The Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging
“Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.”
Does that phrase sound familiar to you? If it does, that’s because our grade school teachers used it over and over again to help us learn how to do math in the proper order.
Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally = Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.
This is the order of operations. It’s important because it helps us solve our math problems correctly. If you have an equation such as this…
[(2 + 3)^2] – [(6*5-3) / 9] = X
…using the order of operations makes it relatively simple to find that X = 22. Without any particular order, we would never find the correct answer, and the world would end.
For those of us in the online business and blogging world, there’s a specific order of operations that we must follow too. If we don’t, it will be much more difficult to reach our goals.
The Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging is something I just came up with, but it sums up (pun intended) everything I’ve done since I started doing business online.
Here’s the mnemonic (you can make up your own, but I like this one for obvious reasons):
“In comes Dr. Flynn.”
Get it? “Incomes”?
Anyways, here is what it stands for:
In Comes Dr. Flynn = Intention, Content, Design & Follow-thru
Intention
Everything you do online must have intent. In fact, it should start with it. There must be a reason and motive behind every action you take - even all the way down to the headline that you write on your next blog post.
Without purpose or goals, there will be no passion, no excitement, and you will see no results.
Why are you doing what you’re doing?
Content
With a purpose and intention in mind, content must come next. Remember, content is King.
Your content is the information that people absorb, it’s the text that search engines find, and it’s exactly the vehicle you’re going to use to achieve your goals.
There are some debates between quality vs. quantity when it comes to your content, but really what it comes down to is how much value you’re providing to your audience. Provide tons of value and you will find success.
Design
Design matters. Whether it’s the look of your site, how people flow through it, what’s on it (or what shouldn’t be on it), it’s all important.
It’s not as important as content, but it’s the next most important thing.
You’ve heard me say this before: design without content is useless, but content without design is dumb.
The thing about design is that it can have a major impact on what you’re trying to do. Take the same content, illustrate it in two different ways, and you’ll have two different results. If that’s not a reason to make sure you optimize every single part of your website (by testing, experimenting, redesigning, etc.), then I don’t know what is.
Follow-thru
Last (but definitely not least), is your follow-thru.
If you’ve ever played golf or basketball, you know what “follow-thru” is all about. Even though it’s being applied physically in these sports, it plays the same role here in business.
For those of you who don’t quite understand, when taking a swing in golf or shooting a basketball with your wrist, it’s the follow-thru motion and action that you make after you swing or shoot that make sure you:
- Don’t lose speed and keep accelerating.
- Stay on target and maintain accuracy.
We should always be following through, because “just enough” isn’t good enough.
It can be really easy to stop or to give up – but that’s just like taking a golf swing and stopping the club right when you hit the ball. You’ve done a lot of work already, so you’ve got to keep going and make sure you’re doing what it takes to make sure you don’t lose speed, stay on target and maintain accuracy.
And remember, this doesn’t mean you have to work harder – it may just mean you have to work smarter.
For You
1) Do you agree with the Order of Operations for Online Business and Blogging? If not, what’s missing or how would you change it?
2) Do you have a different mnemonic? (This is just for fun).
3) Please retweet or share if you have the opportunity. Thank you! Cheers!
Posted on : April 23rd, 2010
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51 Comments (Click Here to Leave a Comment Below)
so simple! great guideline to follow for aspiring bloggers like myself. thanks patt!
Thanks Vinay!
Great post, Pat. These 4 steps are really what it all comes down to… I’m glad you stress design as an important factor also. Reminds me of Perry B. always saying “It don’t matter what it look like!” … love the guy, but being a designer, that always made me cringe. :]
YES! I’ve heard him say that thousands of time, and it really bugs me. I know what he’s trying to say, and I think it helps his customers understand they don’t have to be “perfect”, but still – the design helps the content along. I’m glad I’m not the only one who cringed whenever he said that too.
