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How To Overcome Procrastination

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Procrastination is the act of putting yourself away for doing things at a later stage, what you can do today or right now.  We always find something better to do than to focus on important tasks or activities that we started to work on. This leads to doing many things at the same time and never really completing any tasks.

Everybody procrastinates to some extent, but this can become a real handicap to a certain extent in the professional and personal life. There is always a valid excuse of pushing things away for later. We have a tendency of pushing things that are difficult to do or which requires big efforts to accomplish certain tasks.

Let’s say for example, I decide to take up some physical exercise at home. Just when it comes to start some exercising, I suddenly realise that I have to clean up the room first, make some place to do some exercise, and finally that thought in mind pushed away the idea of getting to exercise. We always will find the best excuse to push things away when they are really needed to be done.

For your online business, it can create a real handicap. How many times I sat down to complete a task and then got distracted or those negative thoughts came into my mind, or the fear of not able to do it right and started doing other things that were really not worthy of the effort that I put into that task. One of my best examples is to look at emails or read what others have to say on the Internet.

This usually happens when I have to write an article for my blog. Sometimes I am short of ideas and that is what gets me to excuses. Yes, I know that is really not good but this is human nature and everyone falls into this trap.

In your personal and family life, it can be also very annoying. How many times I said that I have to pay the bills, I have small notes in front of me to say that I have to pay and yet I have not paid them on time. Then when the day arrives and you have no choice but to accomplish it, you, either make a mess out of it or you found that you are all stressed out.

Why do we Procrastinate and do you find yourself in the following instances

There could be many reasons for procrastination but some of the major reasons could be due to

  • Unable to organise your ideas, actions and make proper decisions
  • Finding the tasks difficult and you feel that it is not worth a try
  • Pure laziness
  • Tiredness
  • Fear of failure
  • Not focused
  • Fear of rejection
  • Lack of confidence
  • Don’t want to quit from that comfort zone

Yes these things also happen to me and I think every one of us has at some instance faced excuses of this kind. This can really be a drawback to your career, family life and your online business (if you are doing one).

Imagine your life with the diagram here below. Do you find yourself doing all those things that are marked on this flowchart. It would take me ages to get to the end of the sequence. Our life is not a machine but we need to model it around our work and family. There has to be a balance between the two.

imagesprocrastination-20flowchart
Creative Commons License photo credit: jean-louis zimmermann

I am a part time Internet Marketer and have to also maintain my pro life, student life and my family life. Having things organised can really help me get to where I want. So here are some ways I have organised myself and hope that it helps you do the same. I am not 100% perfect but have managed to make it work.

Ways To Stop Procrastination

  • Take some time out and do a list of all the things that you have to do.
  • Then, rank them according to its importance and urgency. You need to prioritise them according to their relevancy.
  • Now estimate the time that is required to accomplish each task. Don’t underestimate the time that may be required for each task. Always keep in hand some extra time in case you can’t finish it on time. Depending on the task, I usually keep from 10mn to half a day.
  • Depending on the duration of the task you can then classify them into categories. Say for example the task that will take lesser time can be done straight away and for longer task they may be divided into multiple smaller tasks (if possible)
  • Make yourself a detailed timetable and set yourself real targets to accomplish them
  • Distraction can also be your biggest enemy. Eliminate all sorts of distractions for e.g. television, radio, telephone, messengers. These will only lead to procrastination

Now it is nice to have a big list of things to do and all planned in advance but you don’t get out of that comfort zone and start putting them into action then it will never work. You will find yourself again procrastinating.

SO GET TO ACTION.

To Your Success,

Internet Selling For Newbies – The 4 Fundamentals & 8 Components

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Creative Commons License photo credit: Public Domain Photos

Some people sit around waiting for things to happen. Some people “Make Things Happen”, and others just wonder…

“What the heck just happened?” Which of these three categories do you fall under? Be honest, I’m sure everyone wants to believe that they’re in the “Make It Happen” category, but are you really?

