It’s 11:38 pm on a Monday night and the rest of the house: the kids and the wife, have drifted off to sleep one-by-one. Meanwhile, I’m online tweaking 3 or 4 different websites and trolling for plugins to improve my websites. I had just installed an exciting one called Jetpack that bundles together 8 great tools in one package, including a Twitter Feed widget, site stats, shortcode embeds, shortlinks, Gravatar Hovercards, and a few others. I was excited to find more, so I did the obvious: a Google search for “best WordPress plugins.”
The top result for my search was a very well-written article with the supremely catchy title: “The 15 Best WordPress Plugins to Use in 2011.” That title alone is worth the price of admission: keyword rich, relevant and in-the-moment. Of course I clicked it and, as advertised, I discovered some gems that I immediately downloaded and installed: W3 Total Cache, HeadSpace2 SEO, SEO Smart Links and others. The site that I had found was: Nicholas Cardot’s Site Sketch 101, a well designed, attractive blog about website design and blogging. I browsed through the site and was attracted to one article in particular: “How to be a Credible Online Authority.”
I’ve been building websites in one way or another since the late 1990’s and I’ve been a professional internet marketer since 2008. Despite those two facts I’m still shocked by what I don’t know about the internet. I focus so hard on Local Search, Web Development and Social Media, I sometimes feel guilty that I don’t know everything about Affiliate Marketing or Pay-Per-Click or non-Local SEO. The article, and this quote in particular, really reassured me:
“What’s wrong with taking on an attitude that expresses that you’re learning while you’re teaching?”
That’s the attitude with which I started my business and the attitude I have every day. I’m learning more and more every day, and I want to share what I’ve learned as my knowledge grows. I’ll never claim to be an all-knowing guru. I’ll always be a student looking for the best answer.
I gave myself the title “Head Navigator” when I started the company to poke fun at myself. It’s really hard to navigate when the online landscape is always changing. I’ll never know “everything”, all I can do is take Nick’s advice:
“The right answer is to study, practice, improve and grow. Do this and your authority will grow with you.”