In the E-Myth revisited, Michael Gerber goes on at length about the need to systematize everything in your business. The book itself is horribly written, using a poor metaphor of a pie-baker, and is a thin lead generation tool for Gerber, but the point he makes is an excellent one:
Your Business Needs to Be Systematized, and Your Business needs to serve you.
When I first sat down to really think about this, it was an eye-opener. The average SEO/SEM/Affiliate does a lot of the same things, day in and day out. We optimize sites, build links, talk to merchants, run PPC campaigns, monitor cash flow, order content, promote content, and whatever else is necessary to turn a profit in our business. The thing is, how many of us spend the time to document what we do everyday, how we do it, why we do things a certain way, and how we can make it happen?
So I decided to spend some time paying attention to the different things being done by me, my employees, contractors and anyone else who does things for me repeatedly. I paid attention to things that tended to reoccur often and tried to map out both for myself and others the best way to accomplish certain tasks, and the steps involved in most of the things we do.
After doing this for a while and finally mapping out most of the major functions for our business, we’ve experienced a few interesting results:
- Streamlined a lot of the day to day functions – for example: we’re able to identify link targets much faster, acquire those links much faster. Overall that means more links for the same effort we were putting in previously.
- Less apprehension about employee turnover: One of the biggest fears in any knowledge based business, especially SEO, is having to find qualified employees, train them and then monitor their work before they can be 100% functional. When you start systematizing everything, it’s much easier to teach new employees what to be done, and actually allows us to lower standards for functions that were previously assigned to only high level people.
- Rethinking how we do things: Because I spent some time systematizing everything, it’s allowed me to spend some time in the internals of what we do and remove some of the deadwood and shifting our business model.
- More Time for Business Development: Since every thing is more streamlined now, there’s more time for Biz Dev, which means more growth and more money.
This is what’s helped us – what have you systematized in your SEO?
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