While sitting down to enjoy breakfast at a local restaurant, I hear this young guy at a table next to mine say “all I want to be is rich so I can do whatever I want!”
He then goes on to talk about how he would travel the world, etc.
I couldn’t help but think “If he only knew he doesn’t have to be materially wealthy to do that!”
Quite often the dream of instant overnight riches is the result of a poor plan (or lack of one) to achieve it ethically. This kid was different though. He had a plan.
He explained (to his friend) his strategy to winning some sort of online poker game where he had a 1 out of 33,000 chance of winning a million dollars. At first I thought “how silly to bank on something like that for a million dollars” but then I was reminded how my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies (or lack thereof) used to work similarly.
My thinking used to be “If I rank #1 on Google for make money online, I will make millions of dollars and will never have to work again!”
It sounded good in theory, but how would I do it? How the heck was I going to get my broken site to rank #1 on Google for such a competitive search phrase? I had absolutely no idea. The dream was big, but no plan for execution had been drawn up.
This was right about the same time as the movie “The Secret” came out. Remember that one? It’s all about “happy thoughts” and how all you have to do is always think positively and the universe will hand you the key to everything you want out of life.
It’s not a bad movie. I too believe in positive thinking and that it will – with time – start forming environments in your life in which positive things will be able to start coming into fruition.
Or as Zig Ziglar used to say: Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.
This is what the movie was all about. Using dreamboards and positive thinking to attract results into your life. It was good stuff, but it was lacking two key elements: creating actionable goals and executing them.
Once I realized that “hey, wanting that #1 ranking on Google is great, but no matter how long I think very positively about it, I will not get there. I need to first come up with a step by step strategy, then execute it, and then I will get the result.”
No matter how positively I thought about it, my chances of getting that #1 spot on Google was less than 1 in 33,000. In hindsight, not sure why I didn’t just play poker instead, haha.
Once I understood the flaw in “The Secret”, I sat down and decided to learn everything I could about SEO and then created a strategy to getting my site to the top of Google.
For the record, I came close. I got to page one of Google for “make money online”. Although it was great and was a very profitable keyword to rank for, it did not make me an overnight millionaire. Due to the incredibly high competition for “make money” type keywords, I did not stay on page one for long.
Long story short, I ended up pursuing other niches just because I did not have the time and budget at the time to keep on top of the make money niche.
The moral of the story is this: Having big dreams is great and visualizing the results you want out of life is an important part to living a fulfilled life. However, neither of them will get you the desired outcome until you create a plan and then execute it.
If you got the top Google ranking “dream” figured out and know exactly what results you’re after, but have no idea how to create an actionable plan to get you those results, leave a comment or shoot me a message. I would love to take a peek and give you my brutally honest feedback.
