Take Simple Ideas Seriously

2 min read

Charlie Munger once said, “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”

In many fields, the key to success is not discovering some complex formula that yields quick results.

Instead, the key is understanding the one or two actions that actually lead to results and implementing those actions consistently over the course of months or years.

Unfortunately, this sounds like a boring path to success so most people don’t follow it.

The most obvious example to me is SEO – search engine optimization. I currently earn a full-time living by writing SEO-optimized articles and monetizing those articles with ads, affiliate links, and my own digital products.

Virtually everything I do with SEO can be boiled down into two steps:

1. Find good keywords to target. (A “keyword” is any word or phrase that people search in Google)

2. Write articles about those keywords.

By doing those two things consistently, I’m able to generate hundreds of thousands of visits to my portfolio of websites each month, which translates directly into income from ads, affiliate links, and digital products.

Literally anyone with an internet connection can spin up their own website in under an hour and start implementing the exact strategy I use, but there are two reasons why nobody does:

1. Most people assume SEO must be more complex than that, so they avoid doing those two steps above and instead spend hours looking for “hacks” to implement.

2. For people who do take those two steps above seriously, they don’t take it seriously for long enough. They quit after a few weeks or months.

The doors are wide open for most people to start a website and earn an income from it, but hardly anyone does. People don’t take simple ideas seriously.

Simple Ideas Generate Compound Growth

In a previous article I shared that I only work about five hours per day. This might not sound like much, but I spend most of those 5 hours in unbroken concentration writing SEO-optimized articles for my websites. 

By simply showing up every day and writing new articles consistently, I’ve been able to grow my income to around $6k/month recently.

The following chart shows my monthly online income since I started dabbling around with websites in 2017:

Most importantly, income from SEO follows compound growth. Most of the articles that I write on any given day won’t earn a dime of income for 3-6 months, but once they do start earning income they can continue to do so for years to come without my help.

This means that SEO just gets better over time once more and more articles start to appear on the front page of Google and generate income.

My most recent example of this is a site I created just one year ago that now earns $500+ per month in ads. I only work on the site for a few hours per month now since it brings in 90% of its traffic from SEO.

The smallest website in my portfolio turned 1 year old today. Here’s a look at its weekly organic traffic since inception.

The lesson: SEO works, but the returns are always delayed. pic.twitter.com/9YietHsHR1

— Four Pillar Freedom (@4PillarFreedom) August 20, 2020

Simple ideas implemented consistently can lead to compound growth. But most people don’t take simple ideas seriously.

Resources

For anyone interested in learning how to start your own website, write SEO-optimized articles, and generate income online, I offer two resources:

1. The Income Community – A private community filled with tutorials on how to start a website and monetize it from scratch.

2. SEO Zoom Webinar – A recorded zoom webinar I did recently where I share the exact SEO strategy I used to take one of my sites from 0 to 90k+ visits per month.

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