Effort Versus results

When I started Internet marketing I spent hours and hours clicking through adverts on traffic exchanges to get readers to my sites and to an extent it worked, but more often than not, the people who were reading my adverts were in it for the exact same reason as me. They were there to promote their own sites and were not interested in reading other peoples ads let alone buy anything from them. I eventually realised I was putting too much effort into this and was not reaping the rewards at the other end. This reminds me of a joke:

An Englishman moved into the Highlands of Scotland and bought a farm. One day his chicken jumped over the fence into the neighbours farm and laid an egg. He went to the neighbours farm house and asked for the egg back. However, the farmer next door advised since the egg was in his farmland then he owned the egg. The argument went on between the Englishman and the Scotsman before the Scotsman came up with a solution. Here in the Highlands we have a method to resolve issues such as this.

Each of us takes a turn and kicks each other between the legs and times how long we each stay down for on a stop watch. The person who gets back to his feet the quickest wins. Since the Englishman was in Scotland and wanted to abide by the Highlander's customs he agreed to go along with the contest.

The Scotsman said I'll go first and walked backwards a 100 paces and then ran up towards the Englishman and with all his might kicked him between the legs. The Englishman flew up into the air then came down with a thud and rolled about in agony while the Scotsman timed him. After a while the Englishman staggered to his feet and and mumbled in a weak voice "how did I do?" the Scotsman answered. "6 minutes and 10 seconds, that's amazing, I could never beat that. You keep the egg."


The point is don't put more effort in to achieving a goal than what the goal is worth. Remember what your goal or target is and measure how much time and effort you will need to put in to achieve this. If you are selling keyboards at $30 each it would be bad practice to spend $29 in advertising and shipping unless your were selling thousands of keyboards a week. Like the Englishman in the joke, you may get the result you wanted but at what cost?