze leading to your goal has multiple entrances and countless paths running through it. Only one leads to your goal.

Without any KEI, you’re just guessing where to go. You power through, you try everything, and there’s no way to know which one will get you to the end. The only way to the top is to just try everything and figure it out.

But with enough KEI, you might get an overhead-view of the maze. You can see which paths go where, and eventually trace through which one leads to the top. Imagine how much easier it would be to get there!

Sure, you’ll still have to put in the work of actually taking that path, but you’ll be armed with the confidence of knowing you’re on the right one, which will allow you to power through it and waste minimal time on other paths.

I think that we intuitively know this is all true. When thrown into a totally new situation, things are often overwhelming. If you are lucky enough to even know what your goal is, there’s a good chance you have no idea how to get there. You have some things you can try, but you don’t know which will work.

But after many attempts, you start learning. Through experience, you learn things that don’t work and eliminate those as possibilities. You start to develop a sense of how things will work out before even trying them.

You might even read books and research methods and concepts, which will increase the knowledge you have on the topic. This also will guide your decision making.

And through both of those things, you gain insight into difficult problems. That all helps you figure out the best way forward.

After time has passed, you end up gaining confidence and an understanding of how things work, and suddenly achieving those goals doesn’t seem as daunting.

Within my own career, it is very much true. When I first started and clients would report problems with their websites, I would often have no idea what was wrong. All I could do was try things and hope they worked. If they didn’t, I’d keep trying and researching util I found something that did.

Over time, through making mistakes, researching, and reading, I gained KEI. And now, it’s very rare that a client will bring me a problem I can’t solve quickly. And if I don’t know the solution right away, I’m always confident that I can do some research and figure it out.

So what do I do with this knowledge?

I think it’s important to maximize KEI as quickly as possible. Here are some ideas for doing that:

  1. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Experience comes from both successes and failures, so both can be beneficial to maximizing that experience.
  2. Gaining as much knowledge as you can from external sources is critical. Reading and learning are so important.
  3. Above all, action is key. If you aren’t applying your knowledge, then you aren’t getting experience and it is essentially wasted. Sometimes it’s better to act instead of seeking more knowledge, and it’s almost always better to act instead of becoming paralyzed when you aren’t confident enough to make a decision.

I think these ideas are particularly helpful for accomplishing more nebulous goals such as “being successful”.

It’s just so hard to know what path to take, but knowing that the path will become more clear with more knowledge and experience should be key to actually achieving it.

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I Need to Revise My Website

I’m realizing that I really need to revise my website. Some of the content is just very out-of-date and doesn’t reflect what we do anymore. If I want it to convert, I’m going to have to do a better job.

There are a few things I need to do:

  1. Come up with my value statement/tagline for use throughout the site
  2. Make a list of the other things I want to touch on throughout the content
  3. Review my pages and actually write some new content

It doesn’t have to be super difficult, but I really should do it. I think there might be some issues in there that reflect the recent drop in search engine traffic.

Also, in reading some of my oldest posts here, I’ve had two completely unrelated thoughts:

  1. My original goal was to write “10 minutes per day, every day” in this blog. I haven’t come close to that, but it might be a good idea to start trying.
  2. In a very old post, I broke down how I wanted to be spending my time in the business. I had something like 20% allocated to planning for the business and implementing major improvements. I think that’s a great idea, and it’s something I’m definitely not doing now.

I wonder why I’m not doing that? I really should be! I feel that most of my time should be spent either planning for growth or actively implementing it. Working on the business instead of in it.

So I’d like to start making that much more of a priority.

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I Should Always be Reinvesting Back Into the Company

I had an epiphany the other day and it’s that I really need to be utilizing all of the credit I have available to me and reinvesting large amounts of the money I make back into the growth of my company.

Maybe this seems like an obvious things for many people but for me, it was a total departure from how I’ve operated. Historically I’ve never paid for marketing and my costs have always been very low, so anything I made was basically just straight income for me.

But now that I’ve successfully purchased another hosting company and quickly grown my business that way, my mindset has completely changed. What if there was some magical way to continue spending my revenues on things that will get me new clients?

I say that tongue-in-cheek, but it really is so different from what I’ve done historically that it’s actually a novel idea.

I actually had the thought while reading the book Sapiens. The author is discussing Consumerism and Capitalism and describes how the wealthy capitalists reinvest all of their earnings back into growth, while the consumers, well… Consume. They spend what they make on stuff.

While he by no means glorifies capitalists, it still made me think about how I’m running my business and realize that I could really be doing things differently.

So now that I’ve decided to do that, the question is: where do I spend this money?

One of my top choices is to simply buy more business. You get a lot of clients at once, on-boarding is simpler, and it just works. There is little-to-no sales process which is great. Plus I get all that link juice which is super nice.

But I haven’t tested whether it is repeatable to just continue acquiring businesses. I’ll have to reach out to a bunch of owners and see if I can find any that are looking to sell.

And then there’s the other options of paid advertising. Ultimately, I have some idea of what it’s worth to me to have new clients. If spending on advertising costs less than what clients are worth, I should proceed full-steam ahead.

The main thing is that I need it to be repeatable and scalable. Unlike in-person networking (which I can only do so much of), the right paid ad could be completely scalable. Spend more: make more!

So over the coming months, I need to work really hard to test out different marketing methods, and figure out which once I can repeat over-and-over again. I’m thinking that if I can get new hosting clients for $100, it is absolutely worth it to do so.

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Sign-up Form Results – Lots of Spam

So I’ve been letting my last experiment run for many months, and while it’s gotten more than 2,000 submissions… It’s pretty much all spam.

