Who’s to argue this one, money is important. Obviously we all have bills to pay. Money pays for my computer, my broadband internet connection, my home, my food, my car, my gas, my insurance premiums etc etc etc. I just got back from a holiday trip that was paid for with money. My wife and I had a great time partly because we didn’t have to worry about money at all on the trip. We did everything we wanted to do without being hampered by a lack of funds. And this web site provided the money that actually paid for the vacation.It is vital that I generate money from my work, but I don’t need to extract every possible dollar from each page that I upload or each post that I make. In fact, relative to its traffic levels, I’m seriously under-monetizing this site and several others that I operate. Hey, money is clearly a means to an end, but it is important to note that it is 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 relationships are far more important. The funny thing is that the less I focus on money issues, the more of it I seem to have. I am lucky, people seem to enjoy reading what I have written and I am already making more money than I need to pay my bills. My income from this site keeps increasing month after month so I am very proud to be held in such high esteem. If I simply keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll probably become fairly wealthy. But here is the interesting thing, money tends to be an extremely weak motivator for me.
Very little of what I do today has a profit motive behind it except to the extent that money will fuel more important goals. That tends to confuse certain people because some of my decisions align with earning money, yet many others do not. While I do consider myself an entrepreneur (at least it’s less isolating than “guru”), I only see money as a tool for enhancing and expanding my contribution to my loyal readers. While many entrepreneurs pursue money for the purpose of becoming wealthy, I chose a different route. I sought to earn money for the purpose of increasing my freedom. I don’t want to get myself stuck in a pattern of working for money. In fact, I am constantly turning down opportunities to make money if I believe that such an opportunity would restrict my freedom in some way. For example, I rarely do any consulting or coaching anymore. As a result, my calendar contains very few fixed appointments. This doesn’t mean I’m idle. It just means I spend my time doing what I choose to do instead of what others would have me do. I discovered several years ago that i need this level of flexibility to do my best work. By paying close attention to how I earn my money rather than focusing on how much I earn, I keep money in its proper place. This allows me to stay focused on my purpose without getting wrapped up in less important concerns like building a brand, closing sales, or doing cheesy marketing activities.
I really do not appreciate it when other people push sales and marketing tactics on me, so I avoid using these techniques on this site. I’ve sort of unplugged myself from the current capitalistic system and set up a side system of my own that I find much more congruent with conscious living. I would love for other people to have the same level of freedom I enjoy each day. I’m sure I’ll continue to improve my approach over time, but it’s working wonderfully so far. Imagine having a business with no physical products, no actual inventory, no sales concerns yet still generating an abundant positive cashflow month on month. Since the income generation is largely on autopilot, I can focus my time and energy on creating content instead of on doing marketing or trying to sell something. And being able to devote so much time to content creation without worrying how I’ll pay my bills makes it a lot easier to increase traffic to a level that I would deem to be high traffic. Some business models make it very challenging to build traffic. You have to spend a lot of time and energy just on lead generation, and then maybe you try to monetize those leads by selling a product or service. It’s always an uphill struggle.
I give all my best content away for free. Word of mouth does the rest. So my traffic building strategy is more viral and like flowing downstream. It hasn’t been a struggle for me at all. Once you have sufficient traffic, it isn’t that hard to monetize it either. We’ve all heard the expression, “Build a better mousetrap, and they’ll come.” And we’ve also heard marketing and sales people say that this is just plain wrong – you have to market and sell that mousetrap effectively too. I say they’re all wrong. My approach is the equivalent of, “Build a better mousetrap and give it away for free, they’ll come – and they’ll probably bring a few friends along too.” The interesting thing is that many of them will want to show their appreciation for what I have offered in the form of a financial contribution – money… and for that I say thank you very much as I keep on writing and adding more value for these lovely people. This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 15:27 and is filed under Traffic Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
