It’s quite easy to kid yourself into the idea you are working on your online business just because you are sitting at your computer. Working on money producing activities is the key to building a successful online business. What are you doing at any given moment while on your computer? It is very easy to get distracted looking at articles and videos and scanning through your Facebook feed, only to realize that you have spent your whole day there and nothing has moved forwards in your business.
If you already have an online business you will know how easily you can become distracted and end up on a complete tangent to your business activities. Make a list of productive activities which you should do every day in order to move your business forwards.
- Building content
- Advertising
- communicating with your list
- building your list
It is also worth analysing your top most productive habits in terms of what they do for your business. Building content especially blogging is time consuming and brings slow results. Advertising and building your list is probably the best thing you can do for your online business. Rank your best activities in terms of which ones bring about the most desirable outcomes. Don’t get caught up in meaningless activities and distractions on the internet.
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion. It is therefore easy to fill time up with meaningless activities and in response to the results expand the time you consider necessary to attain a desired outcome. This leads to less and less getting done and a constant chasing of your tail, all the time blaming the ‘system’ rather than yourself!
Use the online stopwatch to take stock of the time you use. I use this so as to notice the passage of time during the day. If I set the timer for an hour it makes me conscious of the value of time. If the alarm goes off I can take stock of what I have accomplished over the last hour. If I have been ‘surfing the internet’ and got nothing done then I am more aware for the next hour!
Look over your results so far
By consistently looking at your results, in terms of sales, email opt-ins and website visits or video visits, you can take stock of what is working for you to move your business forwards. There should be a constant improvement in terms of your understanding of your business and also in your awareness of your productiveness. In Japanese there is a term for constant improvement call Kaizen. By noticing your best use of time, what distracts you, how exercise and diet influence your productiveness, you should be on a curve of constant personal and financial growth. Knowing what works for your business and which activities produce the best results, and then acting on this information, rather than simply repeating your old behavior, is what will make you and your internet business a success.
Lead generation is probably the top money producing activity for your internet business once everything else in in place. You will of course need products to sell and be offering value to your list and to find new leads. Just looking over my lead generation tactics today has shown me which activities are producing the most opt ins. I can then concentrate on this area instead of doing the many other activities I have been doing which are not producing any results for my business.
Here are some of the lead generation tactics I have employed:
- Facebook advertising
- Ebay advertising
- Video marketing (content creation)
- Article marketing (content creation)
- Free advertising websites (Gumtree, Craigslist, Freeads etc.)
- Adwords video advertising
My recent tracking review has revealed that Facebook advertising and video marketing are my top list building activities. So this is obviously what I should be concentrating on.
Some questions to ask yourself when starting out with your day:
- What are my best money producing activities?
- How can I give more value to my list?
- What is the most valuable way to spend the next hour of my online activities?
Obviously there is a lot to learn when starting out with your internet business. Just be careful not to be the perpetual student – always learning but never implementing. Make a note of how you spend your time on the internet. Don’t look for your results. Instead look at your activities. This was a nice little gem which I learned when doing network marketing years ago. Looking too much for your results before things are really moving for you in your business can be a huge mistake. Why? Because if your results are poor, you lose motivation and become disheartened. Once disheartened it is hard to motivate yourself to move forwards and be productive. Of course looking at your results can help you plan more appropriate activities, but it should be done with this in mind.
Don’t focus on results, focus on activities.Â