There is some truth to the saying “Slow and steady wins the race.” This is especially true when it is over an extended period of time. Even progress at the slowest possible pace can add up after a while.
Quite often, I will start a small project and don’t think much of it at the time when I start it. When I first put guitar chords on my website, I just started out with the first few keys. Then a few months later I did the remaining keys. That meant that I have 12 pages for the 12 major keys and the main page that linked to them all. A whopping total of 13 pages in that section of the website. Not too impressive though. Not yet anyway.
About a year or two later, I decided to put guitar scales up on the site. I just started with the major, and minor pure scales for each key, which meant 24 more pages. Now the guitar lessons portion of the site was up to 37 pages. Of course that wasn’t good enough, so then I went back a few months later and added even more guitar scales. That portion of the site eventually went over 100 pages. The traffic to the website increased dramatically as all of the content was being added. The new content would start showing up in the search engines and the increasing number of visitors reflected that.
I then decided to add more instruments. I decided to add mandolin chords. Once again, the traffic increased significantly. As soon as I saw that there was a significant increase generated by adding the mandolin chords,I decided to add the scales for the mandolin too. Then I added banjo chords, keyboard chords and other music related features to the website. With each addition to the website in content, the more visitors I received, as a result.
Not only was I adding music related features to the site but I had also been adding classic poetry. Originally, I had a goal of 200 poems. Over time, though, I added more and more. Now, there are over 2,000. It took a while, but they add up over time.
The same is true regarding other things I have been working on throughout the years. I had joined a few social networking sites and started to add friends. My Myspace friend count currently stands at almost 31,000. I have over 5,000 Facebook friends and a couple of thousand Twitter followers. It took a while to compile them but now I use the social networking sites to help drive traffic to my sites. That with what I get from the search engines gets me a couple of million page views a year on my websites.
I also started to develop my own product line. When I first started to do my websites, I had no product line. Now I have a handful of products but, slowly, over time, I will continue to add more. I use the websites to pull people in and then promote my products from within the sites. Cumulatively, the tasks of creating the content for the sites, creating and uploading the pages, creating the products, writing articles, working with social networking sites and all of the other things take up a lot of time. Much of that time is divided between the various tasks. So progress is quite slow for each of those tasks. However, over time, much progress is made.
Over a period of just over ten years, I have accumulated about 4,000 pages on the Internet, accumulated all of those friends, I mentioned above, on the social networking sites, started to compile articles, recorded my own music, made the music available for download and have done a number of other things. Now, it sounds like I did a lot, but it took ten years to get to that point. Ten years is a significant amount of time in my book.
If you break the 4,000 pages on the Internet down by year, it averages 400 pages a year. Well, there are 365 days in the year. That means, on average, I created 1.1 pages per day. Doesn’t really sound like that much now, does it? It’s that slow and steady thing creeping up on you. The idea is not to lose your enthusiasm. The idea is to maintain enough determination, long enough, to actually be able to create something big. They say that quitters never win and winners never quit. Maybe that idea combined with the fact that slow and steady wins the race, is what really makes the difference.
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