Miscellaneous

It would be fair to say that discipline has never been my strong suit. I often end up getting sidetracked and starting on one thing before I’ve finished something else, simply because my attention threshold is so low.

Yet one of the biggest challenges for anyone seeking business success online is being disciplined enough to complete tasks inspite of all the other distractions competing for your attention.

It’s an ongoing battle and particularly so if, like me, you are trying to build an online business whilst also holding down a full time job. I also have a lovely young son (Louis, almost 8 months now!) to help look after. With such limited time it’s vitally important to remain focussed to have any chance of achieving success.

I’ve known for a long time that I do too much of the work by myself. I create the websites and landing pages, write the copy, install wordpress blogs and plugins, set up testing and tracking, market research, traffic generation, in fact pretty much everything.

I’ve persisted with this way of working far longer than I should have. Partly for financial reasons, but also because I’ve often felt it easier to complete a task myself than explain how to do it to a freelancer. And there is also the feeling of losing control when you hand the reins over to someone else.

So lately I’ve been examining how I run my business and what I can do to boost my productivity, and I’ve identified a number of areas where I waste time and work inefficiently.

I also made a forum post over at Starting Start Profits asking members for their suggestions. I got some incredibly useful feedback, some of which I’ve included below in my list of Top 5 Tips For Improving Productivity…

Tip 1 - Focus On Tasks That Have Leverage

Do something once and benefit from it indefinitely. My free rebrandable ebooks are a good example. Because these ebooks spread virally, each one brings in a consistent stream of visitors to my sites every single day. All from creating simple interview ebooks.

Tip 2 - Write Down Your Goals

This is vital. You should set daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals. By writing your goals down, you give yourself both a focus and a plan of action.

Here’s one suggestion I received from Lee McIntyre on his SSP Mentoring Forum.

For your short term tasks try making a list of everything you want to acheive during the following week. Do that last thing on Friday, then allocate tasks to each day. Then when you wake on a Monday, you’ll know exactly what needs to be done.

Then at the end of each day, just spend 5 minutes updating your plan for the next day. It’s also helpful to prioritise tasks. So if you don’t complete your top priority A task on Monday, you can carry that over to the Tuesday ahead of any medium priority B tasks you may have.

Tip 3 - Set Aside Specific Times Of The Day For Checking And Answering Email

Another huge time waster is constantly checking the inbox for incoming email. I no longer check my email in the morning as soon as I switch my PC on. I try to get something done instead, like writing a report, making a blog post or outsourcing a project (more on that in a moment).

Try just checking your email only twice a day instead, say at midday and again late afternoon just before you finish your day’s work.

Tip 4 - Stop Checking Stats So Often

I’m a sucker for this one myself and it wastes so much time. I can easily end up checking my link tracking stats or aweber account 3 or 4 times a day. Once a day at most is all that’s needed.

Tip 5 - Create Systems and Outsource

Probably the single most important tip for growing and leveraging your business. You must outsource as much as you can. Easy and relatively inexpensive tasks to outsource include graphics creation, blog commenting, article writing and keyword research.

Think about how you can systemize tasks that you’ve previously done yourself so you can outsource them to someone else. Perhaps through creating screencapture video tutorials. Whenever you have a new task to perform, constantly ask yourself if your time would be better spent on another part of your business such as market research or coming up with new product ideas. If it would, then you have a prime candidate for outsourcing.

That was the title of a forum post over at Standing Start Profits that I read yesterday. The question was asked by a “newbie” who’d just joined and was looking for a bit of advice.

My reply to the poster is below. It was just one of the many replies given by the very knowledgable and positive minded members at Lee McIntyre’s site which, by the way, is well worth checking out if you havn’t already.

Anyway, this is the advice I gave…

Now as I say above, I’m still learning this game and a long, long way off making internet marketing my full-time living. So make of it what you will.

Having said that, I’d have been thankful of the above advice when I started out because it’s largely based on my previous experiences and mistakes, some intermittent success nowadays, and from talking to and observing other marketers and how they operate.

For instance James D. Brausch has an incredible outsourcing strategy in place via his intern program. According to his blog (which I also believe is outsourced to his interns writing under his “Diego” penname), he has around 400 interns helping run his business at any one time.

Now that’s leverage!

And I’ve talked previously about building business relationships with other marketers. It’s often overlooked by beginners (I didn’t consider it when I started out) but having a network of successful marketers you can collaborate and do joint ventures with, is pretty much a prerequisite for success.

That’s why online learning communities like Standing Start Profits are well worth joining just for the opportunity to network with other serious marketers, let alone the great tutorials Lee provides.

Ofcourse, the most important thing you can do is start to build a list of highly targeted subscribers. It’s the best asset your business will have.

Forget about trying to bombard your list with offer after offer though. That might have worked a few years back but not now. Today, web visitors are much more clued up and will only continue to subscribe to your list if you provide great valuable content that they benefit from.

At last year’s Britpack UK seminar, I heard about one very well known marketer whom despite having a huge six-figure list, was apparently struggling to make more than a trickle of sales from his affiliate promotions. Why? Because he hadn’t spent anytime cultivating a relationship with the people on his list. Instead all they got was one promotional mailing after another. No tutorials or tips or advice…nothing.

No doubt they were unsubscribing in droves too!

Anyway, that’s my take on things. What about you? What advice would you give to someone starting out in internet marketing? Why not post a comment below and let me know.

I‘ve just read on John Thornhill’s blog that eBay will be banning the direct selling of digital items such as ebooks, audio mp3’s, domain names etc from March 31st 2008.

Sadly and quite arrogantly, eBay have deemed it necessary to only give a weeks notice on a policy that will dramatically affect the businesses of hundreds of sellers.

