I like digging for things. And by digging I mean seeking information. Over turning stones and figuring out how things really work.

Let me tell you a little story. Early on in my web publishing “career” I became very interested in the companies advertising on my sites. Why? Not only was that where my money was coming from, I knew they were paying Google perhaps double what I was recieving! Yes, this quest threw me off track from content site publishing. However, during the process I learned about e-mail newsletters, PPC ad buying, affiliate marketing, branding, and a whole hell of a lot more.

It is very important, no matter what industry you are in, to dig into the businesses around you. If you are reading this blog, you probably know a lot about SEO already. Imagine all of the web site owners who really don’t know about SEO nor have bothered to figure out how or why their visitors find their site(s). Yes, there are a lot of them out there.

Heavy marketing campaigns and lots of forum talk can skew your knowledge base towards very competative areas. How often have you seen affiliate links or ads to SEO tools? There are many elements of business that just don’t get mentioned in the popular blogs. Make a legitimate attempt to bridge knowledge gaps in the under reported areas of the web publishing industry: conversion rates, e-mail marketing, the law, lead generation, to name a few.

Learning is costly. It takes time away from your business and, without the right match of assets and skills, newly gained knowledge may prove worthless. The most profitable path to learning is learning about the things immediately surrounding your business. If you already have a website with thousands of daily visitors, its not to difficult to launch a successful e-mail newsletter, forum, blog and so on. If you don’t look into these new opportunities you are under-utilizing your assets.

Two years ago, I didn’t really know much about blogs. I didn’t read any blogs, I didn’t care to make one. Publishers were complaining that blogs were dominating too much of Google’s SERPs. That wasn’t a problem, that was an opportunity. I started a couple of blogs, and here I am today.

In a rapidly evolving and changing industry, learning, or digging for new knowledge, is a necessity to your long term survival.