I clean my cars on a Sunday morning.
About once every two years.
I hate it, and to me it’s the perfect example of how to waste some of your precious time on Earth, because in the great scheme of things ladies and gents, we’re not here for very long. The blink of an eye in cosmic terms, and spending some of it hoovering crisps out of the child seats doesn’t sit too well with me.
But it was fun for two reasons. Firstly I wouldn’t have to drive the big one round wondering what that ‘funny smell’ was any longer, and secondly because my three year old daughter decided she wanted to help, which meant it would take twice as long but be a hundred times more enjoyable, albeit wetter when I’d showed her how the windscreen washer worked.
When it was done though, I felt sufficiently satisfied that I’d completed a task I’d put off for so long that I spent an hour at my laptop doing exactly the same.
I tackled boring and repetitive tasks that I don’t do half as much as I should like backing up blogs, files and going through files called ‘to read’ or ‘ideas’ on my laptop that I hardly ever look at.
The result was that I feel a little safer because I’ve backed up imortant data, but also because I’ve re-discovered ideas that I’d long forgotten and some of them are frighteningly good!
If I say so myself I do have some great business ideas, but like most people I forget to act on them, put them off and too often forget about them altogether.
Going back through my ideas book and files on the PC bring them back to the forefront of my mind and start the creative juices flowing.
Which brings me back to the reason I decided to wash the cars.
I have quite a few niche sites which do pretty well and some which bomb and aren’t worth the hosting they cost. That’s fine with me because as long as I make a decent profit in the long run I’m extremely happy.
One of my niche sites recently hit a huge gold vein and I woke up to a very nice surprise in my account. A bit of research, traffic tracking and the rest showed up something interesting – the traffic had come from an affiliate who had suddenly – without any warning or prompting decided to spring clean his site, optimise his adwords and remail his list.
The results were great for me and even better for him because he got 60% of every sale.
So going back and cleaning things up resulting in a few thousand dollars for both of us, for no other reason except remembering to do it.
So I’m now looking through all my sites, which is going to take some time, and clean them up a little to see what happens.
A bit of renovation on long forgotten sites can have similar results to launching a new product (almost). Go back and check out how your older sites are doing and if there’s anything you can do to titivate them a bit. It’s well worth it.
But I’ll still leave the cars another 2 years.
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