Get Out of the Quicksand
Success needs change. By definition, doing the same thing over and over will only get you the same results. In this weird world we now live in, this sentiment could never be more true. If you don't get out of the quicksand of daily monotony, you'll get sucked down further and could even drown.
Sometimes you've just to see things a bit differently. Take a different approach requires a new perspective. This was highlighted to me the other day in two ways:
- a book I am currently reading
- my latest WA training lesson on gathering comments for your web site.
Firstly - the book. It's not a motivational, self-improvement or skills building tome. Rather the opposite, its an escapist crime thriller of the type I generally turn to for relaxation and to turn off my frequently over busy mind. The title - Quicksand - hence the heading for this blog post. Its a Swedish crime noir, and during her trial, the central character makes the following observation, which struck me as being very apt:
"…no one wants to listen. They’re expecting what they think they already know. People like to say that kids believe what they want to believe, but the truth is, it’s impossible to fool kids. Adults, on the other hand, want to make up their own minds about which story best matches their beliefs. People aren’t interested in what others say or think, what they have gone through, what conclusions they have drawn. People are interested in hearing only what they think they already know.”
We tend to follow our own beliefs and make value judgements according to our own frame of reference - or what suits us best. This is where fake nes and media manipulation is so effective - it plays on prejudices and thoughts that already exist.
If we are to move forward in our lives, sometimes we have to be a little more questioning about what (and why) we do what we do.
And this is where the second bit comes in - I'm slowly working my way through the training here at WA and get to the bit about getting comments from fellow members and using these to boost your sites profile in google.
One of my sites is 3 years old (I bought it through fippa about 9 months ago. The settings are to manually approve all comments. Whilst I've been focussing on content and keywords, SEO settings and a myriad other things, I hadn't really given a thought to comments. I had about 2,700 of them - mainly spam. So I've spent a day or so cleaning them up - updating Askimet for one thing to rid the spam.
When I checked my backlinks, and broken links a month or so ago - it came up with a whole bunch of negatives, and I wasn't sure how to fix these. Turns out most of it were these spammy comments - even though I hadn't approved them.
Downside is, my DA has dropped from 24 to 23 - proabably because there's several comments from new sitres with a DA of only 1. Hopefully as these sites gain some age and more traciuon, those DA's will rise, and boost mine with them.
Bottom line - I now have an additional strategy to follw, and better knowledge and confidence in how to make this work. All because I tried something new and left my preconceptiopns behind.
All the best in your journey forward,
David
Recent Comments
2
Interesting post, David! Thanks for sharing!
Stay safe!
Jeff