Pareto Principle: The Idea of Getting More through Less Effort

We have been taught, trained and possibly ‘brainwashed’ with the concept of in order to get what we want, we have to do more than the day before. For example, to get huge incomes through Internet, there are a lot of tips and advice… especially through ‘make money online’ blogs’ authors who consider themselves as experts, are also telling us the same thing.

However, there is one question for you – are those advice and tips are absolutely accurate?

I do always believe that there are always alternatives in everything that exist in this world as long as we keep looking for those alternatives and keep pushing ourselves to think outside our box.

There are always two sides for a coin, right?

What is Pareto Principle?

For me, there is an alternative for the idea of  ‘work more to earn more’. This alternative is called Pareto’s principle – a principle that was first introduced in 1906 by Vilfredo Pareto. This principle has also been called other various names such as; the Law of Vital Few, the 80/20 rule and the Factor of Sparsity.

Pareto invented this principle as the result of his simple observation – 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of population and vice versa. Through this, he realized that X amounts of efforts will not necessarily create X amount of good results – the result can be more than the X value or lesser than what we expected. He discovered there is the existence of imbalance element between the input and output equation and this element existed in the observations that he carried out in other countries through different situations.

The key of this principle is there is existence of imbalance element in the ‘input and output’ equation and if we can identify for the 20% portion of input that will create 80% of the output portion, we will able to work in more effective and efficient way. This is because we will not waste most of our time for the 80% portion of input that will only create 20% output portion.

However, the accuracy of the percentage is not the main idea – the imbalance element that matters. The portion can be turned to 1% into 80% or 40% into to 60%.

How can you integrate this principle into your site?

The first step that you must take is to install and integrate in any statistic plugin or toll that will help you to identify the efforts that generate the most returns in terms of incoming traffics or sales. The tools that I recommend are Google Analytics for incoming traffic statistic and MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate for affiliate sales tracking.

Through these tools, you will able to track the performance of your site.

My case study - Huzzer Magazine: WordPress Seems So Easy!

I have also integrated into the idea of this principle. This is because I know that only the small portion of my contents will attract huge traffic and due to this reason, I have used a few ways to push the articles that belongs to the ‘20%’ portion of input that will create ‘80%’ of output i.e. traffics for my blog to gain more exposure especially for the first time visitors. These are the steps that I have taken:

• Put up Most Popular Posts widget at the sidebar as this widget will help to push the best content of my blog as only the articles that most of people read will appear.
• I installed Yet Another Related Posts plugin and put it at the end of each articles as this will ensure that other articles that are less popular will get notified by my blog visitors and not just ‘died’.
• I will only focus in limited number of social networking buttons such as Twitter and Facebook which give me the most incoming links by putting their buttons in the beginning and end of my contents. By putting a lot of buttons, they definitely don’t have the amount of time to hit all of the buttons. We are asking for them for a favor – so let it be quick and easy!
• I use minimalist design approach for my site as it will help to retain readers’ attention. With ‘messy’ design, it will keep distracting our visitors as there are a lot of things to be seen rather than only our contents. Let our blog have proper structured so that our readers can read the article first, then see related articles that they may find interesting, hit the social networking buttons and finally leave comments. It is better if we do not change this standard flow.
• I have only minimal amount of sidebar widgets in my blog’s sidebar which are value added to the visitors. Our visitors’ main intention to come to our blog is to read the content that they are interested in – not to know what is our blog’s Alexa ranking or amount of spam that we have captured.

Pareto’s principle is a very flexible concept as it can be applied with anything and at anywhere. The most important thing that we must know is there is imbalance element in this world and if we can identify the factor that contribute to us more, we will able to earn more with less effort as we will know and possibly stop doing the stuff that consumes most of our time, but brings less returns.

I believe that great life comes not necessarily through a lot of effort. It comes when we take the right actions and consistently focusing on them.

This guest post is written by Helmi Asyraf Abdullah, the author of Huzzer Magazine – Wordpress Seems So Easy! He believes that there are always two sides of a coin which is the main reason he is supporting DoFollow commenting movement.

At the moment, he is offering 5 internet marketing tools and special gifts through his collaboration with Obox Design, premium themes developer for those who subscribe with Huzzer Magazine.