Mike Haydon — Helping You Build a More Effective Online Presence

Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly

by Mike Haydon on 1 June 2009

I was just reading the introduction from Robert Kiyosaki’s excellent book “Before You Quit Your Job” (see left) and one of the headings struck me as being a little odd: “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for producing quality work all the time. But sometimes it’s better to have your 2nd or 3rd draft as your product, rather than waiting until the product is perfect. There comes a time when you have to say “it’s good enough“. Don’t worry what your mother taught you, in business near enough is often good enough.

Kiyosaki uses Microsoft as an example for just getting a product to market that isn’t perfect but is good enough to partially satisfy the demand. You then work on improving the product and put out an updated version. Now Microsoft isn’t the best example, in my opinion, because you could argue that it crosses the line between good enough and just plain shoddy (just look at all the bugs in Vista), which you never should do. I think Wordpress is a better example. It’s now up to version 2.7.1. Each of its versions have been pretty good, but the next has almost always been a bit better than the previous. Imagine if they didn’t release the product until at least version 3 – the world would certainly be a poorer place.

There are many examples, but all of them lead to this truth:

There comes a time when you have to stop developing and start marketing.

If you wait until your product is perfect, you risk missing your window of opportunity. You risk another company coming in and grabbing the market share you easily could have taken. That’s a whole lotta money that will be in your competitor’s pocket rather than yours. You had the brilliant idea, you found an effective way to solve peoples problems, you deserve to profit from that. But you can screw it up by being a perfectionist, just as you can by being sloppy.

Have a look at your websites “under construction” or books you are working on. Is it good enough to go to market? Good enough to go live? Is it time to stop researching and start writing? Time to stop learning and start doing? So what are you waiting for? Get cracking.

Popularity: 9%

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5 Killer Articles to Increase Your Presence Online

by Mike Haydon on 18 May 2009

For today’s article, I decided to take a break from my usual format and point you in the direction of 5 recent articles that I think will greatly help you improve your presence online:

8 Essential Apps For Your Facebook Page

If you have a facebook page (see my previous post for why you should have a facebook page), I highly recommend you use some or all of these applications to improve your connection to your readers.

7 Myths About Blogging

Diane is an experienced blogger and author (ok, they’re kinda the same thing lol) who has helped many people break through barriers to become successful bloggers. She is actively involved in Jack Humphrey’s BlogSuccess training center and is someone worth listening to. This article is particularly useful for beginner and intermediate bloggers.

9 Ways to Improve Your Writing

This article is short and to the point. It has some great tips that you can use to become a better writer.

10 Ways to Put Your Content Before More People

I think this is one of those articles that changes the way you think about writing. Paul suggests you focus on getting your content out there more than getting traffic to your site. Of course it depends what you are trying to achieve, but in many cases, I think his approach is sound.

12 Easy Mistakes That Plague SEO Newcomers

This is obviously required reading for anyone beginning in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). More advanced/experienced people may still get value from a glance over this. Particularly note point 9 (ignoring non-Google search engines).

I hope you find these useful. Until next time.

Popularity: 13%

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First 3 Places To Kickstart Your Online Presence

by Mike Haydon on 8 April 2009

If you are just starting to market your product or services online, I highly recommend you focus first on building these properties:

Build a Blog

Running a blog properly can build your authority and promote your brand like nothing ever. I recommend posting as often as you can, as long as the quality doesn’t suffer. Regular, quality posts give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. A blog can also be thought of as an eNewsletter that people actually read because they can subscribe to the feed and receive the new posts when they are published… you know what, just head over to the Friday Traffic Report for this great article on why you should run a blog. Jack explains it better than I could, maybe because he’s one of the recognized blogging leaders.

As you can see from my archives, I’m a huge fan of Wordpress and recommend you get a self hosted wordpress blog. I use Godaddy for hosting (get good discounts here). I also highly recommend you spend the money to get the Thesis Theme. I’ve tried using the free templates and customizing them to suit and even though I’m fairly good at CSS, Html and Php, I’ve wasted so much time that is worth a lot more than the $80 or so that Thesis costs. I’ll be changing this blog over to Thesis in the next few days and I wish I’d done it ages ago when I first heard of Thesis.

Twitter

If you don’t have a twitter account, go and sign up now for free at twitter.com. It’s ok, I’ll wait … Now you’re back, we’ll go through why you just did that…

Twitter is a powerful social communication medium. People can follow you and receive your status updates (140 characters per update). It is the best tool available now to easily keep people up to date with what you are doing, your take on the world and resources you think people can use as well as interact with your audience, find new resources and get ideas for new articles. Don’t go and post what you had for breakfast; no-one wants to know that. Think who your target market is and only write tweets that they would find useful.

Feel free to follow me @mikehaydon on Twitter and let me know, so I can follow you too.

Facebook Page

I’m assuming that you’ve got a Facebook Profile. If not, get one for free here.

A Facebook Page is like a profile except for 2 important differences:

A Page has “fans”, not “friends”; and
Pages are indexable by the search engines.

The difference between friends and fans is that friends have to be “accepted” by you, whereas anyone can become a fan, meaning your facebook profile can be used for what it was intended – keeping in touch with your friends. I don’t think I need to emphasize how important the second point is.

Go here to setup a Facebook Page. You should setup a page for each facet of your business, each brand or each niche. There is no limit on how many Pages you can setup, but remember that the more Pages you setup, the more work you’ll have to do interacting with your fans and keeping the Page up to date. See here for an example.

Once you have these setup, you’re on your way to great visibility online. Regularly update these sites with quality content and watch your presence soar.

Popularity: 19%

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