Impatient is a Lonely Old Fool Wishing He’d Only Listened

Day 26. People’s impatience is driving me nuts.

People are too impatient. They want something and they want it now. They want results and they want it now.

I suppose this is a reflection of the times we live in. Everything is instant. The days of receiving a text message and replying the following day are gone. People now see that you’ve read their messages on Whatsapp.

How often do you get a message like this or some variation of it: “Why aren’t you replying to my message? I can see you’ve read it!”

This impatience is especially prevalent in business. Agencies who are pressurised by clients who want something now, impose this pressure on freelancers, and contractors. I’ve got a few short words here: manage your clients better.

Stop being a little bitch and bending over backwards. What they want is not always what’s best for them. Your job is to guide your clients and give them the best possible service. You should advise, not submit. You should steer not be steered. You should grow a thicker skin, instead of shedding it each time you receive a call from them.

Also, when you’re starting a business venture, or any venture, things don’t happen overnight. Your website isn’t going to instantly rank on the first page of Google when you’ve done a few SEO tweaks to your site.

In fact, it may will take months many months for you to even gain any traction. These on-page tweaks only account for about 15-20% of all SEO. The rest is all off-site optimisation like gathering a healthy amount of backlinks from other sites. And no I didn’t thumb suck these figures. I spoke to an SEO expert who gave me some advice.

Similarly, don’t think stuffing keywords into your posts is going to work. Those days are long gone. If you want your site to rank, be patient.

Submit your sitemap to Google so their little bots know to crawl your site, do your keyword research so you know what customers are looking for and launch a blog that provides your readers with valuable content. Content that they’ll love. Content that they’ll want to share time and time again. And maybe, just maybe you’ll start building up those backlinks (incoming hyperlinks from another site).

Why do I emphasise backlinks? Why are they so important?

Well, backlinks are like referrals, they let Google know you’re an authority. If there are more backlinks to your site about a specific topic Google starts to realise this and your website starts to rank.

Think of someone who gives the best massages. One positive recommendation increases their reputation and as more recommend them, their reputation increases even further (akin to increasing your Google rank). They become the go-to person for massages.

So what do you want to be the go-to person for? Whatever that is it’s not going to happen by being impatient.

“Impatient” is a lonely fool sitting there wishing he’d only listened.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, but I’ve done enough reading to know what doesn’t work. If you want to do some reading yourself I’d suggest you follow Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin. They are gurus in the digital marketing space.

And hey – here’s a backlink for Neil and a backlink for Rand.

Cheers,

I’m out.