Luck, Fatalism, and Online Success

A fatalist might take the stance that it doesn’t matter what you do with your website. Or with anything for that matter. Fatalism basically holds that everything will unfold the way it was scripted to unfold regardless of the decisions that you make or the efforts that you put into something. Those decisions and all of that trying you did happened because it was supposed to happen. The results of your trials aren’t actually results of your actions, but just the next occurrence in a sequence of things meant to be.

Oh, you worked extremely hard to make a website, and it failed? Don’t beat yourself up about it, success just wasn’t in the cards. Oh, you compiled a detailed SEO strategy and put in hours of hard work to ensure that your website was extremely successful? Sure, you can take the credit, but it was bound to happen anyway. Of course if you take the proper steps to make a good website, like developing an SEO strategy, supplying regular custom content, paying attention to the design, and supporting it with a good social media strategy, your website won’t fail.

If you take the right steps to make a good website, it would take a severe stroke of bad luck and a catastrophic chain of unfortunate events to see your hard work and efforts go to waste.

Some people truly believe that it’s better to be lucky than good. It doesn’t matter how good you are at math when it comes to winning the lottery, and a fluke goal in a soccer match gives just as many points as a ball that’s expertly curled into the upper 90.

We’ve had some lucky breaks ourselves. Our lab site was featured in the Google Doodle and we got huge amounts of traffic. Too bad it was our lab site, and we weren’t selling anything. Too bad we didn’t learn a foolproof way to make that happen for all our clients. Those things, fatalists would say, were meant to be. But if we hadn’t made the effort to build a great page even though it was just our lab site, we wouldn’t have caught the attention of Google, and some great things that have happened for us since then would not have happened. Did we make the effort just because it was all meant to be, or because we truly care about quality web content, even on our lab site?

poster2Even if you do believe that everything boils down to luck or the decisions of the Fates, it doesn’t make sense to sit around waiting for things to happen. By working hard and getting your website in a strong position, you have an advantage over the person who did nothing other than wait for something. You have to be luckier to make something happen from nothing, than you do to make something happen from something.

The harder you work, and the better the work that you do, the more likely you are to succeed. This is true for practically anything in life, and it is certainly true for your website. If a soccer player trains and works hard perfecting the art of shooting, he is more likely to get a goal than an inept player who chanced his way onto the scoreboard. If you invest in search engine optimization, quality content, and everything involved in making a good website, you’re more likely to have online success, and are less dependent on luck for that success.

Let’s put it this way. You have to be really unlucky to work hard and make good decisions, and still fail. Regardless of how you feel about luck and fate, working hard — or hiring people who will work hard for you — is the best way to increase your chances of success.

top image from Wikipedia

 


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