Question of the day. Is your home business like a game of Donkey Kong? Not sure? Wondering if Wags has totally flipped his lid with this one? Well, if you want the answer to that question, just in case it might be vital to the health of your home business, you might want to read this article. I promise you that it will open up your eyes to possibilities that you’ve never considered.
Before we answer the question, we have to first make sure you know what Donkey Kong is. It’s been a very long time since this classic dominated arcades. In fact, it has to be at least 25 years since I last played it, if not longer. Honestly, I just don’t remember. That’s how long it’s been.
Anyway, Donkey Kong was a game where the plot was simple. Mario, our hero, had to climb through this construction site in order to rescue the heroin, Pauline, from Donkey Kong, the big bad gorilla. If Kong managed to hit Mario with any of the barrels that he threw at him, Mario would lose a life. Once he lost his last life, the game was over and you had to start again from the very beginning.
Donkey Kong was a trap as there was no real way to win. Sure, you could complete a level but the game would just go back to the beginning and the next level would start and you’d have to keep going. Each time you did this, it got harder and harder. Eventually, even if you were good enough to last for hours, the game would end because you’d lose your last life.
In other words, it was a no win scenario. You simply tried to do better than the time previous. But winning? There was really no such thing.
A lot of people’s home businesses are kind of like Donkey Kong. They make a little progress but then they hit one or more of those barrels and they get stuck. They either stop getting traffic to their site or the sales stop because somebody made a better mouse trap or, well, pick any number of horrible things that can happen along the way. Point is, no matter what you did, you never seemed to make it to the top level and stay there.
The worst part of Donkey Kong was that you couldn’t save the game. That’s the one thing I like about today’s video games. You could always save and start at the point you last left off in order to keep from “dying” for good. And then, eventually, you WOULD make it to the end of the game and win. With Donkey Kong, this just wasn’t an option.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your home business had a “save” function so you could pick up from the last place you left off before the last fatal disaster struck? Well, it does. But you have to run it like one or that option never comes up. So, that brings us to the $64,000 question.
“How do you run your business with a save function so that you never completely die in the face of catastrophe?”
There are quite a few things you can do. In fact, there are too many to go over in the space of this article, but I’ll go over the more important ones.
The literal death of your business can come if you suffer a PC crash and lose everything. I can’t tell you how many people have contacted me to tell me that they lost everything and had no backup. I don’t know what I was supposed to tell them other than sorry. Next time you’ll learn.
If you don’t do regular backups of your PC, you’re looking for trouble. There is no other way to put it. I am speaking from experience. There was a time in my life when I didn’t do these things. I lived to regret it. Fortunately, my business didn’t die. But it could have.
Another thing people do that puts their home business at risk is relying on one thing to keep it going. Just recently, I saw a thread at the Warrior Forum where a home business owner doing over $10,000 a month was put out of business because their Adwords account was closed on them.
It boggled my mind that with that kind of income they didn’t bother to work on a backup or additional source of advertising just in case. And why no affiliate program to have others bring in sales for you as well?
This is something that is very common with businesses that rely on just one thing. They think it can never happen to them… until it does.
Another thing that you should be doing to make sure that your business doesn’t run like a game of Donkey Kong is to test and track your activities regularly. I’ve heard stories of people who would let a campaign run and never check it to make sure it’s even still running. Then one day, they notice that sales have stopped. When they check other stats, they see that traffic has been slowly declining for over 3 months.
Had they been checking this, they could have then looked to see what the problem was. Were they getting fewer impressions for their ads? Were some of their pages down? Did their site drop in the SERPs? If you don’t check these things regularly, how can you possibly know why things are going bad when they do?
And all the above is just the tip of the iceberg. Did your payment processor suddenly put a freeze on your account but you were too lazy to even check your email to find out and the last time you logged into your account was 60 days ago?
If you don’t keep an eye on your business, you’re eventually going to get hit by that last barrel and your game is going to end.
So please, don’t turn your home business into a game of Donkey Kong.
It may be fun for a little while. But eventually, losing gets tiresome.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
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