Why Some of the Biggest Successes Make the Biggest Mistakes
I have been going through my emails since arriving back in the UK, only 165 left. One of the messages prompted me to write this short post.
The message included the phrase “I guess though he must be right, after all his blog is huge”. I realised reading this I might be partly to blame for misleading this blogger. Over on Problogger I wrote a couple of posts looking at what we can learn from successful blogs.
You see, just because someone has a popular blog does not mean they are doing all the right things.
People or companies, the more success they have sometimes the more ingrained wrongness becomes. When I worked for a marketing agency some of the biggest companies with GDP-sized advertising budgets did some of the most stupid things. Their own successes, despite dumb moves, reinforced their mistakes. They believed what they were doing must be right, or at least not broken, because they were doing so well. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
Smaller operations see more immediate feedback to the decisions they make. A change will be reflected in the results. Mistakes are not so easily masked by successes in other areas.
So just because a blog is successful do not think everything they do made it that way, it could be a decision they made was covered by performance in another area.
Do not mistake correlation with causality. Look deeper for why something might work, and above all test.
Posted on April 10th, 2007 by Chris Garrett in Blogging
Interesting post. Its one of those things that I have never realised before, but seems so obvious when you point it out… I guess ‘learning from the best’ is not always the best strategy… Perhaps it should be ‘learn from those who are becoming the best’?
Its not they don’t but they haven’t been notice by people who see them now. When time passes we will think yeah i know i made mistakes event hough so many told me….But thats how life goes you learn and you become successful only when you don’t repeat it