We are all looking for ways to make money. We have plans, dreams, hopes and yearnings. I don’t know about you, but my little dream is to make enough cash to lie back on a tropical beach while watching hula girls and drinking fruity boozers with pink umbrellas.We are all looking for ways to make money. We have plans, dreams, hopes and yearnings. I don’t know about you, but my little dream is to make enough cash to lie back on a tropical beach while watching hula girls and drinking fruity boozers with pink umbrellas. But in order to realize my simple little dream, I have to make a big chunk of cash. If I want to live on that beach, then I have to make that cash regularly enough to count on it – even while lying on a beach with a fruity boozer.
The big-wigs call it productivity.
Productivity? Stuff accomplished, and profit made, for each hour worked.
If your Web site produces one dollar a day, how do you go from making one dollar a day to making one million dollars a day? By doing exactly the same thing that made that one dollar – but one million times more. Easy, right? Well that depends on how long it took you to set up your operation to make that one single dollar. Now multiply that one million times.
Productivity is linked to efficiency (the ratio of output to input). Efficiency is how streamlined your workload is. The idea being that the more efficient your process is, the more you can produce.
In short, if you can speed up the process by doing less, you get that much more productivity (i.e. profit,) out of the time you spent doing it.
Finding ways to “do less” is the tricky part.
There are five steps to improving productivity:
Eliminate unnecessary work.
Eliminate unnecessary re-work.
Shorten the duration of effort.
Automate as much as possible.
Manage demand.
The first four approaches deal with limiting the number of things you have to do to maintain your current projects so that you can also reduce the amount of work needed for new projects. The fifth approach is all about arranging the time you spend on new projects.
ELIMINATE UNNECESSARY WORK
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Make damn sure you have back-up copies of everything you figure out. If you find yourself using the same references over and over again, find a way to keep those references within easy reach.
I learned a neat trick from my friend Wes. He has a pack of Web pages cleverly disguised as link pages. A couple of his pages represent a complete list of all his currently active money-making sites, another link page is a complete list of all his TGP posting sites, another is simply a list of all his affiliates, and so forth. With all these seemingly unimportant link sites, Wes has every link he needs to add to any site he creates all in one spot, eliminating any need to go hunting for them. And they all just happen to be redirecting traffic to his money-making sites. Pretty clever, huh?
ELIMINATE UNNECESSARY RE-WORK
Check and double-check before you post. Did you think to use a spelling checker on your text? Are you sure all your ‘alt’ tags and page titles are correct? Do all of your links actually go where they are supposed to go?
I got sick and tired of writing the same damned text over and over and over, so I decided to write it down once and for all and keep it all in one document that I scrape and paste from. With a few minor cosmetic changes I have fresh text for every site I bump out.
SHORTEN THE DURATION OF EFFORT
Don’t over-schedule yourself. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Take a break once in a while. Sure it’s fun, but give your brain a rest! Don’t expect to get a million and one orders filled or Web sites built in one weekend. Pace yourself.
My friend Wes was burning the midnight oil to get his sites done, then found himself sleeping around the clock to make up for the night-owl routine. Not good. He had a bunch of affiliates that needed his attention during normal office hours. This on-again off-again stuff drove him and his affiliates nuts – and did bad things to his profit margin.
I finally talked him into a week vacation. He came back, burnt to a crisp, redder than a beach ball, and started stopping roughly at sunset. He even took the occasional Sunday afternoon off for the movies. After a little while he realized that his profits had started climbing again. He couldn’t figure out why. He knew he was actually doing less work.
Sure he was doing less – but he was also spending far less time on reworked projects because he was making fewer mistakes. He was operating on a fully functional brain.
AUTOMATE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
Cascading style sheets (CSS), frames, macros, Web site content management systems… these are your friends. They are a collection of pre-made scripts and programs that help you manage your content pages. AVS systems help you collect money while keeping out under-age viewers. There are scores of companies that offer pre-made scripts and programs designed strictly for the adult Internet. Many of them will also write custom software and scripts if you ask nicely and use your wallet.
Why the hell should you do all that work yourself if somebody else has already figured out all the shortcuts, pre-tested the stuff and then made damn sure that it was profitable?
The idea is less work people. Less work! Think: beaches, bikinis, grass skirts, fruity boozers with pink umbrellas!
MANAGE DEMAND
One day you’re chugging away, programs and solutions galloping through your head, chatting with other Webmasters about this content or that traffic solution, going as you’ve been going, making a tidy profit on the way, then the next day you wake up and – WHAMMO – you just can’t do it. Or worse, you don’t want to do it. Everything you found fun, interesting and cool just wasn’t fun, interesting or cool anymore.
You shrug it off. Maybe you just needed to give your brain a rest. You pass by the computer and go do something else. You find yourself doing something else for several days, and then several weeks have gone by. Then several months, sometimes several years. What the heck happened?
Two words: burn out. It’s the number one cause of Webmasters abandoning their perfectly profitable businesses.
Webmastering isn’t the only profession that gets this disease; writers and artists have been getting it for millennia. Writers run out of stories; they call it “writer’s block.” Artists run out of vision; they call it “artist’s block.” Webmasters get it too; we call it burn out. Think about it. What’s missing? Ideas – all those really cool Ideas are missing. Talk to any writer or artist, they’ll tell you exactly the same thing. They were working their butts off 24/7 and all of a sudden, everything just stopped.
Webmastering is mentally exhaustive work that takes a high level of concentration and a huge amount of creativity. Yes – creativity. Everything you do, every solution you come up with, comes from your imagination.
How do artists and writers fix it? They refuel their imagination.
How do you fix burn out? First, you rest. Exhaustion plays a huge factor is this particular disease. Rest equals vacation. Take a week; take two! Get your brain out of that box. Then, feed your starving imagination.
How the heck do you do that? Go back to your source. How old were you when you decided to begin your first Web site? What did you do for fun back then? Think about it. All that stuff you were doing back then is what triggered the need to build your first Web site. That’s where your imagination caught fire. That’s where your imagination can be found again. But first – go find a beach and some hula girls and some fruity boozers. Then worry about going to that sci-fi convention and reading comic books.
Published since 1980, Ms. Hawke has been a professional writer since May 2001, writing and publishing numerous adult industry-related articles for AEBN.com.
