Empowering Small Businesses on the Web

From the Real Sim­ple Suc­cess newsletter.

photo credit: daniel9d

In this week’s issue: It’s the tech­nol­ogy plus YOU that makes the tech­nol­ogy magic. Don’t for­get this, if you want to the tech­nol­ogy to work for you.

My father came home with his first per­sonal com­puter in 1983. Time had just named the per­sonal com­puter its “Man of the Year” a year before. They were brand new as main­stream appliances.

It was magic. It lit up, and the tiny green char­ac­ters danced across the screen, chang­ing at a whim. No more white out, no more backspac­ing to under­line a word.

My father was a writer, and for years, he planned to write a novel, but never quite got around to it. (In the last years of his life,he did get around to it–and wrote many good novels.)

After a few months with the MBC-1000, my father said, “you know, I guess I have to admit:

“I some­how thought the com­puter would help me be a bet­ter writer. But of course, it won’t make me be a bet­ter writer. To be a good writer, you just have to write. The machine’s not going to do it for you!”

It’s the same now, as it was in 1983. The magic of the tech­nol­ogy daz­zles us, and some­how con­vinces us that we’ll mag­i­cally be freed from doing any work!

I think it is easy to–often unconsciously–apply this same think­ing to today’s web tech­nolo­gies. While many of these atti­tudes are below the sur­face, I think it’s easy to get into mind­sets that sub­tly reflect this same view­point. Atti­tudes like:

The fan­tasy: “Once I have an amaz­ing, beau­ti­ful new web­site, lots and lots of new clients will find me and give me new busi­ness.”
The real­ity: The web­site is a tool to facil­i­tate new busi­ness; it won’t bring it to you on its own.

The fan­tasy: “Our new Face­Book page will cre­ate lots of new clients.”
The real­ity: You can cre­ate lots of new clients, using Face­Book as a tool, by focus­ing on pro­duc­ing value for them, over time.

The fan­tasy: “Once we opti­mize our page to the right key­words, we’ll start get­ting a flood of traf­fic to our site.”

The real­ity: Depend­ing on your key­words, this could be true, or much more work could be required. Focus­ing too heav­ily on key­words can get you dis­tracted from your main mis­sion; unless you have lots of money to spend, you’re bet­ter of start­ing by focus­ing on

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I don’t mean to sound cyn­i­cal here. The point I am mak­ing is that the com­bi­na­tion of these tech­nolo­gies, plus some­one who really has
some­thing to say, and really wants to help their customers–now that is very pow­er­ful. To ignore any of these ingre­di­ents, right now, is very foolish.

In each case, the point is that the col­lab­o­ra­tion between these won­der­ful new tech­nolo­gies, and a per­son who cares about his clients, and is devoted to help­ing them succeed–that is the pow­er­ful combination.

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My father kept that MBC-1000 for, like, 10 years. “It’s a dinosaur,” I would think, but “it gets the job done”–that’s what he thought. And over the years, I am sure that sim­ple com­puter saved him many hun­dreds of hours of effort, over using his old Brother elec­tric type­writer. He learned how to get it to do what he needed it to do, and it did it well, for many years.

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What’s your rela­tion­ship with the tech­nol­ogy you use? Do you expect it to “do it for you,” or do you find ways of work­ing with what you
do? Please share, by adding a com­ment below.