I was getting many submissions per day, which seemed great! But when I looked at the submissions, they almost all had throw-away Russian email addresses. Never a good sign.

So I decided to add a Captcha. Submissions plummeted, unsurprisingly.

It’s been about two weeks since I added that, and I have gotten a handful of submissions. However, I ran them through the website cleantalk.org, which identifies spam addresses, and learned that most of these, too, were spam.

It looks like I got maybe on legitimate submission in those two weeks.

I also didn’t have a single person legitimately reach out to me to start hosting, so I think that overall, there was 0% conversion. Not ideal

So I think it’s time to try something new.

New ad content is:

“Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress website? Email me at brian@pagecrafter.com and mention the code #FreeHosting10 for two free months of lightning-fast WordPress hosting. We will even migrate you for free!”

I can’t imagine it will be a whole lot more successful, but we’ll see! We could also make a variation that has a form submission but this seems nice and clean.

Stay tuned.

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2020 Goal – 100 New Hosting Clients

It’s 2020 and it’s time for some serious goal-making. And you know what my goal is? To add 100 new hosting clients over the course of the year.

A couple interesting notes on this: it’s actually fewer hosting clients than I added in 2019. However, that was just because I purchased a hosting company with more than 100 clients, so it was kind of cheating.

But then again: it worked! If all it takes is purchasing hosting companies to add them on like this, I feel like I should absolutely do it. I think I need to reach out to a bunch of hosting company owners and just let them know that if they are interested in selling, I’m interested in buying.

I just did a quick Google maps search for “Website Hosting” in the Twin Cities area, and what I found was astonishing. I found one company that seemed legit that apparently just shut down and literally turned off all of their client’s sites. Others seem to be fairly outdated and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they are in the same boat as Berry Bros was.

I think I’d be missing out on incredible opportunities if I didn’t reach out to every single one of these and see if there was any interest in selling. It just makes too much sense.

Alternatively, I’ve gone over many ideas for getting new clients, and I think that once things slow down a bit for me, it’s time to really ramp up those efforts. While the SEO and calls-to-action are things I should certainly work on optimizing, I think I should definitely start aggressively pursuing some paid-for marketing options.

I need to really sit down and think what a hosting client is worth to me. Are they worth one year’s expected revenue? Two? Three?

I should be willing to spend a good chunk of change on advertising that delivers results and brings new clients through the door.

Whatever it takes to get two new hosting clients every week, I think I should absolutely do. That should be my ultimate focus this year.

I want to continue posting here and monitoring my progress. Hopefully by this time in 2021, I’ll have well over 100 new hosting clients.

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Thinking About Goals – 100 New Hosting Clients?

It’s time to start thinking about goals for next year. My first thought was, “how about 100 new hosting clients?”

And it’s not a bad goal! Obviously, it doesn’t specify how I get them.

The interesting thing is that I’ll meet that goal this year. But it’s because I just purchased another hosting company and took on all their clients.

But does it really matter?

Sure, it’s been a ton of work, and I had to pay a decent amount of money for all of them. But are the acquisition costs really that different than they would be “in the wild?”

The ways I’m thinking about doing it next year involve driving all over the place and networking. All of those things take a lot of time and have opportunity costs associated with them.

It’s entirely possible that just buying these clients outright will be cheaper than any other form of taking them on.

It’s maybe still to early to get a proper sense of how everything went, but if this current acquisition goes well overall, my time may be best spent in the future trying to purchase other companies.

Sometimes the “easiest” way to do something is still the best way! It sort of feels like cheating but if it works, it works!

I think it’s just important to continue considering all options at this point and to try some new things out. I think a lot of options have merit, including going out and networking.

Unfortunately it just doesn’t seem like SEO is paying off, though it may still be too early to call. I need to review my posts about different tests and see if we can start converting visitors.

And in another post I’ll have to confirm official goals for 2019. I do like the idea of just adding new hosting clients, as I still believe that growing that part of the business is key.

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Focusing on Blog and Habits Works!

So over the past month or so I’ve made an effort to do more of these blog posts and also focus on improving some of my habits. And it works!

Lately I’ve been sleeping better, getting up way earlier, being way more productive, and just generally doing better.

I’ve said before that the blog is the most important thing I do. The reason for that is it’s the only place where I put down some introspective thoughts and then follow-up later to track everything.

Focusing on it helps be focus on growth and self-improvement and holds me to things that I’ve resolved to do. Without it, I feel like I don’t really improve at all, I kind of just limp along.

Specifically it leads me to trying out things that really help me improve. For instance, I’ve been working on establishing a new habit lately. I would say that I should always be trying to establish a new one at all times, and I really hadn’t in a while.

The one I’m working on now is to get up after the first alarm without snoozing at all. For many, this probably isn’t a challenge. But I’ve been doing it for like 20 years. Breaking that habit (which I think is basically the same as creating one) is extremely difficult.

But I’m like a month in now. It was extremely difficult at first, but it’s getting easier and easier. And only good things have come from it.

And a few days ago I did something that isn’t really a habit, but I should have done a long time ago. I tend to waste a long time on the site imgur.com, and I realized that I don’t even really enjoy it. So after years of wasted time, I installed an app on my phone and blocked the website.

Problem solved!

The interesting thing is that this one doesn’t even really require willpower because it’s blocked… There’s no choice there. That’s a good subject for another blog post, but it’s quite fascinating.

So now I instantly have a lot more time each day because I’m not on that site. I move on to other things right away instead of wasting my time.

I’ve even started doing Spanish studying on Anki again. When I’m twitching on my phone and bored, I don’t really have anything else to do now so I just do it! It’s great.

In conclusion, it’s really important to keep doing this. Keep it up.

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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!