Hey Pat,
I agree with your points, but I think there’s one point needed for online businesses – be they blogs or other, and that’s promotion
For some people that’s just organic search traffic that comes naturally over time, and for others it’s paid ads or perhaps just getting discovered – but if there’s nobody out there finding what you’re doing, there won’t be any customers or readers for your business =)
I agree. Promotion definitely is important element.
I, personally, haven’t gotten to that element. I’m still working on the Content and Design, but I’m already realizing that people don’t just come. I have to market my blog/business. Once you get some momentum your readers/customers can help with the promotion, but until then, you’re on your own.
Maybe you could call promotion… “marketing” . Then with an Aussie accent say: In Comes Dr. Flynn Mate
Thanks Jim. I think with Design and Content, people will come – but only eventually. This was the case with my own website (greenexamacademy), because I didn’t really do anything to actively promote it. However, I know if I didn’t actively promote for SPI, i wouldn’t be where I’m at today.
Thanks for the comment!
Thanks Sid, you’re right. I think initially I had put marketing and promotion in the “Follow-thru” category, but after re-reading my article it doesn’t really come across. My apologies.
Promotion is important, and it’s what you do after you set everything up that can have a drastic effect on your results.
Thanks Sid for the back up!
i agree with everything pat said and i agree with this as well … the right promotion especially well designed, interesting, unique promotion can get people thinking and interested in seeing what you have to offer.
I’m definitely with you on follow through.
I just ran an interview with the founder of Artybuzz, a print-on-demand store (POD’s are great for passive income btw). I could have left it there, but I’ve been doing everything I can to make sure that post gets seen.
It’s important to me to make sure that if someone has taken time to contribute, they see the benefits – eyeballs, click-through’s etc, especially If my intention in posting is to generate social proof.
Quid pro quo.
Another part of follow through is making sure that old blog content stays live and maintains the momentum of your site’s development – I’m using a “related posts” plugin and a “Tweet old post” plugin to keep this activity as passive as possible.
You’re really doing some great things to really follow-through, Dexter. I love it! Definitely keeping the momentum going and getting your old blog posts to resurface is really important, and making sure the eye-balls of your readers see everything. Cheers!
Hi Pat,
This is a great post, everything works well if it has an order and the order you wrote above is very important for blogging success.
Thanks for the great post.
BTW: I sent you a guest post.
Thanks,
Onibalusi
Thanks Onibalusi, and I’ll definitely check out your guest post and leave you my comments. Cheers!
Hi Pat,
I will really appreciate that.
Thanks a lot,
Onibalusi
I think I needed this post, one thing i have been struggling with is having a solid game plan when it comes to the running of my blog. I seemed to have been doing things in a haphazard manner and it could be the main reason that I am not seeing any really sort of success. Thanks for the great post !!
I’m glad you found this post useful. It was meant to organize thoughts and give people a more outlined order of how things should be approached. It seems like the message is indeed getting through. Thanks Jason, and good luck with everything!
I like that intentions are the cornerstone of the whole project. Sometimes I have to ask myself why I am doing something and if it serves my ultimate goal.
Intentions, goals and purpose are everything in my opinion. And when the intentions are primarily to help someone else first (before making money), the money will just come. At least this is what I’ve noticed, and many other people I’ve spoken to have noticed too. Online Karma does exist!
Cheers Tyler!
Pat, that’s good….. Income Dr. Flynn. Now I’ll have to come up with one for myself, for fun.
I haven’t figured out everything about the order of operations in the online world yet, but when I do, you bet I’ll be sharing it. Fun post, Pat.
Thanks Moon! Have a great weekend!
Nice one, Pat… I like how you worked your name into the acronym. If you add Sid’s idea of promotion. you could make it “In comes Dr. P(romotion)at Flyyn”
Yes, indeed! I thought that promotion would be put into follow-thru, but it wasn’t really conveyed in my message. Dr. Pat Flynn would be cool!
