The 80-20 Rule

If you have a blog and want to grow it to be huge, there are several tried and tested things that you can do:

1. write quality content
2. promote that content
3. use social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook)
4. use social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg and Reddit)
5. tweak your design
6. chat with readers
7. create Youtube videos
8. article marketing
9. submit your blog to directories
10. search engine optimization

That’s a lot of stuff, eh? Can you imagine that a lot of the bloggers do all this for their blogs? How hard do you work on yours? The interesting thing is that for many, many bloggers doing just two of the above produces 80% of the gain. If you just wrote quality content and promoted it, you would be good. Think about it, 2 out of ten of the activities above lead to 80% of the gain.

The Pareto Principle
An Italian economist once observed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. His name was Vilfredo Pareto, and that is where the principle got its name from. The Pareto principle, which is also called the 80-20 rule, states that for many events and things in life, 80% of the effects come from just 20% of the causes.

Did you know that Microsoft once found that by eliminating just 20%
of the largest bugs in its operating system 80% of the crashes
would stop? Interesting, eh?

Applying the Pareto Principle In Business
We all waste lots of time on trivial, repetitive tasks. This often means people are kept busy whether it is important or not, equipment is running whether needed or not, sales are made whether they are profitable or not.

“The value of the Pareto Principle is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things you do during your day, only 20 percent really matter. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of your results. Identify and focus on those things. When the fire drills of the day begin to sap your time, remind yourself of the 20 percent you need to focus on. If something in the schedule has to slip, if something isn’t going to get done, make sure it’s not part of that 20 percent.” – About.com