eAction

I must be in a poetic mood today. I’m trying to think of just the right picture language for how I feel about my learning curve in running my online business ventures.

Sometimes I think back to when I was a kid and our visiting Uncle Isbrand, who had come from B.C. took us young fry fishing at the river. We scampered all about, exploring while he cast one line after another attached to a sturdy willow stick and planted the rear end of it in the sand (I guess since we kids weren’t patient enough to sit there and hold them), and then he prepared and cast and planted the next one. At some point I came back to the sandy part of the beach and found he had a row of four or five such lines in the river.

Well, as I’ve come “online” to run my business efforts, I’ve learned one method or another, tried them out, no big bites right away, so I sort of planted them on my web site, and started another. As fast as I learned about them, and once I thought I understood the principle of the thing, I tried yet another income line.

The question arises, what to do if all the lines start jerking with busy fish that have bit my bait? This is the stage that seems to be coming upon me now. I see that as I learn to do better marketing and promotional work, more of these lines will start coming alive with action.

Fortunately, for the most part, it only entails more correspondence, or just depositing cheques in some instances. It’s in the areas where I have offered services, such as web design, that I’m stretching my schedule to the max.

The best case scenario will be if the quieter affiliate commissions keep coming in to the point where I can afford some virtual assistants to help with the service streams.

Do you notice how my allegory is shifting from fishing to streams of income? This is why I’m wondering if I need to look for a different image to illustrate my point.

What about a turtle that buries it’s eggs in various pits in the sand, and forgets them there? She’s hoping that if she lays enough eggs, in the end, sufficient numbers will survive and make it to the ocean so that their species will not die out. Maybe some people do operate their online business like that. They start a multitude of “business opportunities” but if they don’t bring in cash right away, they wander off, and start another one. (Of course, this wouldn’t be you or me, right?

Maybe we should see them more like babies we have - which we prepare for in advance, then nurture tenderly, and as they grow up we let others step in to help teach and care for them too. Most caring parents allow the first child to get to be about age two before they have the next. They follow through, and understand that the child will go through phases of development.

Hmmm? So what do I do now about my logo image of having a bouquet of enterprises, each smaller business named after a flower? Can I convert that child-rearing image to a gardening one?

See how one needs time to sort out picture language like this? You really need to put your feet up and mull these things over for a few hours. Thanks for joining me as I got started. I see I need to go off to spend more thought on this.

Let me know if you come up with some interesting analogies or parables.