In these trying economic times, more and more people are turning to “internet marketing” each day as a means of supplementing their income. Home based businesses are becoming more and more common place across the world. Unfortunately many of these entrepreneurs fail. Here’s why, in many respects the very definition of “internet marketing” can preclude you from achieving success. You see, just marketing a product and raising awareness doesn’t make you money, SELLING that product over and over again does.

The key here is to sell, and there are four fundamental skills needed.  There are also 8 basic components that you’ll need to thoroughly understand. I’m about to explain the 4 critical fundamentals here and then over the at the bottom of this article, you’ll click on a link where teyou can find the 8 components you’ll be using to master the fundamentals.

Fundamental #1 List Building

Everything, and I sincerely mean EVERYTHING you do online should be geared towards growing your subscriber list. Your members are the “lifeblood” of your internet business. Your subscribers and followers become your customers but more importantly, they also become your biggest asset in the acquisition of more members. To build a list of members you’ll need a squeeze page, this is basically a simple “mini website” specifically designed to capture the visitor’s name and email address by way of a web-form. A web-form is just a name & email field with a submit button that empowers you to store the visitors information in a database for future use.

Once the details are in the database you can bulk mail your subscribers to stay in touch with them. As your list grows, you can monetize it by emailing promotional offers for either your own products or affiliate products on which you’ll collect a commission if the subscriber makes a purchase. The easiest way to entice someone to subscribe to your list and enter their details into your web-form is by way of an “ethical bribe”. This means you give away something of value in exchange for the customers details, once they give you their name and email address you instantly give them access to their “Free Gift”.

Fundamental #2  Driving Traffic

Lets say you have a killer recipe for BBQ Sauce and you want to open your own BBQ restaurant but you’re on a limited budget. You know your restaurants success depends on foot traffic and visibility after all you’ve heard it said many times before in retail… “Location, Location, Location” so you are faced with a tough decision to make. “Do I pay top dollar for prime commercial real estate in a highly visible mall or do I save some money and put my restaurant in an obscure part of town with low rent?”

Even though the initial investment is higher, the mall location will produce a profit while the obscure location wont even cover the low rent. In the obscure location you would have to actually create the traffic by paying for advertising while the prime location will have inherent or what we like to refer to as “organic” traffic. This is what driving web-traffic is all about, it makes absolutely no difference how good your product is if no  one can find it on the internet. You have to look for existing flows of traffic online and place traffic signals there which direct the surfers back to your internet real estate, your squeeze page. This can be done in a multitude of ways like banner exchanges, social networking, video sites, SEO, forums, safe-lists, ezines, any many more including Pay Per Click advertising..”

Fundamental #3  Increasing Conversions

Ok, so now you’ve gotten some customers to your BBQ restaurant where they can buy your delicious home cooked secret recipe Chicken & Ribs… but will they? Will they actually buy? How does your restaurant look? Is it clean and tidy? Do you have nice furniture and an attractive menu? Are you fairly priced? What kind of specials do you offer? Do you have a punch card that can earn me a free meal after a certain amount of purchases? What are you actually doing to convert your visitor into a REPEAT buyer? That is called conversions. The way you structure your website from, graphics & sales copy to offer and guarantee will all determine whether or not your visitor actually buys from you.

The key here is to monitor your site metrics impressions vs clicks in comparison to sales. Acknowledge trends and then tweak the site components by “Split Testing” different site parameters. Split testing can be done with special software or it can be done manually by monitoring the site statistics daily and making subtle changes to see how they affect conversions. Perhaps your background color is too bright, or your headline font is too big. Maybe you’re guarantee is not in a prominent location on the page. Who knows what it could be! The key here is to test, test, and retest. Once you’ve arrived at a high converting formula stick with it and repeat the process.

