How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) #9

By Steve Pavlina http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/

9. Keep money in its proper place.

Money is important. Obviously I have bills to pay. Money pays for my computer, my high-speed internet connection, my house, and my food. I just returned yesterday from a vacation that money paid for. 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 paid for it.

It’s important that I generate some money from my work, but it’s not necessary that I extract every possible dollar. In fact, relative to its traffic levels, I’m seriously under-monetizing this site.

But money is only a means to an end, 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 human relationships are far more important. The funny thing is that the less I rely on money, the more of it I seem to have.

I’m already making more money than I need to pay my bills, and my income from this site keeps going up each month. If I simply keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll probably end up becoming fairly wealthy. But money is 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, but many don’t. 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.

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, so I’m constantly turning down opportunities to make money that would restrict my freedom.

For example, I don’t do any consulting or coaching. Consequently, my calendar contains very few fixed appointments. This doesn’t mean I’m idle. It just means I spend my time doing what I freely choose to do instead of what others would have me do. I require this level of flexibility to do my best work.

By paying close attention to how I earn money and not just 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 phony marketing.

I dislike it when other people use one-dimensional 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 products, no inventory, no sales, and no customers, but still generating an abundant positive cashflow.

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 build 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 like flowing downstream. It hasn’t been a struggle for me at all. And once you have sufficient traffic, it isn’t that hard to monetize it without becoming an ogre.

We’ve all heard the expression, “Build a better mousetrap, and they’ll come.”

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, and they’ll come — and they’ll bring friends too.”