The mystery of the Chinese bamboo tree and your business
There is a species of bamboo that grows in China. You have to water it daily for exactly five years, but nothing happens. If you miss one day of watering, the tree will never grow according to the legend. However, at the end of exactly five years (according to the story), this tree will grow ten feet in a day. According to what I have read on the internet, some species of bamboo can grow up to three feet per day, so this myth I am relating to you is not so far off. But, how does this relate to your business?
Business is weird and strange. A smart business person will have his company very streamlined and well organized. He will go to great lengths (or heights) to see that his business is as perfected as possible. But, sometimes you have to put in many years of hard work before you ever see any remarkable growth. In internet businesses, it is common to put in three years of hard work before ever turning a profit, or even a revenue. You have to have faith and love for your business, otherwise you don’t have a chance. But, how does this relate to me?
The story of 123notary
I remember, back in the 1900’s (I am sounding old now), I started 123notary.com, a notary directory. I started it to market my own personal notary services. I never made any money until 2002 when I made a trickle. But, I kept putting my time and money into that site out of passion and desperation. Finally all of a sudden in March of 2003, we started making 10x the income just like that! It is exactly like this crazy bamboo tree myth from China.
The outsourcing blog story
But, I just had another situation like this. Our Outsourcing blog (the one you are reading), is something that gives me great pleasure to write. I have a passion for taking a look at business from as many interesting perspectives as possible. I wish I could see more perspectives so I could write more. I have been working on this blog for two years, but with minimal traffic. I realized that the tags for the blog articles had been “hijacked” by wordpress. It is their right since my blog was hosted with them. So, I had to spend $1100 to my programmers to reconfigure the blog on my server, so that I could have my own tags. It took a few months because someone quit, and the programming company was behind schedule. But, eventually the reconfiguring task got done, and it was formatted exactly how I wanted it. The next step was to create some links from 123outsource.net to the blog. About a month after the last of these steps was completed, the blog traffic started really going up. For two years we got less almost neglegable search engine traffic and not much visitation. Now, we are getting more than 30 visits per day, and the visitation keeps going up. We might be getting 10,000 visits per month in a few months if I keep adding interesting articles! Also, the traffic on the outsourcing site has jumped by 20% in the last month as a result of the blog’s new success. I think that it might keep growing really fast if the blog continues to do well.