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Archive for category Time Management

The Week That Was: April 11 – 18

Apr 19

Posted by Valentina in Making Money, Time Management | No Comments

It has been my practice here to post a weekly review.  It was typically published on a Saturday. I’ve changed it to Monday.

Why?

It is my belief that things flow better when things are in alignment.  I found that with my Saturday weekly review I was at sixes and sevens.  Here is what was happening:

  1. For all my planning my week starts on a Monday
  2. My publishing schedule includes a Sunday post under the title of Sunday Morn Musings
  3. A Saturday review of the previous week looked like this
    -  the week ends on a Friday
    -  the week starts on a Sunday
    -  according to my planning board, my week actually begins on Monday

You can see what I mean – I was all over the map.  As of this week The Week That Was will be published on Mondays.  That could mean that on some Mondays there will be two posts … the operative word being “could.”

This was a good week.  For time management I have returned to my previous practice of blocking time and I find that it is a model that works for me.  I plan my week on Sunday night.  It supports my plan for the month.   Tasks are written out for the week in order of importance.  These tasks are separated into the proper business and listed according to priority.  Then I block time for each business for the week from Monday through Friday.  Weekends are free fall and may or may not include working on a business or two, more likely if I’m not hanging out with friends I spend the time on my internet marketing “studies”  and implementing what I learn  – the only scheduled task is the Sunday Morn Musings.   What this means to me is that the important tasks for each business are handled.  Taking a suggestion from  my coach  Steve Keough I now allow time for unscheduled daily time because sure as there are little green apples, something is going to disrupt my schedule.  No disruption?  Great.  The low on priority tasks get handled.

Here is the summary of new posts since the last Week that Was:

Sunday Morn Musings:  On Overused  Words – 11/04/10
It’s time to retire certain words and phrases from the English language – or at least, give them a rest, a long rest.  Perfectly good, honest, strong and hard working words that have become hackneyed through overuse … time to give some of them a rest.  I list some of my pet peeves, you’re welcome to add your own.  Full article on overused words

Blog Hopping to Success – 14/04/10
Blog hopping is a smart thing to do.  It’s fun.  You meet good bloggers.  It helps you to establish your online presence  … and it’s just plain good business..  Today I met Maren Kate.  Never heard of her before.  I met her on my blog visiting route over at Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income … it’s what I call blog hopping and in this article I share my views on its importance to your blog income business

What Does a Blog Income Life Look Like?  17/04/10
“What does a Blog Income Life look like?”  People have read and heard that there are bloggers out there who are living the life of Riley, drinking fine wines, dining on epicurean delights, travelling to exotic destinations and living in the house of their dreams and they want to know if this.  What they are really looking for is a validation, they want to “know” someone who is  … the article on what does a blog income life look like is my answer

Sunday Morn Musings: Living the Life of Riley   18/04/10
Who was Riley and why do we want to live like him?  Songs, WWI, Reilly coins and a real life spy by the name of Sidney Reilly factor in this Sunday’s morn musings

Wishing you a great week of blogging!

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Four Bleeping Hours!

Apr 12

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Time Management | 3 Comments

Four Bleeping Hours! Daily!

Just to keep up with your emails!

I recently had a discussion with a colleague — someone new to the world of Internet Marketing. Like so many newbies, she had subscribed to several guru newsletters and had bought a course or two, OK, make that three or four and maybe more. What this means of course is a very active Inbox. In the course of our conversation she fessed up that going through the emails took as much as four hours every day. Four hours? Four bleeping hours! She was frustrated that after half a year the results were abysmal and was wondering if she shouldn’t throw in the towel with this latest venture of building a blog income and try something else.

Ok, four hours may be a bit on the high end of the spectrum for just “managing” your inbox, but honestly, don’t all of us fall victim to doing exactly what my friend did? Lets do a quick inventory. How many newsletter subscriptions do you have? How many courses have you signed up for – the freebie ones, the cheapie ones, and the not so cheapies? You get emails from all of those too even after the course has run its course (yes pun intended … ok, I just couldn’t help myself). Never mind the plethora of jokes from friends who obviously have no intention of making money on the internet. Then of course those jokes have to be forwarded to your own special inner joke circle.

