Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner
Here's a list of holidays and observances for 2011.Use it to help you plan your publishing schedule for 2011.
For example, you now know that Chinese New Year will be on February 3rd. Write a post now about Chinese New Year and schedule it to be published on that date.
You will find that these types of preparations make your workload over the course of the year SO much easier!
I've had the WP Shopping Pages plugin for quite awhile now and absolutely love it.
I use it to auto-post products — mostly romantic movie DVD's from Amazon — to my dating blog on a regular basis.
Actually, the WP Shopping Pages plugin has been a real blessing.
I haven't been that keen to write about dating for awhile now, yet with the auto-posts my subscribers still receive updates through my Aweber blog broadcasts on a regular basis and therefore keep returning to visit the site. By result, my Google Analytics stats show no real decline in traffic despite the fact that I've done very little work on the site for months.
There are a couple of issues with the plugin that I've noticed just recently, however.
By goodness, I think I've finally licked overwhelm! Six days into 2010 and my year-end is done, reconciled and ready for the accountant. Not only that, but I'm making great headway on a number of other projects that combined had me overwhelmed to the point of complete inertia.
In addition to the books, I'm juggling home renovations, the AffiliateBloggerPro project, a new book, Affiliate Summit preparations (Jan 16-19), a surprise birthday party (Jan 20th), winter vacation planning (Jan 23 – Feb 10), workup to Valentine's Day for 101Date.com, and queuing up posts for all my sites while I'm unavailable for almost 4 weeks…not to mention eating, sleeping, snow shoveling and other forms of exercise.
Phew.
Under normal circumstances my brain would seize at the prospect of all those tasks and you'd find me on the couch in the afternoon watching something inane like a Real Housewives of Orange County marathon for hours on end, trying to relieve the stress.
Let me tell you, that form of ‘stress-relief' doesn't work.
Instead, I lie there thinking about everything I have to do and berate myself for having accomplished absolutely nothing, while the real housewives go about spending $18,000 on a 10 year old's birthday party and buying $5000 handbags (for which I berate them even more). 🙂
But I finally discovered how to overcome the overwhelm and it was actually easy to do.
Take for instance the year-end. I have always been accounting phobic and to make matters worse, I changed from Quicken to QuickBooks this year, the multi-currency version, no less.
On January 2nd, I realized that it would be easier to do my GST (Goods and Services tax) submission for January 30th, if my books were up-to-date. Then I realized that (despite good intentions) I'd made no entries since firing my useless bookeeper in June.
Ugh.
Six months of entries. Considering I'm leaving on January 16th, talk about overwhelm!
But… when I looked at it positively, I realized that I had 13 days.
13 days, 6 months, half a month per day… … hmmmm.
I thought I could chunk the process down and spend an hour per day doing entries and have it done before I left for Affiliate Summit, and still have time to work on other projects.
Turned out that I was wrong.
The data entry went far faster than I expected — especially after I figured out what I was supposed to do with those multi-currency options.
Just deciding to start by doing a little bit and limit the time I spent per day got me off the couch.
And once I started to see the results, I got on a roll. I discovered that the work wasn't nearly so heinous as I presumed.
It never really is.
So, there's the big tip for overcoming overwhelm.
Don't fret over having to do the WHOLE darned thing at once. Nothing ever happens that way. Just as a book is written page by page and houses are built board by board, your project too will be completed step by step.
Give yourself a time limit during which you'll only focus on one aspect of your project. That way you won't get fatigued by doing one thing for too long. Best of all, you'll feel great that you've made some progress as opposed to none.
Now all you have to do is get off the couch and start. 🙂
Today's guest post is by Jeffrey Wood and deals with a topic few of us even bother to consider – but is essential to achieving maximum productivity from the work we do. Read it and enjoy ~ Ros
This often is in reference to things like being organized before you start, setting up your work area, figuring out ways to not rely on brute strength, etc.
For Internet Marketers “Working smarter not harder” is sometimes used for outsourcing certain tasks or doing your research before entering a market or by using existing tools instead of reinventing the wheel.
Today though I'm looking at it in a different sense.
I'm talking about working with your natural biorhythms instead of against them. Sounds kinda like some whacky new age thing, doesn't it?
Here's what I mean: I am a night owl by nature and over the years this has been reaffirmed every day off I've ever had. I like staying up late, but not all night and I like sleeping in, but not all day.
In fact, swing shift would be the ideal working hours for me if it wasn't for one teeny tiny issue…I hate working those hours.
