Archive for May, 2007
It’s amazing how powerful deadlines can be.
I used to work at my local newspaper where everything depends on deadlines. There were deadlines to submit ads, deadlines to finish financial reports, deadlines for sending in news stories, deadlines for delivering the paper.
Now that I’m working at home, I don’t have all these tight deadlines to adhere by. That doesn’t mean that I still don’t use them though. They may not be as strict as when I worked at the paper, but I still do my best to stick to them.
Creating deadlines for yourself and making sure you complete your tasks on time can be a huge secret of success for you, especially if you are your own boss. It gives a sense of accountability that otherwise might not be there for someone who works at home.
The trick with creating your own deadlines is to make them challenging, but not impossible. You should also figure out ahead of time a ‘punishment’ for not meeting your deadline. I love to buy shoes, but if I miss a deadline I don’t allow myself to buy any more until I make up for the work I skipped out on. It also helps to have a buddy to help you stay on track. This could be a friend or family member, or even someone you met online.
There’s something about knowing that you only have a certain amount of time to finish something that really makes you get your butt in gear. I find that things also get done a lot quicker, leaving more time for other things like spending time with family.
Set yourself some deadlines and see how it works for you.
May 30th, 2007
There’s something about crappy weather that just gets me down and really hinders my productivity. As you can see, I haven’t posted in a few days. It’s also been raining and cold for the past few days. I’m assuming that’s no coincidence.
Today it’s nice out again, so I’m back at it. However, I really need to work something out so that I can still be productive when it’s not so nice out because obviously we can’t have sunshine, lollipops and rainbows every day.
I was actually doing quite well with my new schedule that I printed out for myself, until my daughter swiped it when my back was turned and proceeded to color all over it until there was nothing left. If I was smart, I would have just printed another copy since I have it saved on my computer, but I’m obviously not that smart.
Today though, I was reading Problogger like I do every morning and this post helped me snap back into place. Now I’ve got a new schedule printed out and I’m back to work as you can see. This time I think I’ll either laminate my list and stick it on my wall beside my monitor or I’ll make it an image and set it to my desktop background.
Whatever works, right?
May 24th, 2007
I don’t usually read Matt Cutt’s blog even though I’m sure I should, but I found out in Michael Campbell’s newsletter that buying links from other websites can get you in trouble if they haven’t added the “nofollow” attribute.
If you’ve been buying links or thinking about it, make sure that the site you’ve purchased from not only includes the nofollow tag but also they should disclose that it is a paid link or “sponsored” link just to be on the safe side.
According to Michael, Matt confirmed that buying links is fine as long as they’re nofollow links and there’s also no problem with selling links for traffic purposes. But if you’re trying to gain PageRank, you’d best go about it another way.
I don’t buy links and I probably never will, but I wanted to give you a heads up in case you weren’t aware.
May 18th, 2007
The internet is loaded with free information on virtually any topic, so it’s no wonder that you can easily spend your entire day just reading while sitting in front of your computer.
However, earning money online takes more than just reading about how to make money on the internet. You have to actually take the information you’ve learned and apply it to your own online business.
Yaro Starak suggested in his last newsletter that only a small part of your day should be spent actually consuming information. The rest of your day should be spent working and using that information to create something of your own.
This sounds like common sense but if you actually compared the number of hours you spend reading to the number of hours you spend actually working, you might be surprised.
If you get caught in the web of free information, maybe it’s time to change your schedule (or create one if you haven’t already). I like to spend the first parts of my morning checking emails and reading anything that’s on my list of ‘things to learn more about’. Once that time is up, it’s off to work. If I come across something interesting later in the day that I’d like to read, I’ll bookmark it and add it to my ‘to read’ list for the next morning.
Since adopting this new routine I’ve cut down my ‘consuming’ hours drastically and my work performance has increased. It doesn’t feel like I’m missing out on anything either. All the information I’d normally be reading right now will still be there when I decide to get to it. In the meantime, I’m building my content and gaining exposure to my sites because I’m actually WORKING!
May 17th, 2007
Have you ever read an email or a sales page and you thought “Wow, this is really good! I wish I had thought of that”. I have many times.
Awhile ago, I started two ’swipe files’ for myself, one in my email folder and one on my desktop. When I see emails that I think are particularly good (especially if I’ve purchased the product) I’ll save it to my swipe file. Same thing goes for a web page or blog I like. If I see a new concept or I like the layout, I’ll save the page to my desktop swipe file if I need some inspiration later.
The key is not to copy these pages or emails, but to use them to come up with new ideas for yourself. Take the idea and improve on it, but don’t blatantly rip it off.
I’m kicking myself for not starting my swipe files sooner because there have been lots of great ideas that I’ve missed out on. So if you haven’t started your own swipe file, you should do that now. You’ll thank yourself later.
May 16th, 2007
One of the first things I learned when I started working online was that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Basically, you should have more than one source of income and one source of traffic. If you only rely on one, it could turn around and bite you in the ass in the long run.
Case in point: One of my blogs was receiving quite a bit of traffic and leads from forums. It wasn’t one of my favorite blogs to write for, so I didn’t do much of anything else to promote it. Now that I’m not posting as regularly in forums, I’ve noticed my traffic on that blog has dipped down next to nothing.
It’s a shame because I have spent a lot of time on that blog and I feel it would greatly benefit a lot of readers, but I didn’t heed my own advice and I just settled for one source of traffic. I still get the occasional visitor from search engines who type in very strange keywords and phrases, but it’s obviously nothing to call home about.