STOP! This is insanity! If you’re serious about becoming an Internet Marketer – one that makes money that is – then you have to declutter, unsubscribe, don’t open the jokes – or at least save them for “break” time. I save mine for the weekends, and if some don’t get opened, so what.

The first thing that newbies need to know is that the internet is not a free ride. It is a continuous process of learning, and, unless you have the basics down pat, you’re never going to join the ranks of the gurus whose newsletters you so readily subscribed to and from whom you bought the courses and for which you now have no time because it takes you four bleeping hours every day just to read all that good stuff that comes into your inbox. FOUR HOURS!!! … and there is so much information you don’t know where to start and then you get frustrated because nothing is working and you throw up your hands in frustration and start looking for the holy grail of the internet and you can’t find it! Whew! Months go by, even years.

Don’t fall victim to this trap.

I bet you have emails in your Inbox that have not been opened.  I would even go so far as to say that some have been sitting there for over a week, maybe even a month!  Be ruthless with the stale dated ones – open and unsubscribe.  Don’t start reading!  If you haven’t read something for a month don’t read it now!  If you really like the newsletters save the links.  You can always resubscribe at some future date when you are ready for more and have learned how to manage your online time better.

Good News/Bad News. The good news is that you know more about the internet than you think you do. You’ve gone through kindergarten. You know the basics of being on the computer: open, close, send & receive emails, browse, Google something. You might even be active on some social marketing sites … you know, Facebook, Twitter and perhaps niche specific social media sites. Later on you will learn how to use these sites as valuable marketing tools, but for now, put your time into the action packed basics that will help you towards earning an online income.

Take these steps immediately:

1.  Email all your joke buddies. Tell them that you love them and appreciate their jokes but could they put them on hold for several months. Tell them that you are working on a very important project to build a blog income and much as you love a good laugh here and there, for the time being the Ha Ha’s have to stop.

2.  Love em and leave em. Unsubscribe to all but 5 of the top newsletters you receive.  Make sure that the ones you decide to keep will add value to your online income career.  I would suggest that you keep one or two that give information on how to maximize your blog, the others should be about your niche so that you can broaden your own expertise in your field.

3.  Those course gather dust on the shelves are never going to do you any good unless you crack them open and start in on them.  If you more than one still sitting there (or downloaded into your computer), choose one to work on now.  Calendar time to work on it.  . Whether you decide to devote 3 or 4 hours a day or a week, schedule it. This is very important. I would recommend scheduling some time on a daily basis, but if the weekend is all that you can realistically devote to your course, then bunch up the hours, four or five on Saturday and another four or five on Sunday. 

4.   Resist the temptation to check on your Inbox all the time.  I used to check three times a day, now I check only twice a day.  Once in the morning and again at close of my official business hours.

5.  Small consistent steps will pay off.  Do whatever you can to free up more time to do that which is a high gain activity … write daily.  You don’t have to publish daily, but by putting in even 30 minutes a day on writing, you will be building your blogging muscles and will always have articles on the go.

this post was first published in December 2008.

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The Bank of Blog Income

Nov 9

Posted by Valentina in Blogging for Money, Making Money, Time Management | 2 Comments

If you are blogging for money, then you have opened your own blog income bank, or, as I prefer to call it, The Bank of Blog Income.  I rather like the thought and the image it brings to mind, but I tell you, I am absolutely, positively in love with the notion that blogging and banking are the same thing and I don’t just mean the money.

What with all the hullabaloo on money and banks these days, I decided to attend a seminar on wealth creation. To get us thinking in the right direction, the speaker started off by telling us about the rule of 72.  You’ve probably heard about this but just as a refresher, the rule of 72 estimates the length of time it will take you to double your money at a given compound interest rate by dividing that rate into 72, so, if your interest is 12%, you divide that into 72 and the answer is that it will take about 6 years to double your money.

The interesting thing with this rule is that once you begin to double your money it begins to take on a snowball effect as each year thereafter is a rolling 6 years.  That’s when your money begins to grow at increasing rates of speed.

It struck me then that a blog is much the same.

Never mind the paltry interest rates banks pay us today.  Just stay with me.  The more frequently you make deposits into your bank, the better the balance.  The better the bank balance, the more interest accrued each year which means more money.  The early deposits are the most powerful even though they may be smaller than later ones.  The early deposits are the ones that gather most steam.

