|
Getting More
Work Done In Your Online Business
©2005 by Willie
Crawford
If you're anything like me, there never
seems to be enough time
to get all of the things done that you'd like to
do. If your
income goals are as high as mine
(seven-figures,) then you also
realize that you'll have a very hard time
reaching them if you're
trading time for money. I realized this second
point when I first
noticed all of the doctors and lawyers leaving
those practices to
start their own businesses. When I asked them
why, they explained
that they only got paid when they worked, and
that the fact that
they could only work so many hours per day was
what limited their
incomes the most.
DE
Assuming you're not simply trading your time for
money... working
for a salary or at an hourly wage, how do you
simply get more
done?
First of all, you need to make sure that you're
only trying to
do the things that you should be doing. For most
entrepreneurs
that means doing things to grow and market your
business. Most
other work should be farmed out... subcontracted
or outsourced
to technicians. If you can easily hire someone
to do it cheaper
than you can do it, then YOU shouldn't be doing
it.
Trying to do everything yourself is one of the
biggest reasons
I see most netrepreneurs failing. You simply
can't be an expert
at everything, or do everything yourself. You
need to identify
those things that will offer you the highest
return on your most
limited asset (your time), and then you need to
focus on doing
just those things.
Yes, you may need to understand how to do some
basic things
yourself at first. For example, when putting up
your first
website, it may make sense to learn some basic
html or at-least
how to use a WYSIWYG (what You See Is What You
Get) HTML
editor. If you can afford to hire a webmaster
and programmers to
do everything for you though, even learning
those things may not
be the best and highest use of your time.
My personal experience, like that of many of my
contemporaries,
is that I learned to use DreamWeaver to do my
own webpages. I
simply didn't want to be trapped waiting for my
webmaster to
make minor changes (that I knew would
dramatically improve my
bottom line) to a webpage . Good webmasters and
programmers are
often in high demand and very busy.
Click Here to Start.
|
Debbie's General Info |
|
|
Happy Spring!
|
48 Friends
Member since 2/11/2005 |
|
|
|
Gender |
Female |
Age |
43 |
Location |
St. Charles, Il, United States |
Interests |
Fitness, networking, small business, German shepards, Illinois, direct sellers |
|
|
Company |
Avon |
URL |
View Avon's web site |
Industry |
Skin care, cosmetics, fashion, fragrances, wellness |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
After I learned to do the basics, I also often fell into the
trap that I want YOU to avoid. I want you to do two things.
First, learn to say "NO" and secondly, learn to prioritize.
Learning to say "no" can be hard. It's human nature to want
to
do favors for others. We want to be liked. We believe that
if
we say "no" to requests for assistance, we will be liked
less.
Until you learn to say "no" when you have a full plate,
others
will control your time and decide what you do... when. You
can't afford to put that much control over your time, your
business, and your LIFE into the hands of others. So, it's
critical to master the skill of saying "no" sometimes. You
can
do it politely :-)
Learning to prioritize is the second essential that you must
master. Otherwise, you'll simply find yourself doing the
easy,
enjoyable things that produce little long-term benefit,
while
you ignore the very things that you should be doing.
There are a lot of systems for prioritizing, and you have to
choose the one that works best for you. For me, it involves
making a list of the things that I must get done and then
doing
the most important ones first. This takes firmness and being
honest with yourself. You have to do the most important
things
first because, then, if something doesn't get done, it will
be
the less important things that you simply can't fit in.
In prioritizing, you do need to seek balance though. Things
you probably don't want to compromise are your health and
your relationships with your family. Make those a higher
priority than business.
A common trap too many netrepreneurs fall into... one that
I've fallen into, is offering to do too many things for
others.
In a phone conversation, or perhaps a discussion board
thread,
someone needs help doing something that is very simple to
you.
You try to explain to them how to do it, and they just don't
seem to "get it." So you offer to do it for them. Before you
know it, you find yourself doing the very things that you
normally get someone else to do for you so that you can
focus
on better uses of your time.
Visitor only for $0.01. Try our pay per click search engine.
The cheapest on the market.
