Consistency Is the Key To Long-Term Success
Consistency is one of my personal weak points. I seem to work in flows and ebbs. Some days I’ll wake up and write 10 or 20 articles, losing all track of time until I’m finished. Other days I’ll write an entire 10,000 word report instead. I start a new blog, and sometimes I can work on it for several weeks.
Eventually though, I get tired of the topic, or I have a lazy day, or something else catches my eye. So I move on. This is one of the key reasons I like to automate so much of my business. Since I already know I have a difficult time being consistent, I’ve gone to great lengths to put things into place which will make me be consistent whether I’m doing anything or not.
Consistency is a critical factor of being successful for the long term… especially online. If you want search engines to visit your site regularly for example, and keep indexing new content, you have to keep giving them that new content. This is why everyone tells you to regularly update your website. And this is why search engines such as Google really like blogs.
Blogs by their very nature tend to be updated quite frequently. And even those which are not updated often are at least updated somewhat regularly. And this makes them a very powerful tool to actually train search engines with.
Yes you can actually train a search engine. All you have to do is add new content to your website. If you add content once each month, you will train the search engines to come and check your site about once a month. If you add stuff weekly, then they’ll learn to come back and check weekly. And yes, if you add things daily, or even multiple things each day, you will train them to come running frequently throughout everyday.
The trick of course, is to stay consistent. If you load up thousands of pages of content in just one day, or even one week, search engines will come looking absolutely. But if you add nothing else after that, they will stop looking.
What this means is, it doesn’t really matter how big your site is, or how fast you add content to it… as long as you keep it consistent. If you’re going to add a thousand pages in one day, then make sure you have a plan to add another thousand pages on a regular basis such as monthly or weekly.
Most people are like me though. They have a very difficult time maintaining the schedule. Getting started is not usually too hard, and everyone has different tolerance levels too. So some people may be able to continue adding content (or creating products or whatever they’re doing) for several months before they start burning out. Others may only be able to keep going for a few days or a few weeks. Those who can continue going for many months and even years are the ones who succeed the most.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Hammer one nail”? Essentially, the lesson goes something like this: If you’re building a house, you have hundreds of nails that need to be nailed in. If you try to hammer all of them at once, it will take you a very long time for any one of them to be fully nailed in. If instead, you focus on just one nail and hammer that as long as it takes, it will eventually go in fully. In fact, it may seem to go in fairly quickly and easily. And that is the power of focus.
I feel it’s also the power of consistency. If you consistently swing a hammer to hit that one nail, you will get the success you are looking for. Yes you can hammer three or four of those nails at once, and as long as you are focused and consistent, all of them will go in too. But it happens faster if you focus on just one first.
Even focusing on just that one nail though will not automatically make it be nailed in to your board. You have to swing your hammer. And you have to keep swinging that hammer consistently, over and over and over, until it is driven fully in.
Now of course if you hire people to hammer your nails, or you have machines which automatically do it for you, many more nails can be hammered in all at once. And to me that’s what automation is all about. Putting systems, and people or scripts or machines into place where ever possible will help you stay consistent with what ever you are doing in your business.
Before you get to that point of course, you have to be consistent yourself. Regardless of what kind of business you are running, you need to stay consistent. If you’re writing articles, creating e-books, building websites, even running eBay auctions… it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you do it today and get success from it, but you don’t do it again for weeks or months, you will not see consistency in your success. Because you have not been consistent in building it.
If on the other hand, you continue doing your chosen success building practices day in and day out, you will start seeing success. And you will continue seeing success, and those successes will grow by leaps and bounds.
So sit down and make a list for yourself today. What activities have you done in the past that have shown some kind of results? Even small results count because we all have to start somewhere. Once you have your list of success results, choose which of those you do without much effort, or those you like the most, or those which brought the most success. Write those actions onto a consistency list. Then start doing them every single day, or every single week if that’s all you can do. But make a plan to do them consistently, and stick to that plan.