Fundamental #4 Duplication

This is probably the most important fundamental of the four… “Duplication.”  If you want what one man has, do what that one man does. Contrary to what you may believe, one of the biggest reasons that Newbies fail online is not lack of direction. It’s actually “too much direction” or should I say too many directions (plural.) The average newbie opportunity seeker subscribes to multiple marketer’s lists and begins acquiring every product that appears to promise instant riches.

The problem is that different marketers have different marketing angles and strategies which pull the newbie into an exponential overstretched frenzy of information overload. This in turn causes multiple info products to accumulate on their hard drive until the tasks at hand become insurmountable and they just throw in the towel. The key to avoiding this is to go on a “Low Information Diet” by choosing a mentor that you like and relate to.

Do some research and once you’ve decided on who you will follow, then duplicate their success step by step. Once you begin to see positive results, just duplicate YOURSELF to increase your results. This is a sure fire way to avoid the snags and pitfalls of newbie marketing.

So thats all fine and dandy but “How Exactly Do I EXECUTE The Four Fundamentals?” Well, you can learn those at the website by clicking this link: Internet Selling For Newbies See You There!

To Your Sales Success,


Beware Of The Twitter Kit – Spammers Dream Come True!

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Cybercriminals are on the merge of discovering new ways to spam the internet. This time it turns out that Twitter is in the range. Twitter.com is fully aware  and have been continually developing new ways of protecting it’s twitterers of all these cybercriminal attacks. I am sure many of you have noticed the recent change about Twitter’s Link Service .

Some underground forums are currently promoting a tool kit aka “Twitter Kit” which  has some interesting functions, it allows to send messages to thousands of followers using proxy settings. Not only that it enhances Search Engine Optimization. The tool also enables the user to search through other users’ followers and to send Follow invites to them as well as to break account limits set by Twitter. [Source : http://blog.trendmicro.com ] you can read more at this blog

Search Engines Can Drive Hordes of Traffic To Your Blog

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Creative Commons License photo credit: Danard Vincente

I am sure this is not new to anyone. Blogs can be an excellent method for building your list. And moreover it is a free traffic generation method. Every time you add new fresh contents to your blog, the search engines spiders will come and crawl your site. These are hungry spiders eagerly waiting for higly informative content to provide to the internet surfers. Why do you think Google is ranked as #1 search engine. Google always changes its algorithm so that it can locate the best content on the net for their readers.

Search engines are on the lookout for fresh content and valuable information. If the spiders like your content, they will index it and that means the search engine will be sending you quality traffic to your blog. The more your content appears in the search engine, more you will get traffic. It is important to note that your content should look like quality information and not a sales pitch. Spiders hate spammy contents and they will reject your hard done work.

Obviously, you would like to have some links in there. I suppose that is your main objective either to sell something or to build a list. One or two links are tolerated but more than that it looks like a sales pitch. So add value rather than a sales pitch.

A reasonable blog post could be around 500 words with a few paragraphs and headings. Use your primary keyword and secondary keyword in the headlines and text. Don’t over do it either.

Makes sure to add some images also. You can search for images from Flickr.com and use them in your blog as long as you give credit to the creator of the image. Google loves images and you will get good ranking for it.

Be consistent in your blog posting. Do a post on a regular basis using a relevant keyword in each of your post. You will get high ranking for that particular keyword. It is better to use long tail keywords (keywords more than 3 words) than short ones. Because there can be high competition and your objective is to get ranking quicker in the search engines.

When people are searching, they usually tend to type longer phrases to get the exact match to their search query therefore lower the volume of search better the chance of getting ranked on first page of Google. If you cannot get your link on the first few pages of search results then, it will most probably not be seen by people searching and they tend to do another search query if they are not satisfied. Therefore, it is very important to use keywords with low volume of search results. And if you end up on the first few pages, the chances are very good that you will get visitors to your site.

Google is the primary search engine on the net and it can send tons and tons of traffic, only if you have chosen the right keyword to rank for, and that tons and tons of traffic is may well be directed to your blog!

Hope you enjoyed this post. Please do leave a comment and don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter!!