Love it!
(And apparently you’ve left me otherwise speechless)
Cheers Jackie!
Love it!
Short and precise. You reminded me again for the importance of intention in our online ventures! Cheers!
Thanks Carey, and yes – intention is everything in my opinion. It drives the passion and gives you the energy to do everything else.
Follow-thru is a tough one.
I’d love to hear some more of your thoughts on follow-thru. Some practical tips for what works well for you would be really beneficial.
Thanks for sharing Pat.
Thanks Jim, I’ll think more about it and possibly write something up in the future. Cheers!
I love the mnemonic!
Thanks PA! Btw, do you have a name – I kind of feel weird calling you PA all the time, lol.
Pat, I’m a rather avid golfer so I’d like to expand upon your golf analogy here because I love the comparison. And great article by the way, I think the message is very important.
I’d like to pick up where you left off at stopping the swing AT the ball instead of following all the way through. That is the very important part. But first, the cool thing about the golf swing is, when you break it down each step of the way, you will see a return from each little improvement. Blogging and online business aren’t so different, as each motion must be completed before or after another motion, it can’t be skipping around all the time. As you get through the back swing and in to the down swing, to the ball, and through it. It all has to stay in a sequence.
As you continue to follow through after solid contact, and get that momentum all the way to the top of the follow through, you create more COMPRESSION, getting the ball to actually spin back towards you when it hits the green.
I like to think of it as my return on investment. If I put my quality out there, give it that compression that it needs and finish all the way at the top of my follow through, I’m going to see some spin back towards me, and we all know what that means
Or, you leverage the ball another way, and create a top-spin that will allow the ball to continue to roll for added distance/reach. The analogy works all of the way around, it all comes down to knowing the swing that you want to put on the ball, and following through with the motions – the game will come into line.
Thanks again for the post, nothing better than golf on Friday
hope this expansion helps some people out also!
Great additions to the golf analogy Brandon! Thank you!
Oh man, it’s been a little bit since I last played. Over a year ago I think. It’s sad, because I was just starting to average about 85-90 a game. I bet now I’ll be back at where I was when I started: 120-130…lol.
Cheers Brandon, and thanks again!
Glad to see design being mentioned more lately in business topics … some people seem to forget that we our a visual society and most of our first impressions are based off what we see (hence the saying “dont judge a book by its cover”). Great post pat !
Yes, exactly, Joseph. I can’t stress it enough either because of the exact reasons you mentioned.
Thanks!
Great visuals, Pat! The follow through step really brings everything all together. Without the follow through, all the other steps will not yield as much. I think we see lack of follow through all over the place with all the abandoned blogs, projects and websites. Sure, people had good intentions and perhaps a bit of content. Maybe the site even looked pretty cool. But without the follow through, those projects now all look like our abandoned MySpace pages.
Hey Rudy,
Thanks for the comment. In fact, it was an abandoned blog I ran across which served as the inspiration for this post. It was a great blog, had a great design and even great content, but it just didn’t follow-thru and it became a wasteland.
“…look like our abandoned MySpace pages.”
I couldn’t have said it any better.
Cheers Rudy!
Great line of blogging command.
“Content is King”, we’ve all heard it but it wasn’t until recently I truly understood it. To me, ‘content is king’ comes down to the SEO quality of the subject matter, the fluid matter in how content is written, your knowledge of the content and how it relates to your readers. And I think even if one reads that ‘content is king’ you just don’t get to understand it right off the bat. Its something that is learned and then you say, ‘ahhh’ (light bulb moment).
Well said, thanks Money Funk!
Hi Pat,
Yes, content is king! I have been focusing on that more and more. One of the things I have been very focused on is working on quality (where have we heard that before?) So, as part of my daily routine, I have spending at least 1 hour per day working on content build into my daily schedule. My other objectives will fall into place but not until I meet this first. Take Care, Mike
[...] Over at the Smart Passive Income Blog, you can read a great article on the order of operations for online business and blogging. [...]