I once had over a month off due to an injury. “Aha”, I thought to myself, “I'll have so much time to work on my internet business.” I daydreamed of all the things I'd get done. Yeah right, didn't happen.
During the daytime, the time most people think they'd be the most productive were actually the LEAST productive hours for me. I'd be (and still am) distracted by e-mail, noise, snack attacks, Twitter and just about everything else you can imagine. I just couldn't focus for very long.
Oh sure, most of it was related to work, there's always a blog post from an expert to read, a resource they mention to check out, the occasional news headline that the Great Plague was caused by flying monkeys, etc. There's nothing like being Productively Unproductive.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, “Well, all you had to do was to not turn on your e-mail, Twitter, or those other things until you got your blog post written or a message added to your autoresponder, or whatever else you had to do.”
Great in theory, but that didn't matter, I still couldn't focus. The daytime is the perfect time for me to check Twitter, check e-mails, make phone calls and things, but it's horrible for just about everything else.
I work better and am more focused, either in the early morning or late night. Here it is at 5:30 am and I am very focused, very undistracted, very productive, but in a couple of hours that will change.
This is what I mean when I say work smarter not harder by working with your body instead of against it. I know the times I am most productive at certain tasks, so even though I have all day and could have (would have loved to) sleep in, I got up at 5am so I could be focused and productive doing the things I need to do to add content to my sites.
Now if you only have 5pm to 6:15pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays to work on your internet business, then you don't have a choice, you MUST figure out how to work very focused during those times. Use Tuesday to prepare and Thursday to execute the plan OR divide up the time however you need to.
But when you do have the time on a day off or vacation or whatever, work with your body whenever you can. I can happily spend 10 hours planted on my rear end on the computer working, but I still know when I'm going to be able to work at my best at certain tasks.
Figure out when you are at your best and work with it. The time you spend on a task may be cut down, but you may find ironically that your productivity goes up.
And that my friend, is one way to work smarter not harder and now I must go, for the Twitter, it calls to me.
I do it and you can too!
Watch the video below to see how I set things up on different sites to free up most of my time during the summer. (That advance planning & work came in especially handy considering a recent family emergency!)
So, if you want to take a little time off, or make sure that your affiliate business keeps ticking right along when you have to be away unexpectedly – watch the video – and have a super summer!
Note: This technique works particularly well for affiliate publishers and bloggers who promote the same products consistently.
Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!
Cheers,
Elance, Freelancer…You know that you need to build a content-rich website if you want to get free traffic from the search engines, but writing takes lots time and your time is better spent marketing.
So, if you want to free up some of that writing time, consider hiring a ghostwriter.
Listed below – in no particular order – are the services that I use (and have used) to find ghostwriters for article writing projects.
Get an article written for just $5! OK, AND remember that you get what you pay for, so don't expect Hemingway. 🙂
Freelancer is an international marketplace where people who need custom software developed can find coders in a safe and business-friendly environment. Buyers can cherry pick from a pool of 124,597 coders…enabling them to hire a coder across the country or across the globe…from the comfort of their computers.
Buyers who wish to hire internationally, can take advantage of favorable overseas exchange rates, resulting in work being done for 50-90% less than if the project were done in-country. Coders are also given access to a huge pool of potential work and have the ability to work independently from their homes rather than for a company.
Look for PLR content in your niche that either you or your ghostwriter can re-write BEFORE you hire someone to create unique content. See the Related Articles below for content suppliers.
I can hardly believe that I've never told you about my all-time favorite software before!
It didn't really occur to me until I was at AdTech in New York and was dealing with the frustration of having to work without it because I'd forgotten to load it onto my laptop … again!
Later in the conference, during a discussion about software with some webmaster friends, I mentioned my oversight and was absolutely shocked to learn that some of them did not use this software.
WHAT?
I honestly thought that all computer users (not just webmasters) would not only know about – but rely on – this fantastic little productivity tool that reduces workload and saves a heap of time.
Check out the video above (if you haven't already) to see how slick how it works.
Auto Macro Recorder is a easy-use macro program for you to record what you operate or write in the computer by mouse or keyboard.
It can save all operation records to a script file automatically, and you may modify the script file and replay it manually.
Very easy to use! Just Record — Save — Replay 3 steps. You don't need to have any program experiences.
Record all operations in any applications even it don't support Macro.
It can automatically repeat many times on whatever you do or test so that you don't need to stare at the computer. If you work with a computer,you need it.
Check out Auto Macro Recorder now.