Building for Growth
July 21st, 2008 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
I got a question about site/business building after making this post asking what’s your goal, and I wanted to touch on something I think is really important to long term success whether you’re building a hobby site or a full online business.
Everybody’s heard the term scalable. Often it relates to software, but it can also relate to the foundation of a web site or business model. Basically, it’s a measurement of the ability for a site or business to grow and expand in accordance with visitor or customer demands.
Now, of course it’s vital to think ahead on scalability when planning your site or business, and most people do this; but where a lot seem to “miss the boat” is in planning for their site or business to scale upwards without their actual time and investment having to grow at an equal rate.
I’ve done this myself in the past and it’s a real heart breaker when you suddenly realize that a project is growing popular, yet you can no longer provide the necessary time into it because you didn’t plan ahead for the growth properly.
Many blogs are great examples of this. Often as a blog becomes more popular the blog owner feel’s forced to put in more time on posting to his visitor’s needs, replying to lots of comments, replying to every email contact and etc.
Without thinking ahead from the start and placing firm limits on what the blogger is willing to put in to his blog, he can quickly find himself in a vicious cycle of chasing his own popularity while it grows, and sadly more bloggers than not aren’t ever going to earn a fair return for their time investments from their blogs.
The opposite side to that coin is the blogger who realizes that as popularity and visitor counts rise, so will expectations from their readers–and the smart blog owner will have planned ahead for that increased demand in ways that won’t further tax their time.
For example, they may have established relationships with other bloggers whom they’ll tap for guest postings, or they may have searched out a decent ghost-writer to hire once demand began to rise. Whatever they have ready to go, the important fact is they are prepared for when the time comes.
These principals can be seen and applied with just about any web site or business model in that when you’re planning for future growth, don’t just plan to get that growth, but also plan for how you’ll handle it when it comes without having to become a slave to the project.
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