Choose An Anchor

Just a quick post. As you learn to sell online, and things get tough, don't flounder around on your own. If your mentor is effective and eloquent enough, you can find where you need to back up. I've created my own WordPress ebook and I've just sold one copy. Why? Pride. I thought I could just set up an ebook on a storefront without blogging about it, or giving out effective parts of it. I got a blog for it tonight, WPfasttrack.blogspot.com, and if you'd like to learn how to set up your own .com on WordPress (while saving $10 on setup fees), please stop by this weekend. I may be a little busy, so yell at me at sumosalesman@aol.com and I'll get it out to the blog. Thanks for reading and if you know anyone who'd like to learn WP, please share this post!

My MusicMemes.com Challenge

I had a great idea for a website that could generate a lot of traffic, a music memes website.

However, as I gave it some thought, I refrained from adding others' memes. 

I think I'm going to give it a go though, and look for people who don't mind their stuff posted with attribution.

So here goes:

http://musicmemes.com

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to improve the site, please let me know.  I'd really like to make this into a fun website I can update every day without killing myself timewise.

Here's a little tip I picked up for making my own memes instead of having to use online services that force you to show a link to their website:

https://snapguide.com/guides/create-memes-using-gimp/

Totally stuck time-wise? Have an 80-20 Day

I hate cutesy-shmootzy jargon.  Empowerment.  Attraction.  Potential.  If you want to write for me, you may as well cross the words out because I either skip the phrases or the whole article.

One of the concepts that makes me chafe is the 80-20 rule.  The proportion may vary from here to there, but the notion is that one fifth of what you usually do is all that makes you successful.

Over the years I’ve been squandering time on one project at a time, trying to make each perfect.  Eventually I hit some annoying time-draining part of it and it feels like it kills me.  It’s as if I have extra time left over and I have to sink it all into some minor detail.  By the next day I have nothing to show for it.

A big inspiration has been the notion of the four-hour work week, but more attainably for me, the four hour work day.  Practically every Internet guru I’ve dealt with either has an army of assistants, doesn’t divulge what hours and sacrifices it takes to make it, or works insane hours that I can’t emulate in my current home situation. This is yet another reason I enjoy learning from Pat Flynn: there is so much that is transparent in his workings that I can personally apply.  Hearing that he made his fortune on four hours a day has inspired me to trim a lot of fat out of my day, time where I would indulge every whim drifting from one income source and its complexities to another.

Writing this article will be one of the eight half hour tasks I will complete today.  When I run out of time for each task, each will still consist of a half hour’s work waiting for me to improve on or complete, and ultimately be successful with, OR show itself to be pointless and in need of permanent removal.

As the day goes on, I may remove some tasks before I start them -- are they really worthwhile? -- or keep working on projects that are already showing themselves to be doable and successful.  My target will still be five tasks.

Here is what I came up with today:

1. Write this article and publish it.  Spend remaining time in the half saying hello @patflynnwins.
2. Learn how to re-publish my app on Stencyl for free.
3. Follow up on website admin and billing for MusicMemes.com and the like.
4. Start putting business downloads on BizDL.net.
5. Deal with client emails (one half hour only, because this is the profession I want to move out of).
6. Promote my WordPress guide.
7. Edit the podcast my wife and I put together.
8. Start a movie mini-review website with Amazon affiliate links.  More details soon… I’m nearing 5 minutes on this task and want to put keywords in.

Just one tip: use online-stopwatch.com.  The moment you get distracted, stop the timer.  You’ll get into effective time use fast.  As an optional way to get into good habits sooner, add five minutes of work time each time you forget to stop or restart.

Let me know how this helps.  Thanks for reading!

In Working, Have An Anchor (Smart Passive Income Podcast #12)

Are You Rooted In Your Work, Or Just Dust?