Start here.. |
Here's how I got out of the trap I
just described... I often
had clients who needed to get minor things done before
we
could get other goals accomplished. They needed to know
how
to do minor things like FTP’ing a file, making minor
edits
to webpages, or perhaps changing out a graphic. In the
interest of expediency, I often offered to do these
minor
chores... until I saw how often they mushroomed into
major
projects. My solution.... I found, or created, video
tutorials
explaining how to do these simple task. I reasoned that
it
made more sense to just do the task once, and record it
so
that I would have it handy if needed again.
If you visit my site at:
http://WillieCrawford.com/how.html
you'll find links to a few of these videos I did in
Camtasia.
These are flash videos on how to:
1) Copy and paste
2) FTP a file
3) Make minor webpage edits
etc.
I actually have dozens of these but just share these few
with
you for illustrative purposes. Setting up something like
this
may be a great time-saver.
Very similar to the concept above, if you find yourself
getting asked the same questions over and over again,
perhaps
you should set up a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
section
on your website. This will stop hundreds of emails or
phone
calls. Just make the link to it prominent on your
website.
If you find yourself answering the same email questions,
or
requests, over and over again, set up email templates in
your
email program so that you have those answers handy.
Then, often
all you will need to do is pull up the template and
change the
name to respond quickly via email. You could also use
programs
that scan an email looking for keywords and then
automatically
send a response based upon the context of the email.
That's a
little advanced for this article, so I won't explain it
here.
Similar to the Camtasia videos, if you find you’re
explaining
the same thing over and over again, you could also post
an MP3
tele-class recording online for your clients. You could
also
just set up a phone line with the recorded messages,
instructions, or other information, and provide your
clients
with the phone number for listening to the recording.
Many
sales organizations use this idea for weekly training
meetings,
etc.
Visitor only for $0.01. Try our pay per click search engine.
The cheapest on the market.
Start here.. |
There are many other common sense things you
can do to get more
done. A couple of quick ones that I use are:
1) Just working smarter... i.e., I don't stand
in line at the
post office. My staff and I have arranged to
just walk up to the
counter and leave the containers full of mail on
the counter.
The clerk simply gives us more mail "buckets,"
and we buy postage
in bulk or over the Internet. If we do need to
actually talk to
a clerk, we visit the post office during the
least busy times of
the day... NOT during lunchtime when everyone
visits the post
office.
2) Avoid time wasters such as spending too much
time at online
discussion forums. These can be great places to
network,
brainstorm, or do research, but make sure you're
not just
avoiding getting started on an urgent project.
3) Identify when you are most productive and use
that time to do
your most challenging work. Set aside times when
you are least
productive (based upon your natural body cycles)
to answer email
or return phone calls.
4) Stop procrastinating! Often we procrastinate
because a task
seems so large. Simply break it down into
bit-sized steps and
it will seem less ominous. Then choose a step
and do it. Mark
that step off your schedule to reinforce the
fact that you are
making progress :-)
5) Automate where possible using things like
autoresponders
and interactive web forms to dispense commonly
requested
documents. You can even use software to
automatically update
or change the content on your webpages. One such
piece of
software that I use and love is called "Traffic
On Steroids."
You can check it out at:
http://WillieCrawford.com/traffic-on-steroids.html
These are just a few of the ways that you can
get more focused
and get more done. It's really just a matter of
prioritizing
and then doing it. Adopt just a few of these
ideas and you'll
be surprised at how much more you do actually
get DONE! Without
implementing a few of these suggestions you
can't be successful
simply because you'll never finish all of the
tasks that you
need to do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Willie Crawford is a corporate president,
published author,
seminar speaker and host, tele-seminar speaker and host,
retired military officer, karate black belt, master network
marketing trainer, and lifetime student of marketing. He shows
people how to actually generate substantial income on-line
using very simple, easily modeled systems. An example of
such a system that you can study and duplicate is at:
http://HowToBeReallyHealthy.com |
|
Adlandpro
Toolbar gives you instant access to your
Free Email Account, Free Website, submission to
over 8,900 sites, learning tools, free discussion
list on marketing and promotion with 26,000
subscribers, Free 5 day Website Success course by
email, plus instant search. Click
Here. |
|