That’s what got me thinking that a blog is just like a bank – your bank!  The most basic fundamental of a blog is posts, consider them as deposits or investments of time and talent.

The more frequent your posts, the more notice your blog will get from the search engines which in turn means more traffic which then turns into conversions or sales.  Its hard work at the beginning and at times may seem that you are standing still maybe even going backwards.  Eventually consistent effort begins to pay off: traffic increases, visitors begin to post comments, your blog begins to gain credibility which means more traffic.  It’s a numbers game from there on – more traffic, more conversions be they Adsense, affiliate or sponsored ads.

Just like the example that our seminar presenter gave us on money doubling every so many years, your blog results will be more significant if the hard work is put in at the beginning and by beginning I mean it could be a year, two or three.  From there on as your results multiply, the amount of time and attention given to the blog can be reduced somewhat and still bring you growing results.

Here is what I really like about this, the investment/deposit is your time.  Everyone has  the same amount of time.  How you use it determines how you live.   Carve out some time, take it away from watching TV and put it towards growing your blog income. It’s the best kind of return on investment that I can think of.

Life gets good.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging is the big cheese!


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The Needle Movers

Oct 9

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Making Money, Time Management | 1 Comment

A needle mover is any activity that makes the needle on the results machine move, you know, kind of like a scale.  In my case it is an activity that makes my blog income go up.

I spend a lot of time on the computer.  I think that I am getting a lot done and moving my business forward and that the money truck is just around the corner … ok, Tonka truck will do for starters.  It is now almost a year since I decided to stop playing at internet marketing and to make it a serious business.  I remember that moment of decision as if it was yesterday.

In November I review the current year. In December I plan the coming year.

Last November’s year review was telling.  I was looking at a line item in my expenses – internet marketing courses, travel to and from those courses, time spent on those courses. It all added up to a pretty penny.  Then it hit me like a bolt of lightening.  Sure I was learning and doing the homework, even had a practicum or two tucked up my sleeve, but I wasn’t doing anything concrete with my newfound knowledge.  That’s when I decided to get going.  I didn’t know everything I needed to know but that was OK.  Mike Litman always says “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”

So I did.

I chose blogging as my preferred method of making money online. This blog is one of the results of that decision.

I sat down and made a business plan – paying attention to the needle movers in that plan.

My first move was to block a chunk of time daily that would be devoted to blogging.  I thought that if I calendared in four hours daily, five days a week I would be well on my way to a decent return on my investment of time.  Nine months into the game but the needle hasn’t moved all that much.

What gives?

Kevin Wilke of Nitro Marketing talks about the 100 hour rule, i.e., put in 100 focused “needle moving hours” of time into your internet marketing and your efforts should deliver at least $100 to $500 a month on a recurring basis.  OK … I’ve met that.  The next one is 500 hours which should gain you a replacement income, i.e., you should be able to cover your living costs at this point.  If you do the math at four hours a day five days a week in 25 weeks you should be pulling in the replacement income.  At this rate I have long since passed the 500 hour rule and if it weren’t for my other sources of income, I would still be doing the commute to a paid 9 to 5.

Kevin was talking about this recently and I got to thinking  – is the time I spend on the computer quality, productive needle moving time?  I decided to keep track. For two weeks I slavishly noted the time spent on various computer related tasks.  Boy!  Was I ever shocked!  Four hours?  Try one hour, two at best on most days.

It’s easy to spend time on the computer and think that you are “working” on your internet marketing. I found that of the four hours I calendared into the day for internet marketing the bulk of the time went  into:

1. Opening and reading email
2.  Replying to email
3.  Sending email re info I think might be of interest to colleagues
4.  Checking statistics (this one has just increased now that I am watching my “new” stats since    being on Wordpress for the majority of my sites
5.  Reading other blogs & commenting  – this is the first “needle” moving activity:  commenting on other blogs, but it is not a high gain activity.
6.  Researching & writing blog posts
7.  Repurposing my articles
8.  Publishing articles to article directories
9.  Other marketing activities which mostly include more publishing.

Only items 6 through 9 are high gain and I can tell you they did not get much attention on a daily basis, in fact items 1 through 5 took so much of my time that I was really short changing myself and not paying much attention to the real needle movers.

I’ve changed that.

