Thinking like a rock

My brain works in geologic time. This is not always a good thing in the business world as it tends to prevent rapid growth, but it may also provide some stability. Most people tend to look at things and see how much money they can make on it over the course of a hour, day, month or year. I tend to live about ten to thirty years out from the present. Because of this I was very slow to do some of the things that will bring results quickly.

For example, as I started out I didn't really want to spend any money on internet advertising, because the end goal of an internet store in not to have someone click on an ad to find you. The goal is that someone searchs for a product and finds it at your store. This is a result of search engine ranking, not advertisements. So I set out to advertise the store basically by internet "word of mouth". Once the site was up, I submitted it to some search engines for review, and then promply began telling as many people online about it as possible. Everytime I published anything online, even a note on a forum, it had a link to the site worked in tastefully. I never Spammed anyone, but in the course of being online I managed to generate more and more links to my site from other sites. These links will eventually help the site rank higer in the search engines which is the eventual goal. What I failed to recognize is that this would take forever doing it myself.

When I finally did wake up to this truth and actually start spending money on advertising, my sales quadrupled overnight. Now it is not me trying to promote my site, but rather it is my customers promoting it for me. And while none of them are as active about it as I was, a lot of them do a little, and the effect is probably greater, and I have more time to focus on the site.

I also tend not to think about individual sales. If I did, I probably would have quit long ago. When you see a sale come through for a small part, and stop and calculate your profit after everything that goes into the sale, it hardly seems worth it, but my mind is always looking at what happens if I make that sale every day for the next year, and what if I find 10 more products that I can sell every day. Suddenly the numbers become a little better. And I start to focus not on individual sales, but on finding niche products that I can sell every day, even if it is at a small profit. Sure it is nice to get the big sales now and then, but it is the volume of the small ones that is keeping the shop alive.

I could go on giving examples, but suffice to say, through this first year and a half, it has been thinking in the long term that has kept me motivated. While sales have been increasing almost every month (this in not hard considering we sold $30 worth of product our first month) they are still not enough to feed the family on. Fortunately my wife works, and I have a part time job on the side, so we have been able to reinvest 100% of the profits into the shop, and it continues to grow. Not many people I know could spend two years working on a project and never see a penny, but I guess that is the beauty of thinking like a rock. I'm thinking 10 years out and it looks good out there.