On the other hand, I have other sites that receive traffic from all over the place; articles, forums, search engines, newsletters, ebook and reports, etc. Lots of times my traffic will fluctuate but the important thing is that the numbers grow every month. I feel safe knowing that if one source dies out, I still have plenty of other sources to rely on.
I know plenty of people who’ve spent hours upon hours tweaking their search engine optimization and receive gobs of traffic, only to crash and burn when their site is dropped from the search engines or their rankings plummet once the algorithms change. Or how about all those people who were affected by the “Google Slap”…
If you’re posting in forums today to get traffic to your website, spend tomorrow writing articles to submit to article directories. Next week maybe you could write an email mini-course and promote that. Or create a free viral report and watch it spread throughout the internet. The important thing is to diversify. Without diversification, your traffic could be heading for an inevitable disappearance.
May 15th, 2007
Wow, what a difference this makes. In the past couple weeks I’ve done a lot of revamping and ’streamlining’ to make my work day more efficient. One of the things I did was I spent a good chunk of time to sit down and write out a daily schedule for myself.
It took quite a bit of rearranging but eventually I figured out something that I think will work really well. I’ve done up a fancy little list for myself that I’ve printed out, and as I do each thing on my list, I check it off.
From Monday through to Friday, I’ve listed a reasonable amount of work for myself to do that will make sure all my websites stay current, and marketing, testing and tracking will be done every week. I’ve also included lists for my regular newsletters as well. It’s all there in one neat little page.
Before I committed to this list, I made myself swear that I would focus on the tasks for each day of the week before I did anything else during the day (including visiting my favorite blogs). If something comes up (like an appointment at the doctor, or unexpected company) I realize that things might not get done on time. However, I’ve also promised myself that if I absolutely can’t finish what’s on Monday’s list, it will be finished by Tuesday night after I finish Tuesday’s tasks and so on.
So far, it’s working great. With my list in front of me at my desk at all times, it’s easy to stay focused. Distractions like email, instant messenger, and funny blogs aren’t as tempting. Every time I finish my daily tasks on time it gives me an awesome feeling.
Working at home can be daunting, especially for moms. With all the responsibilities that come along with being a work at home mom, it’s really nice to take a break and just relax. However, when you’re laying on the couch with a good book and you can see the computer out of the corner of your eye, it’s easy to feel guilty and think that you should be working.
I felt that way all the time, even if I was cleaning the house. Now with my list, I don’t feel guilty for doing other activities as long as everything is checked off for the day. In fact, I think I have even more free time now because I don’t spend half of every morning trying to figure out what I should be doing.
It’s really made a difference for me, you should try it!
May 14th, 2007
I’ve had this report sitting on my hard drive for quite awhile, but I finally read it today. It was a good read because it made me do some analyzing which I’m sure will benefit me in the future. I’m talking about Building Traffic With Article Marketing by Yaro Starak and Brian Clark. I’ve been a subscriber of Yaro’s for quite awhile now, and I’m a religious reader of Brian’s Clark’s blog, CopyBlogger.com so it’s no surprise that this was a good report.
It’s only 10 pages long so it won’t take you long to read if, but I’ll break some of it down really quick for you anyway. One of the tips that stuck with me was about the title of the articles. So many people get this one wrong and don’t spend enough time coming up with the right title:
Testing Article Titles - If you get this part wrong, you’re screwed. Unless you have a killer title to each article, you’ll be wasting your time writing the rest of the article. You need to capture the reader’s attention right away by having an irresistable title. You can have a blah title like “Weight Loss Tips” and it could be the best article in the world, but it won’t get read as much as one titled “Burn Fat The Easy Way - 9 Proven Tips”.
Something else that this report reminded me to do was to go back and work on improving some of my own article titles since EzineArticles (my favorite article directory) allows you to edit them (but they have to be re-approved first so you wouldn’t want to do this regularly or you might annoy the hell outta them).
In the second part of this report, Brian gives some really good tips to help make sure you get it right the first time and also about writing the author bio box and the article itself.
You can grab the report here.
May 13th, 2007
Just in case there might be one or two of you out there who still haven’t ventured on over to John Reese’s new blog, here’s the link, http://www.income.com/blog/. If you check out the first post, you can download the long anticipated report, “The Rebirth Of Internet Marketing“.
If you’ve got ten minutes to spare you’ll want to read this report. It’s 53 pages, but it’s a quick read. I got a few good nuggets out of it and I’m sure you will too. It’s certainly eye-opening and if you read carefully you’ll get a few secrets out of it too. If you have any intent on working online in the future, this is a must-read.
May 12th, 2007
Surprisingly, a lot of people aren’t aware that Wordpress has a feature that allows you to post-date your blog posts. Let’s say you have one blog and you like to keep it current with at least one post every day. But what happens when you go away for a few days? Or maybe you’ve been holed up in bed with the flu.
Save time for yourself and post all your week’s posts at once, then just spread them out throughout the week with the auto post feature. I do this all the time. I don’t know what I would do without it, especially when I know I’ll be busy during the rest of the week with other things.
It couldn’t be easier to use. Simply check the ‘edit timestamp’ box, and enter the date and time that you would like Wordpress to post the entry. Awesome hey? After you hit ‘Publish’ you won’t see your new post on your blog until the time you set it for, but you can still edit the post it in your Manage menu.
May 11th, 2007
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