You have probably heard many children ask the common question of "Why am I doing this?", but it is not asked enough in the internet marketing world.  Often we become caught up in the latest fad or craze.  I know I have joined the mob mentality and gone with the flow several times.  A handful of people start doing something and many others try to copy them. But before you try to copy someone, you should ask yourself  "Why am I doing this?"   

By taking a moment and evaluating your actions, you should be able to make smarter decisions.  These smarter decisions should make more money, and isn't that what drives most of us?  To make more money, you simply need to minimize unprofitable tasks and increase the profitable ones.  There is only so much time you can work each day.  Carpe diem.  Make the most of your work hours. To increase your profits, you do not necessarily need to work harder, but you should worker smarter.   

What, specifically, am I talking about? Here are a few examples where people should ask themselves before following the trend:

Blogging Craze  SugarRae recently wrote a well received post titled "How Depending on Quality Content Can Actually Cost You Links," and basically it said you need to "Build it, then tell them about it, and they will come."  That is only if your content is unique and useful.  If you are blogging about SEO, you are probably wasting your time. 

Why am I saying this? Because it is just simple math.  There are thousands and thousands of blogs talking about SEO, and very few of them have unique posts and helpful information.  Why are you doing it?  If you are doing it for personal fun and ego stroking, then I can understand.  If you are doing it to make money, then my response is how much money have you made for every hour you have spent writing and maintaining your blog?  If you are blogging about another industry, I would ask you to examine your readership.  Do people comment on your posts? Or subscribe to the RSS feed? Or even visit your blog pages?  If you spend hours a day blogging and deleting spam comments and you have no traffic, then your time is probably better spent on something else.  You might get more SEO clients by sending free SEO audits.  

Meta Tags Magic  I am not going to debate if meta tags are good or bad (personally, I think there is some benefit).  I think it is fair to say that meta tags are not magically like they used to be, and hours should not be spent working on the meta tags for a single page.  I once was involved with a company that was spending over $5,000 dollars for a consultant to write metatags for a few hundred pages every month.  If that company had listened to me and thought about why they were spending thousands of dollars on meta tags and not on actual content, they might have done much better.  This is a case of someone believing in an SEO strategy that was king over five years ago and not realizing the world has changed since then.   

Social Media Whores  "Everyone is doing it.  If you are not doing it, you are going to be left behind." I have heard that and much more about social media and online voting.  My response to each person that brags about social media to me is always the same.  How much profit did it make you?  Most people say "None" (a few smart individuals do understand social media and the required business model for it).  If you are earning no money and social media visitors are eating bandwidth to the point of knocking your site offline, why do it?  Until you can answer that question, you should not get involved in social media.  

Video Content  "You need a video strategy if you want to survive in 2008."  It is 2008 and I am doing ok and I have mostly ignored online video, so I guess that line was wrong as well (technically, I guess I do have a strategy...and that is to ignore video).  To produce a video, you need to invest a few hundred dollars in cameras and editing software and spend many hours actually learning to do it - that is before you even produce your first video.  Most webmasters should never be in front of a camera, so now you need to hire a pretty face which raises the cost. 

Why do it?  Because it is cool?  Because others are doing it?  Be smart and ask yourself if video will increase your profits.  Real estate websites will probably benefit from video, but local pizza shops probably will not.   I am not saying these four projects are bad ideas and should be avoided.  I am simply using them to highlight situations where some people spend considerable time and energy working on projects that might not lead to profit-making results.  There are other examples you can add to this.  To be a better internet marketer, you should not be afraid to ask yourself and others the simple question, "Why am I doing this?"

Be Smart and Research  Often when you ask yourself the question, you will not be able to answer it.  Do not take a guess; be smart and research the answer.  By "research" I am not talking about reading other people's blogs and visiting forums to take other people's guesses.  I am talking about doing real research.  Reverse engineer your competition.  Create a website that you can test different SEO strategies on.  Develop automated tools that can generate data points for you to examine.  Gather real data firsthand and make an informed decision for your personal situation.  Do not solely rely on other people.  When you hear of an idea and someone starts to brag about how great it is, do not be afraid to politely ask them hard questions.  Is it profitable?  And I am not talking about making money.  I can earn $1 million of sales by spending $2 million on AdWords, and I don't think anyone wants to copy that business model.  What type of investment is needed (time, money, energy)?  What is the window of opportunity?   

Let's Not Forget About Loss Leaders  It might make sense to do certain activities as a loss leader; that is, to lose money on one activity but have it help your money-making activities.  Maybe it makes sense to write a blog to add credibility to your SEO consulting service.  Maybe improved meta tags will double your CTR on the SEPRs.  Be careful with losing projects.  It is easy to continue to work on a losing project.  Don't make unecessary excuses.  It would be better for you to spend your time on what will help your profits.   

I hope this helps you (or helps your uneducated boss who likes to blindly follow hot trends).  If you did enjoy this post, please send a nice bottle of tequila to the the SEOmoz team.  It might not help their spelling, but it'll help them better tolerate and edit my poor writing. [Note from Rebecca: shouldn't that bottle go to me since I'm the lucky lady who gets to edit YOUmoz entries?]