Micro management isn't a bad thing. Having been making my money on the web since 1999, I can't tell you how many times micro-manasgement caught problems in the making. If you wait a week or two or more to see a problem and begin working on a solution you have lost a lot of money before you even realize it. Since huge problems don't resolve overnight, the sooner you get to working on the issue(s) the sooner you resolve them.
In this case, we saw a problem, that was not typical of other years. The drop was off schedule. Once traffic was investigated, keyword rankings were verified and I looked at what day of the week Christmas fell on this year, it made perfect sense. No worries. Having done that, I can relax for the next week and enjoy the holiday. Though by relax, that doesn't mean I won't check stats several times a day just to make sure everything is going as planned. It just means I won't have have to work on the sites, if everything remains stable.
Don't get me wrong. My 25% of typical earnings, as stated above, still exceeds previous years. This past year was our best year ever. Many who post in the Adsense forum here would love to have my 25%, it's a full time income for two families. But, any drop should send you running to investigate; it does me. I worked my fanny off 7 days a week 16 to 20 hour days for years to get here and never assume or take anything for granted.
I have seen the complexity of problems that complicated resolution. It's not uncommon to have two or more major problems at work at the exact same moment. You don't just assume Christmas is the reason. There may be more at play.
I remember plenty of times all hell had broken loose and I worked around the clock, 20 hour days, for days, weeks or months to resolve the issue. I learned from the first time, most likely because it took me months to rebound, you don't sit back and just cash the checks. While you're sitting back, competitors have their sights set on your traffic and earnings and the web is changing. That's the nature of the industry.
In this fast-moving, technology-based business model where earnings can change, long term, in the blink of the eye, to not micro manage is just plain irresponsible when you make as much as I do. If you're not in my league, you won't get here sitting back, just letting your business run itself; disaster will be forth coming with that attitude and it won't be pretty.
At least when you absolutely need it to, it will run itself. Such was the case when I was sick with cancer and in the hospital at one point in time. Some things just can't be avoided and you just have to hope things will be alright. That's not a daily attitude you want to embrace.
I will tell you this though, as an example. When I was sick with cancer, my biggest competitor for one of my three biggest sites, a public company (parent company of the offending site), quickly smelled blood, stole my meta tag description, word for word in the exact order, and with the content on their pages to support those keywords, began out ranking me for my keywords (they had longevity and site size over me), which included my tradmarked BRAND. This effectively stole my traffic.
To put it into perspective, this was a little website, geting only a quarter million highly targeted, search engine driven, hits a year. That site is now doing a couple million hits a year, several years later.
Sick in my bed for months, fairly certain I would never see another Christmas after the doctor gave me a 10% chance of survival, the act of sabotage was on track for robbing my heirs of their inhertiance. I was checking the stats from my bed, knew there was a problem, but was too sick to investigate.
When I was well enough to find the problem, I had to immediately hire an attorney at a cost of $1500. I explained the problem, how the process worked and what it was going to take to get my traffic back. The attorney then comveyed my demands to that NASDAQ traded company's attorney. That was after I noticed the issue and was able to identify the problem, several MONTHS after the fact. Within a matter of days after the slime balls uploaded their Google site map to complete the purging of the meta source theft, my traffic was back.
I had launched a company blog, to compliment the main site, telling visitors I was sick and would update them via little notes on the blog as to how things were going with my cancer treatment and announcing that the main site would not be updated. At the same time, per my doctor's orders, I had put "my house' in order, prepared for the worst case scenario.
Unknown to me, my competitor was micro-managing his company, visiting my site daily trying to figure out how to get back his share of market that I took upon the launch of my site several years prior. Later the same day I launched my blog, the competitor launched a blog, with my stolen main site's meta description in the source code.
Had my site's earnings come from Adsense, I'd have lost tens of thousands of dollars; the site represents a good sized chunk of my income. Instead, the site had flat-rate annual ad contracts, and I didn't lose a dime. This is yet another lesson in diversification, one thankfully I learned before I got sick.
These are the types of things that can happen when you won't or can't micro manage an online business model. You may not want to micro-manage, but you can bet that your serious competitors are doing exactly that. Anyone who tells you not to micro manage your online company, is giving bad advice. Micro managing doesn't bring confusion, it actually enlightens you to what is really going on if you've been doing it right.
