Choose Plans That Get Traction and Stop Wasting Time

By Jen McGahan • June 12th, 2010

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How to tell the difference between a dream and a plan…

Jeffrey Eisenberg spoke at the Austin SEO Meetup last Thursday evening on The 21 Secrets for Top Converting Websites. Good stuff. One of many great tips we came away with was #19 — A System for Prioritization. The way I understood the story: The Eisenberg team went to a large client with a giant binder full of things the client could do to improve his website. The head honcho there took a look at the size of the book and suggested they capture the most important ones with a system as follows:

Rate every item with a score of 1-5

resources — how much money does it take? Do you have it?
time — how long will it take? Do you have the time?
impact — how much impact will it have?

The items that got the highest score (15) are the ones you tackle first (or the ones you tackle, period).

This tip alone was worth the time and travel to the meetup. I told Sam on the way home that we should buckle down and try that every day. After a chuckle that since we don’t have time or money, we have an easy job of it (doesn’t every one wish for more of both?), we started to think seriously about the things we should be acting on. Tomorrow.

Just to show you how the important stuff tends to get reinforcement, here’s a sentence from Start-up Guide to Guerrilla Marketing by Jay and Jeannie Levinson that I came across just yesterday:

Wanna-be’s seek a perfect plan; Guerrilla Entrepreneurs execute — and adjust the plan later.
Wanna-be’s wait for their lucky break; Guerrilla Entrepreneurs engineer four, five, six plans and execute them in tandem, wagering that at least one plan will get traction.

I think we have the plan that has traction while we’ve been putting a half-baked effort into too many other projects and ideas. That must change.