Rethinking Strategies

Yesterday I was doing a little research and came across an article from Steve Pavlina on how to build web traffic. Interestingly enough he doesn't talk about page-rankings and linking. He talks about producing quality content. I guess he knows what he's talking about. He gets about 208,000 hits per month on his site.

But more importantly he encourages people to keep money in perspective:

It’s important that I generate some money from my work, but it’s not necessary that I extract every possible dollar. In fact, relative to its traffic levels, I’m seriously under-monetizing this site. But money is only a means to an end, not an end in itself. Making a positive contribution to the world is a lot more important to me than money. Money can be useful in achieving this objective, but human relationships are far more important. The funny thing is that the less I rely on money, the more of it I seem to have.

If you think that Mr. Pavlina is a complete altruist, just read another article of his on how to make money from a blog and you'll get another picture.

But the point stands. He is successful (in 2006 his blog was bringing $1000 per DAY) because of the reasons he states in the first article: he's in it because he wants to make a difference, and he's passionate about what he does. He does believe in getting paid for his work, but by concentrating on what he most enjoys--personal improvement--he creates a product that is evidently quite lucrative. If he contentrated just on making money and had no product he wouldn't be nearly so successful.

So my wife and I had a talk over dinner last night (which usually isn't very easy with three young kids), and we're going to shift our focus. Money would be nice, but we'd prefer to be in this to make a difference. And since this business is more about my wife's passion than my own, she has to be in it for the right reasons or she won't be in it for long.

That's not to say I'm not passionate about this. I'm just passionate about different aspects of it. I believe in the cause we're advancing, but it's not my passion. My passion lies in writing to influence, in creating something bigger than myself, and yes, in making money to one day provide me the freedom to really focus on what I enjoy. So while perhaps our passions are not shared, they certainly can be mutually supportive.

So after our discussion we are altering our focus a little, but not by much. We'll just be providing more free content than we originally envisioned. Now that we've got that settled, it's "once more into the niche!"