I think you’ve made an excellent order of operations that is easy to understand too. I just want to add that when working on content and design, we should see to it that these things can easily be accessed and navigated by our readers.
Hey Pat… long time reader, first time commenter.
Pat, I read this post when it first came out and let it percolate over the weekend. My only issue with your “Order of Operations” is that I believe that design doesn’t really belong in this equation. And even if it did, it should be on equal footing with content.
I’ve read your posts on content vs. design before and I agree that one is useless without the other. But one thing that I have finally accepted is that content and design are such radically different animals that one person rarely does both well. You’re a great example of this with the SPI blog – when you wanted a redesign you made some wireframe sketches and gave a designer free reign to come up with a design that met your requirements.
Also, I don’t think that design should be tailored to fit individual content, as much as it should be tailored to fit the overall content message of all the content. You don’t redesign your blog’s template every couple days when you make a new post!
I’m not sure that this is coming across any less jumbled than it was when I read the post Friday, but it can at least spark some discussion…maybe.
Hi Andy, thanks for the comment. Great insight, and I’d love to respond to what you said.
Although content and design are different animals, like you said, that shouldn’t be a reason to focus only on one. A person may not do well in both, but some care to the design is necessary in my opinion. For example, a person can have the most well-written, best advice or content about something, but unless it’s presented in a way that’s readable, it’s useless. Readability is design. Also, in the competitive nature of doing business online, design is used to catch people’s attention, because really we’re all competing for people’s short attention span these days. If you read 100 blogs and they all look the same, the one that looks different will stand out, just because of the way it looks.
I never once mentioned that you have to do all of the design yourself. In fact, like you pointed out, I hired out a designer when I wanted to redesign my blog. That’s the perfect example of me saying that design IS really important. Ever since the redesign, I’ve noticed my traffic and stickiness rates have changed for my favor.
Lastly, I agree when you say overall design shouldn’t be tailored to individual content, but it should be tailored to the individual blog or person behind it.
I hope that all makes sense. I’d love to hear what you or anyone else reading this response thinks as well.
Cheers, and thanks again Andy!
I think, the “promotion” thing is missing in the article. Content and Design are important, of course. But without getting found there are nothing in the Google World.
Great post as usual Pat! I am actually in a redesign phase of my site, so perfect timing. I believe design and content are the most important factors in getting people to come back to your site again and again. That’s why your blog is so successful. You found the perfect mix for both, and you just keep pushing yourself to give us even more. Thanks for that!
Hey Pat
Great post, love the entire ICDF wordplay, seriously, you always surprise me with the creative ways to blog. Its inspiring and at the same time fun!
Keep up the good work, always appreciated
Cheers
Tammy
I really like your nemonic device here. I am going to use that in my own business. I think that with th right content and the proper reach to the right customer base, you can build an on-line (or off-line) business to any scale that you wish. Like you said, it’s all about excelleration. Money and ideas like speed. If you keep pushing forward you have no choice but to reach your goal.
If you aren’t moving forward and getting better, you are getting worse. There is no standing still in business.
Joshua Black
The Underdog Millionaire
Hey Pat, what about a competition to come up with some creative sentences for I.C.D.F.? Can I start it off with two I just though of?
a. I Chase Dollars Frequently
b. Insane Checks Delivered Weekly
Michael.
Ummmm. That should be Fortnightly
, ’cause weekly just doesn’t start with anything resembling an F.
Hi Pat,
This is very good advice. You have an uncanny ability with words. I firmly endorse your number 1 criterion, “Intention”. If there is no “intent” then no passion will exist for what you are doing. If you have a burning passion to succeed in this business you will do everything necessary to have that success, including taking the advice that you have generously shared and apply them where necessary.
That goes for yours truly as well, I have a lot to learn.
Clever Patt, very clever