Priorities have been re-arranged.  I do start the day by checking the stats.  I give this about 15 minutes.  While this activity of and on its own is not a needles mover it is important as it is a measuring stick and tells me if I am making headway in my marketing efforts.  I see day to day what is working and what is not and make adjustments as needed.

My mind works best in the morning, so research and writing is the next item.  I calendar in 2 hours.  After that I take a short break, pour myself some tea and relax for a bit.  Then I check the emails.  I have become ruthless with the delete key.  I flag anything that looks like something I would like to look into and get back to those items end of the four hour block.  I now have an hour and a half left to do some marketing. If this is Monday I decide which “site” to devote this time to for the week.  I check in to Market Samurai and see how I can tweak my efforts for this site, find a new affiliate product perhaps and set up a mini campaign for the current week.  That means that the selected site gets seven and a half hours of focused time for that week.

Do I follow this time schedule?
No.  I still get distracted but I am getting better at it.

Is it working?
You bet! Things are beginning to happen.

I have seen an increase in traffic, the stats look better, clicks are higher, conversions are on the rise.  Most importantly my motivation factor is up 100%.  I am now excited.  I get an adrenalin rush every time the needle moves. It gives me the feeling that I am in control of my business and that’s an awesome feeling.

What about you?  Does any of this resonate with you?  What do you do to keep the needle moving?  I’d love to hear from you … post your comments below.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money
…. and the cheese ain’t bad either!

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Avoid Time Thieves – Focus on Blogging

Feb 18

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Making Money, Time Management | 2 Comments

Avoid time thieves, focus on the job at hand: Blogging.

Valentina, What are you talking about?

Read on.

If you have been trolling on the internet for a while dollars to donuts says that you get a lot of emails in your inbox every day. I know I get gazillions and while a part of my wants to scream “stop the SPAM!” another part of me knows that at least half of those emails – if not more – are there because I subscribed to them. I talk to extremely successful internet marketers and they all tell me that they too have overflowing in boxes and that they even pay attention to the spam because they want to see how others are marketing and sometimes, there might even be a good idea.

But you are not a guru (yet), and neither am I. ( Hint: The gurus have staff) These are all time thieves. Every course I have ever taken told me to apply the brakes to the emails. Emails are a distraction and take away from productivity. Kevin Wilke told us to be ruthless and to unsubscribe to everything.

Avoid these Time Thieves

- Jokes sent by your friends – don’t forward, better yet, don’t open. In fact send an email to your buddies and tell them that you are going to focus on a project online and that in an effort to keep emails down to a minimum, to please withhold sending the jokes, the chain letters, the beautiful poetry and whatever else it is that clutters your in box from your well meaning and loving friends.

- Newsletters that have nothing to do with g Internet Marketing or better yet, with blogging. If there are some newsletters that you really enjoy reading, take note of the URLs, and then when your blogging muscles begin to strengthen, then you can start re-suscribing again, s-l-o-w-l-y, one at a time!

- Clicking on an item that caught your eye on MSN … it probably has nothing to do with Internet Marketing.

You will be surprised at just how much time you will have carved out for yourself, time that you will now be able to put to good use and focus on your blogging. Time is the biggest investment you can make in this business and while it does not take actual hard cash out of your pocket, applied properly, it will put money in your bank. Now, is that good or good?

Keep the On Topic Stuff:

There are some things you should continue to subscribe to, a prime example would be if you are currently taking a course then you need to accept and read continuing updates, new material and so on. That is a given. If you are shadowing this blog and setting one up yourself, you need to subscribe to the RSS feed or the “follow me” button.

I am currently on three courses. They are all related and are specific to Blogging. What I write here is a distillation of the three. I am writing about the baby steps that I think are the best way to start your blogging career. They are all courses for a fee. I don’t like to recommend things that I have not either actually done myself or at least reviewed in detail.

A Course Recommendation:

I will however share one of those courses with you today. I got the idea for this blog from Caroline Middlebrook. I admit it, I am plain out and out copycatting her (though not necessarily each step) – and I have told her so. If you want to blog along faster, I can certainly recommend her Bloggers Bible. She has both a free and a paid version. The paid version is delivered all in one go and you can proceed as fast as you want … you’ll be ahead of the postings on this blog and perhaps banking dollars a lot quicker.

Quick Links:
Kevin Wilke – Nitro Marketing Blueprint
Caroline Middlebrook – Bloggers Bible

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