I came across the following visual while reading Kevin Hogan’s Monday Morning Coffee. If you are not familiar with Kevin, check him out, he writes a dandy of a newsletter each week. If you are a small shop, he is a great ally.

>>>>>
Here’s a cool picture to describe a huge statistic…

www.kevinhogan.com is 1 website on this planet.

There are about 500 million websites not including all of the people on myspace, facebook, you tube, etc. Include those people and you have about 4 BILLION websites.

www.kevinhogan.com is 1 website.

If each website was a page in a fat phone book, there would be about 1000 websites (pages) in that book. If you took your three car garage and stacked 30 phone books to the ceiling that would be 30,000 websites.

Now, stack them from the front of the garage to the back of the garage on the wall and you now have 500,000 websites.

Next stack more phone books across the entire garage so the entire space was filled to the top with phone books. 15,000,000 websites. The garage is now 100% full.

STOP

www.kevinhogan.com is one website. You have just stacked a three car garage with phone books of which ONE RANDOM page at the back of the garage is www.kevinhogan.com

NO ONE WILL EVER FIND THAT PAGE. They would look for YEARS and die trying to find the page with your name scribbled on it.

But there are only 15,000,000 pages/websites in that garage. Nothing close to 4,000,000,000

We need help…we need to enlist THIRTY more garages packed to the brim to cover the official pages with websites and an additional 200 GARAGES to put phone books in for the rest of the pages that are specific to an individual or business.

AND that assumes that each website is ONLY one page.
>>>>>
Even PaladinPrincipals.com has dozens of pages available for public viewing and even more in the private client area with restricted access.

With a website, success happens because you provide other people with meaning, identity, experience or value. By creating a website with the intention to give people what is helpful, useful, valuable, fun and or gives folks meaning, you create what will be an authority website . . . the only thing you have to do is follow through.

The Internet is a very competitive place. Far more competitive than the walkabout retail world, and that too is your advantage. Competing sites fold under the choice of competition or being inert. Sites do not run on auto-pilot. But unlike the rigors of day-to-day in retail offline, once you have a solid foundation, the site can be run on regular maintenance as opposed to long, tedious hours — a privilege that that has been earned by putting in a lot of the right hours upfront. Unlike the real world where time doesn’t predict success, it does on the Internet.

Most companies building websites are totally unprepared for the time investment that must be made in order for a decent site to become successful. They are staffed with graphic designers and offline sales people – neither one of whom is native to the scientific process of anchoring an authority site. They can give you a great looking site, but they don’t build the foundation you need for long term success.

We prefer to move along with what works and as Kevin said it this morning, “Leave the fancy stuff to people who prefer cute failure over effective success.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.