The Traits of a Successful Webmaster
Being a webmaster is a difficult endeavour - you need to have incredible tenacity and a vision that you can actually implement. Because of that, successful webmasters tend to have certain traits that help them run a successful website. These traits may come naturally to some, but don't think that they can't be learnt:
1. Getting Things Started
There's so much to think about, how can you possibly implement everything you need to at once? The more time you spend planning, the more you feel like the task ahead is a behemoth, and the harder it is to start. It's important and vital for your website's success to plan thoroughly, but you need to actually get started once it is time. Understand that there will always be changes to make, and many of them you can make while the site or function is actually live and being shown to visitors.
2. Regularly Changing the Site
This is a form of perfectionism, but it's an essential part of running a successful site. You possibly won't ever have a perfect website, and that's okay, it should be something that you're constantly working on, whether it's by using A/B testing or by conducting a regular SEO analysis. You need to be able to make conscious decisions regarding the optimisation of your website, and you can't really justify your decisions without data. So, successful webmasters regularly change their sites, but they do so by testing and getting both quantitative and qualitative data.
3. Extremely Focused
Being focused on your site isn't enough; you need to focus on one element of your site at the time and smash it out of the park. A common thread among successful webmasters is choosing a marketing and promotion strategy and focusing on getting that right before moving onto another. There are many strategies that work much better together, but you shouldn't move onto another strategy until you've at least fully prepared the stratagem that you are focusing on and set up a framework that allows you to change and evolve how it works. You don't have to put a lot of pressure on yourself, just understand that it is a continuous process and you can get better every day – the Japanese practice of Kaizen.
4. The Power of Mistakes
Mistakes are powerful learning tools. You might remember a lesson from a costly mistake, but understanding the power of mistakes means that you actively try to learn from others – as you get all the benefits of learning from a mistake without a cost apart from time. You will earn a bigger income faster if you start to educate yourself early and model your success on the success of other websites. It can be helpful to have a strict routine that you stick to. Maybe spend 40% of your working day on improving and testing existing infrastructure, 40% on developing a new tool or strategy, and 20% on learning. If you learn every day, you will turbocharge your growth and take a short cut to running a successful website.