Your Only Asset

I'm reading a book about Warren Buffett right now, and one of the points made in the book is one that I've heard before, but had forgotten. The book describes what Buffett explains to his managers about how to run their individual businesses.

Buffett tells the managers of his businesses to treat that business as if they owned it. And not only that, but he also asks them to treat the business as if it were the only asset that person would ever own, and the only asset his family would own, for the next 100 years. Then act accordingly.

How would your website change if you took that attitude toward building it? If your website, or your affiliate marketing business, were literally the only asset you could use to provide for your family for the next 100 years, what improvements would you make? What would you get rid of?

Here are some things I would (and should) do:

• Write better content.
• Write more content.
• Spend more money when I hire writers to write content for me.
• Have higher expectations of writers I've hired.
• Proofread and edit my content more thoroughly.
• Be more careful about how I pick and choose my link partners.
• Look more closely at the potential ROI when determining a niche to target.
• Design my site with a long term view.
• Learn CSS better.
• Learn html better.
• Have a professional designer set me up with a real logo.

Content + links.

Quality counts. For both content and links, and when I say quality links, I mean inbound AND outbound links.

It's simple, but not easy. As a friend of mine mentioned on a forum the other day, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.