I’m going to share with you one of the biggest mistakes I made when creating my previous online magazine, Lovingyou.com. Hopefully, it will help keep you on track and save you some time and money in your own venture.
First, let’s start off with a little history…
Lovingyou.com started as a personal homepage in 1996. It was my “playground” of sorts. I’m fairly competitive with myself, so while it was “personal,” it was still built to succeed. Where I wanted it to succeed was in gaining traffic and having large amounts of interactivity within the site. I applied all of my previous marketing and sales knowledge to these goals. The entire site was built around social networking and user-generated content long before those were buzz words. It’s good marketing – it just makes sense to let people be able to contribute, but that’s a story for another day. These strategies obviously made great sense, because this is where my failure took root.
You need to build for growth.
While I certainly dreamed of overnight success, I didn’t foresee that my methods and strategies would actually work. I wasn’t prepared for success and certainly wasn’t looking at any long-term growth plans. In my mind, it was still a personal homepage with a million pageviews per month. Since it was never meant to be a profit generator, I sort of haphazardly approached growth and expansion. By the time I realized this was going to become our main business, we already had over 50,000 pages of content. Imagine redesigning a site with that much content by hand. It was a HUGE project.
Stay up to date technically.
At the time, there was no such thing as a content management system. Everything was done manually. We eventually automated certain sections of the site as we could afford it. If I could go back, I would have put every extra penny into the technical aspects of the site. The main hinderance here was I wasn’t as knowledgeable in those fields at the time. I didn’t really grasp what a content management system was, and honestly our site was so large (500,000 pages) by the time CMSs became mainstream that it was fairly unapproachable.
Don’t be afraid of hiring an “expert.”
We became quite clever in creating faster fixes for updates, but in all honesty, I should have looked for an expert in the area and let them find a better answer. This lack of foresight is still a problem for the site. I haven’t been involved with the project in the last two years, and quite a significant part of it is still created manually, including the front page.
So what’s the lesson? Anticipate for growth and plan for it!
You’re never going to know everything that’s in the future for your business, but you can put in steps to make growth and transitions easier. It really comes down to how scaleable your business is at any given moment. If the systems you have in place don’t allow you to grow easily and effortlessly, guess what? You’re going to plateau at some point. That doesn’t look too sexy on paper or your bank account.
A lot of people have an “I’ll deal with the problem when it comes up” attitude in an effort to conserve resources. What this attitude fails to take into consideration is that you may be saving immediate time and possibly money, but you’re certainly going to pay for it later, and at an inflated price. While this may be necessary in some situations, it’s best in my experience to try and avoid it as often as possible.
How flexible and ready for growth is your business?
- Take stock of what actions you do every day. Is there a way you can automate or streamline any of these tasks? Could you save time (which in turn saves money) by hiring someone else to do more menial tasks for you?
- What is your method of handling incoming sales, emails and contacts? Can you step away for a day or two and not have your system go completely into meltdown? Is it efficient and easy to find whatever you’re looking for?
- If you have staff, do you need to be there to answer every question? Is there a clear system for doing things in place? Have they been properly trained for it?
- Have you networked to find knowledgeable people in areas you are weak in? For you it may seem like a huge issue, for an expert in the industry it might take them five minutes to give you a solution.
- Planning ahead can shave off tons of frivolous time. It may take a few hours each week ahead of time, but knowing what you’re doing and when you’re doing it keeps you focused and on track during the week. When’s the best time for you to plan ahead?
- If you all of a sudden received a massive influx of traffic to your site, orders or contacts, would the systems you have in place handle them?
Take it from me, I could have done twice the work in half the time if I’d used these tips fourteen years ago. If you’re in a similar situation and need some advice, feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to share my ideas with you.
Now it’s your turn, what are you doing to get your business ready for growth?