The Pareto Principle - Observe, Analyze and Repeat

Only you can define what 'success' means for you and to do that you need to write your own business plan. If you don't know what you want, you don't know if you are successful or not. Here some types of success that can be achieved with internet marketing, article writing etc.

• Money - Most of the people that get started with internet marketing want to make make money, either with Adsense, Amazon, other affiliate programs etc.
• Exposure - Others write online to get their name out, to establish themselves as an authority in their field and / or to promote their own book, product, service etc.
• Finding work and gigs - And others again use their online articles to promote themselves for certain jobs, for example as freelance writers. They are using their published articles as both, a means to find new customers and an online portfolio to show off their work.
• Combinations - And obviously some, or all, of the above can apply at the same time. For example an online writer that wants to find, primarily, new writing gigs (customers) might chose to monetize his or her articles at the same time with Adsense.

To know if you are successful, you need first to sit down and write your business goals down.

What do you want achieve with your articles?

The perhaps most important bit is to observe what is already working for you. Here is where you will discover that the Pareto Principle applies also to you. Make a list of all your online efforts and see which ones contribute the most to your success and which ones not. To do this you need a certain amount of data, i.e. which articles have driven the most traffic to your own website, which articles sell best in forms of products or which articles get the most 'clicks' in Adsense. Below an article I have written earlier that explains how to connect Adsense and Analytics for better data, check it out, it ain't difficult ;-)

If you have collected all this data, you should now see what is working best for which purpose. Now to the next step. For this you need to

To know if you are successful, you need first to sit down and write a business goal down.

Make a list of the top 20% of your articles that convert best for you.

We often get hung up by analyzing what doesn't work, instead we should analyze what works. This puts us not only in a more positive mind set, it also is more effective. As the saying goes 'chase the winners and forget about the losers' ;-) As I don't know your goals, I can only give you some tips on how to analyze your successful pages.

Topic - Which topics tend to result more in sales, which ones more in clicks?

Style / Layout - Does a certain style of writing or page layout has an influence how well your article converts?

Traffic - Which article gets the most traffic, why? From where? And which article drives the most traffic to your main site (if you have one).

At the end of this, you should be able to have a detailed description of the top 20% of your articles that answer the following question:

What makes this article so successful and which of my goals (if you have more than one) does it support best?

Often we spend far too much time in 'improving' things instead of repeating what we know that it works already. So, instead of going back through your old articles and spending time improving them, write new ones modeled on the ones you know work. I don't mean with this to write about the same things over and over again, just to copy your system, but not your content. For example you noticed that a certain baby product you have written about converts very well to Amazon sales. You check that article and copy its cute layout etc to write new articles, about new products but in the same style.

Or you noticed that every time you write about a certain topic, you get more visitors to your own website that followed a link you put at the end of your article. If increasing exposure is one of your goals, I would certainly suggest you write more about this topic.

Applying the Pareto principle to what you do means to

• Determine your top 20%
• Analyze your top 20%
• and repeat what works well

This way you put yourself not only in a more positive mind set, you also will reach your goals faster. It is tempting to dwell on things that didn't work out like we imagined they should and waste time with them, but in my experience this time is far better invested by repeating what already works for you. And that might well be something very unique that nobody will be able to copy easily ;-)