5 Things I've Learned in 5 Years at About.com

This month marks my fifth year as the Entrepreneurs Guide for About.com. In that time, I've grown the traffic for the site by nearly 500%, shared a great deal of what I know about entrepreneurship and learned a great deal more that I didn't already know about it. So I thought I'd share a few of them with you.

1. Get paid to promote yourself. Sure, I get paid, and reasonably well, for being the Entrepreneurs Guide. But the real payoff is far greater. It looks great on a byline or a speaker's one-sheet. It opens doors. I get press passes to cool events. I get to hear about all the latest new technology directly from the entrepreneurs who are creating it. I get to expand my network for my main business with all the forum participants, small business bloggers, other About.com Guides, guest authors and interview subjects. If you're bootstrapping, why pay to market yourself if you can get paid to market yourself? There are any number of ways to do it. You can become a professional blogger, write a book, do public speaking or maybe even become an About.com Guide yourself. And after five years, my main business is booming, and I've spent hardly anything on marketing. Plus I'm doing something I love and getting paid for it -- how great is that?
2. Income automation will make your life better. Five years ago, I knew that developing passive income streams was important, but I really didn't realize just how important it was. If I had, I would have put off working on my other businesses for a couple of months and just cranked out as much content as I could here on About. Whether it's article writing or network marketing or book royalties, it can help you get through a cash flow crunch later in your business. The sooner you can create automated income, the better.
3. Sex sells. Back in July 2005, I was reading the the Forbes Celebrity 100, a list of the 100 wealthiest people in sports and entertainment, and their story about porn star Jenna Jameson caught my eye. As I read it, I became fascinated with her story and the potential lessons that all entrepreneurs could learn from it. So I wrote a story entitled Jenna Jameson's Transformation from Porn Princess to Media Mogul, and it was a smash hit. A few months later, as part of my series of profiles of famous entrepreneurs, I wrote a profile of Hugh Hefner, calling him "the ultimate lifestyle entrepreneur". It was also hugely popular, and when About.com decided to feature it in the top right corner of most of the pages on About.com for a couple of weeks, it created the largest traffic spike I've ever had. Now, I didn't write these stories just because "sex sells" -- I wrote them because I like lessons from unexpected places -- that's where a lot of innovation comes from. But it turns out that they are still some of the most popular articles on my site.
4. Search engine optimization is an essential skill. No matter what your business, the simple truth of the matter is that if your site is well optimized, Google will far and away be the #1 source of referrals to your web site. You don't have to be an expert at it, but I think every entrepreneur owes it to themselves to understand the basics and to make sure that whoever is producing your web content, as well as whoever is designing your web site, are experts at it. It shouldn't be done as an afterthought -- it should be an integral part of your web design and content creation. You should also be blogging. A blog is the easiest way to get a top Google ranking without being an SEO expert.
5. You don't have to go it alone. Just because you're a sole proprietor or independent professional doesn't mean you have to do everything yourself. I'm an independent contractor here at About, and I get tremendous help from my editors and fellow Guides, as well as the support staff at About. But I have also gotten help in other ways -- in addition to getting guest articles to help fill out my content, I've also hired researchers, interns, transcriptionists and more. Remember that time is money. Even if you could do something yourself, what is the opportunity cost of whatever you're giving up in order to do that task that could be delegated to someone else? You don't have to hire full-time employees -- "micro-outsourcing" is now available for just about every conceivable task, or you may be able to partner or barter with another company to meet your needs. Letting go of control can be difficult, but it's the only way you'll ever become a business owner rather than a business manager. I suppose I've always known this, but meeting and interviewing both Tim Ferriss and John Assaraf and Murray Smith really helped drive the point home this year.

So there it is. Nothing lofty and idealistic -- just nitty-gritty practical stuff. But one other thing that I've learned is that if you don't take care of the nitty-gritty practical stuff, you'll never have the opportunity to build your dream business that's going to change your life and make the world a better place.