1.) Watch Your Wallet

Especially in the beginning, this part is crucial.  If you are like most aspiring Internet Marketrs, you are starting out with more time than money – especially if you’re working on this while “in between jobs” aka “laid off”.  Don’t spend more mony than you can honestly afford to.  There are thousands of free resources on the web and hundreds of them are just as good, if not better, than anything you could pay for. Granted, finding your favorite, honest and trustworthy guru(s) will be majorly beneficial to your IM success.  If the “guru” is smart – he/she will freely shar much of their best ideas and suggestions for free.

That being said, be selective in just who you listen to.  Sign up for mailing lists, try it out – if you’re not getting true value from what is being sent to you then unsubscribe.  You may have a lot of time on your hands, but reading every newsletter/ezine, sales pitch and product push that arrives in your mailbox will hinder your progress.

There is one IM guru I follow who sends out e-mails promoting products quite reguarly.  He runs many different mailing lists and I’m probably on 3 or 4 of them.  While I find the constant sales pitches rather annoying, I have become almost impervious to them.  I stay subscribed to his list for 2 reasons: 1) When he does share information it is good quality, useful stuff and 2) I take a look at his sales pitches as examples of good sales copy – if he is sending out so many sales pitch e-mails, they must be working for him.  I, personally, would not choose to send out that many, but I can still learn from his.

2.) Get the Most Out of Membership Sites

If you are subscribed to a membership site – especially one with a forum – use it to your full advantage.  Stop being just a lurker and start adking questions.  You are probably not the only one wondering about X,Y or Z and others who usually keep silent will thank you for bringing up the topic.  You are paying to have access to the site and those running it – pick their brains, ask for guidance and get your money’s worth!

In my opinion, one of the best IM membership sites is My Silent Team.  It has been an invaluable resource for me and was especially helpful when I was first getting my feet wet in the Internet Marketing world.  And there’s also the Warrior Forum which I believe is the best free forum around.

3.) Clean Out Your Virtual Closets (aka Hard Drive)

You know you have several hundred dollars worth of e-books, guides, reports and how-to’s just sitting there collecting virtual dust on your hard drive – most unread.  Now is the time to go through them, sort out the baloney and only keep the true gems.  If it makes you nervous to delete some, just move the potential junk to a new folder.  Should it actually prove to be usefull in the future, you can still get to it.

You also may have several e-books/guides printed out.  When I finally sat down to go through my IM junk collction I had 4 copy paper sized boxes stuffed with printed out e-books, guides, reports and how-to’s !!  4 boxes!!  Over the course of several days I went through ALL of them.  All that remains is approximately 10 of them that I put in binders, labeled and put on an easily accessible shelf.  They are worthy of taking up space in my office.  All the others, well, I now crumple them up and use them as packing material for items I sell on eBay!  They were useful after all…lol.  Besides those 10 lucky winners, I do also have some sitting on my hard drive.  But the ones I actually printed out – those 10 – are the ones I use the most often.

These tips I have given you will seriously save you a lot of wasted time.  All together, I probably wasted years of time reading IM junk.  Follow my suggestions and you’ll move along the road to Ineternet Marketing Success much quicker than I did.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent way too much time obsessively checking your web site statistics, hits, Google Adsense, EPN, Amazon Affiliate stuff, bids on your auctions…….etc.  Here and now I make a pledge to limit myself to checking all of those numbers only once a week.  Besides, it’ll be so much more exciting to see the larger accumulated #’s than the smaller, daily incriments.

It’s going to be tough – but the amount of time I will save is worth it.  I can then spend that time concentrating on driving traffic to the sites instead of watching traffic – much more exciting and a better use of time.

I challenge you to do the same.  I’m going to check all of my stats once a week on Sunday evening.  I figure that way it’ll help with planning what areas/sites I need to focus more on for the following week – and – it will give me a good boost of happiness to carry along into Monday morning.

As I find more time-saving tips I’ll share them with you here on this blog and through my newsletter.

What time-saving tips do you have that you can share with me?

For at least the last 10 years I’ve chased one shiny object after another – I have soooo many great ideas, and an almost equal amount of half-completed great projects.

I sat down the other day and REALLY thought about what it was I wanted to accomplish and which unfinished project would get me towards my goal.
For me, it was to focus on one half-done, poorly designed web site that has been bringing in spurts of affiliate income for the last 6 months.
I wrote on a sticky note that I wanted to focus on this site only and do whatever I could to build it up, gain more traffic and increase income.

I keep that sticky note where I can always see it and so far I’ve spent the last 4 days focused on only ONE project! If any other good ideas or opportunities tempt me, I jot them down in a notebook and return to my original task.

In these last 4 days I have made GREAT strides with the one project/web site I am focused on. Focusing on one thing at a time is REALLY really really a good thing

Figure out which “opportunity” you believe you can see the quickest results from, set a timeline and goals….and then nose to the grind stone until your end date.

Then rinse and repeat with one of the other “opportunities”.

NOTE:  This is from a forum post I did at my favorite “internet haunt”  www.MySilentTeam.com

So, while I “should” be focusing on getting something productive accomplished……..I wandered over to Twitter at 4:30am this morning.  Because how best could I spend my time than to gaze a random 200 letter (or so) – mostly spam-like postings from people I don’t know…lol.

Someone posted a link to an article about the “4 hour work day” (http://virl.com/d9daa/) – not to be confused with the “4 hour work week” ala Tim Ferris……..I guess the post could have been titled the “20 hour work day”…..but it wasn’t..

So anyway…….I found the article to be filled with great nuggets of helpfulness

The author of the article, Scott Young, talks about not looking at work as something that needs to be done in a set amount of hours.  He says we should keep 2 lists – one of daily goals/tasks and one with weekly goals.  And also mentions that if we find that we get our daily tasks completed sooner than later……then DON’T do more for that day.  He equates it to running a major marathon – and running as hard as fast as you can – then getting to the finish line and you find that it has been moved another mile up the road. YIKES!

I’m going to put some of the strategies Scott suggests to the test tomorrow.  Check out his article here:  http://virl.com/d9daa/

Come back here after you’ve read it so we can chat about it

I find it terribly difficult to focus on ONE project at a time.  One thing that I have found that helps is to ALWAYS keep a notebook nearby.  That way, when I’m working on “Project A” and I have ideas for 5 other projects I can jot them down and get them out of my head and stay focused.  Otherwise, I end up jumping from A to B to C and then I can’t even remember what I was initially working on!

Stay tuned to future posts to hear about my latest projects…..working on “multiple streams of income”  – woo hoo!