Targeted Campaign

The justification for the digital item announcement was that many ebayers were only buying/selling digital items to pad their feedback rating. This new policy will obviously eradicate that problem. It also appears to be part of a targeted campaign by eBay against feedback abusers, coming hot on the heels of their hugely controversial announcement to stop sellers leaving feedback for buyers.

Unfortunately, the business model of many vendors is to sell low-priced ebooks to generate leads and then upsell the buyer to higher priced items.

That model no longer exists.

It will however still be possible to market digital delivery items using eBay’s Classified Ad format. It costs $10 for a 30 day listing and allows you to link back to, and process payment from, your own website rather than through eBay. As nothing is bought or sold on eBay itself, no feedback mechanism is provided.

Also the ad stays up for the full 30 days so you can generate multiple leads/sales from the one ad.

Physical Products

The other alternative is to create physical products by burning ebooks to CD and delivering them by regular mail. Although the instant gratification of receiving an ebook within minutes will be lost, this may well be the way forward for many marketers.

Still, the biggest lesson to take out of this is never to place your entire business model at the mercy of one company.

Major developments are afoot at Clickbank which will have huge implications for affiliates and merchants alike.

The first announcement, and effective immediately, is that merchants can now offer their products in the Spanish language.

The Spanish speaking market is obviously huge. The US alone is home to more than 40 million Hispanics and worldwide Spanish is the first language of over 330 million people. So this new feature should massively expand the market for existing and new Clickbank products.

More Languages To Follow

Support for other languages is already in the pipeline with French and German expected to be next.

The other important announcement is that work is underway to allow order payments in currencies other than the US dollar. No doubt, many non-US merchants will be delighted, given the greenback’s plummeting value right now.

It’s unclear yet if this feature will also enable merchants to charge in the buyers local currency, by using ip tracking to detect the purchaser’s location.

You can read more about the first phase of what Clickbank has ever-so-modestly titled Project Globalization here

Well after procrastinating for far too long, I’ve finally published the very first edition of my monthly online marketing newsletter. I hope it’s worth the wait…I’ll let you be the judge!

In it I reveal a viral marketing strategy I’ve been using with some success for a few months now to generate ongoing traffic, build niche lists and create passive backend income. I’ve layed out the whole step-by-step process (which is very easy!) and it really does work.

The best part is that you just do the work once, but the traffic, leads and income lasts indefinitely.

As it’s the very first edition, I’ve decided to make it available without requiring you to opt-in so the entire newsletter is viewable from the home page. You can read it here.

And I’d love to receive your feedback afterwards so please feel free to post a comment below.

In January 2007 I attended one of Robert Puddy’s half-day UK workshops here in my hometown of Bristol. It was a good decision because without a doubt, I learnt more about online marketing in those 4 hours than I did in the whole of the previous year.

The biggest lesson I learnt was that making money online is as much about building business relationships as anything else. In particular, Robert stressed that you shouldn’t just see other marketers as competition but as potential JV or even long term business partners.

And in fact if you check out Robert’s latest blog post Snowing In Indiana, wish I wasn’t here you’ll see a great example of this in action.

You’ll see that Robert and his business partner Pat Lovell are merging AdsenseRealEstate with Sean Roach’s Rip2It to create a brand new service.

How did this business partnership come about?

Answer…after Robert invited Sean to speak at his BritpackUK Seminar in Coventry in September 2007.

Building A Bigger Business

The three of them got talking over a few beers, realised their services could complement one another and decided to team up.

Now they’re building an even bigger business together than they ever could have created by themselves.

A true win-win situation.

However, that opportunity would probably never have come about if they hadn’t met face to face.

People don’t do business with anonymous names hiding behind computer screens, but marketers they know, like and trust.

Work Together

That’s why it’s so important to start meeting other marketers and build relationships by attending seminars or local Internet Marketing workshops.

Introduce yourself to people and find out how you can work together.

It might be you can help each other through integration marketing (for example, promoting to each other’s lists), or if you both have different skillsets. For example, if one of you has html or php coding skills and the other is great at creating graphics, you can exchange services.

Who knows, you may even find your next JV or business partner.

The point is, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can do it all from behind your PC.

Internet Marketing is still a people business.

Something I’ve realised over the last year is that being successful online is as much to do with having the correct attitude and mindset as anything else.

Like any new venture, there’s a steep learning curve involved and it can often be a frustrating experience. Particulary as the daily bombardment of marketing messages tends to make you feel like you’re the only one left not making a buck.

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about why many marketers find it difficult to make money online. Here’s my top ten reasons…

1. Spending too much time reading, learning, buying, watching and
   not enough time DOING.
2. Not taking your marketing efforts seriously enough.
3. Not focusing your efforts on a marketing system (whether it be adwords, bum marketing, blogging or whatever) for long enough to see results. Often this is because you get distracted by the ‘next big thing’ product being promoted by all the so-called ‘guru’s’.
4. Because there are so many ways to make money online, it becomes almost impossible to know where to start. So you end up doing nothing.
5. Lack of perseverance. You start off thinking earning money online is easy (because everyone else seems to be doing it) and quickly become disillusioned and give up when it dawns upon you that it actually takes hard work and dedication.
6. Directing all your efforts into a niche that is either unprofitable, or you lack the knowledge to make profitable.
7. Not setting up your online business in the right way to be profitable from the outset.
8. Lack of a clearly laid out route to success.
9. A failure to set practical, achievable, specific goals. This ties in with number 8 somewhat.
10. Being uncomfortable asking customers for money or not charging enough to make it a worthwhile enterprise.

Perhaps some of those ring true with you? I know I’ve been guilty of most of them at one point or another.

So if you do recognize yourself in that list, atleast take heart from the fact you’re not alone. And remember, it’s never too late to change bad habits or direction if necessary.