I was reading Performancing yesterday and ran across SEO Works Well Because Others Are Not Doing It and thought: Duh. Techies call it analysis paralysis, but in real life I think it’s “fear of the imperfect.”

Look, big time SEO can be time consuming but even in small doses it can have huge payoffs. As an experiment we doubled the readership of this blog one week by spending five minutes/day on promotion. And we don’t even really write what you’d call linkbait. (My wife calls these posts Mensa, er, well, I can’t use the second word, just use your imagination.)

We stopped because doubling readership via SEO wasn’t our goal, even if was only 5 minutes/day, but if were were monetizing this blog about our new startup division then we’d be very aggressive on the SEO tasks that we could actually do.

Because we don’t worry about being perfect (the enemy of good enough) at almost everything we do. I’m 100% focused on making sure payroll works and that our company healthcare is paid up but other than that we just try to do our best.

Marketing? Not perfect, but done on time.

Sales? We work at it, never miss payroll, show stead growth. Check.

Web Design? We stink, but people buy stuff. Check.

I think you get the idea.

So, basic SEO you can do: pick a half dozen social sites (Delicio, Propeller) that seem like they’d be friendly to your content. Use them regularly. Budget your time because you’re busy. Then do it for a month - it’s like a diet, you have to give it a while. It’s also like a diet because you’ll stop at some point - just start again. Measure what works, discard the rest.

By the way, the same is true of Marketing, Sales, and everything else in your business. Except payroll, of course.

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Bump and update: What were we doing in 5 minutes a day to double our readership? That is a good question. We’ll tell you next month. Watch the homepage.