One of the things I've done in my life is pick up and drop my inspirations. I take notes, get an amazing system down, then... Nothing. I wander off. I get discouraged. I forget critical things. By now, I would have wandered off from reposting Pat Flynn's notes. Why? My notebooks are a little disorganized. Some of the podcasts don't jive completely with their numbers. I've taken notes on a few podcasts without labeling them.

Big deal, huh? It's been enough to derail me. But the more I've been online, the more I've realized:

Just show up for work every day. Try a little something different. Put your voice into the permanent echo that is online marketing.

My old real estate boss taught me a little something about the return people can get from throwing sheer numbers at a target. The first thing he did was send me door to door on New Year's Day. I was brutally cold, but not one person was rude to me that day, and out of maybe 50 visits, I got two leads.

One wound up being a guy who wanted to trade his house for an open concept home. My boss tried ramming our current inventory down his throat, and I left real estate five months later, but I never forgot getting the door open on day one of my new job.

So... if you're not doing that well, I recommend just coming back to it, learning from a mistake or two, and having a living (or at least reasonably enduring) source of inspiration.

With that, more of Pat Flynn's productivity tips, and updates on what I've done so far in the next blog post. I still haven't made a penny off anything -- advertising, ebook sales, affiliate sales -- but I now have my own WordPress ebook and video game channel.

If you've been following this blog, please leave a comment. I would be really happy to know someone is reading this.

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/spi-012-mind-hacks-physical-hacks-and-work-hacks-for-better-productivity-and-getting-things-done/ 

• Just keep going, with support if possible.  Be held accountable.  Realize who you are letting down.
• Break up goals, rewarding yourself for each sub-goal.

 Physical Hacks:

• Eat a better breakfast. (Done)
• Get more sleep. (Way done)
• Take a power nap (20 minutes) using an alarm. (Need to)
• Take short walks through the day, 10-15 minutes. (Could use one more)
• Stay hydrated. (Need to)
• Stay fit. (Very need to)
• Avoid sugar. (Semi-done)

Have procedure lists on paper for each project.  I thought online task management would be superior, but today's 12 tasks are being done by scratching off a piece of paper.

Stay on one project to a stopping point -- a dev takes over, et cetera.

Consider mind mapping software -- see Pat's blog, since that's his affiliate sale and he deserves a tip of the hat for these great tips.

Thanks Pat and see you in the next blog post!

Smart Passive Income Podcast Recap #8: More Traffic With Corbett Barr of ThinkTraffic.Net

1. Get a good selling concept.  Realize who your competition is, and offer a unique means of selling.
2. Be patient regarding search traffic.  Rely on social media in the meantime.  Friend other bloggers.
3. Expect about 10 views a day in the beginning until a reader with many more followers than you shares your content.
4. Network on Facebook and Twitter most of all.
5. Flatter and link to other bloggers.  Consider an "Influential Blogger Roundup" post mentioning and linking to 10-50 leaders.  These people will want to share your positive press with others.  Grow with others as they become established for more traffic.
6. Establish "fast buzz" - Combine a Top 10 list and quality "cornerstone" content.  Write 25 top bloggers and ask for their strangest productivity tips.  Keep it short and get your foot in the door.  Briefly introduce yourself and your blog, mention 2 others who have responded, say you'd be happy if the blogger could just answer a simple question, and ask it.
7. When starting out at least have a very popular post with a week's worth of cornerstone content backing it up.  Promote all this with social media and email subscriptions.  Shape your content to encourage signups.

Also:

• Keep creating good content to share.  Test and optimize, link to old content, make access to your archive easy.  Link to personal favorites on the right sidebar.  Feature personal favorites in newsletters.
• Commenting has gotten weak lately but can still get you blogger and popular commenter attention.  Choose your targets wisely.  Forge relationships while giving out value.
• If you're at a plateau, increase your field of influence by reaching into other communities.
• Offer a high quality freebie ebook or blog post.
• Check out The Blogger's Guide to Facebook by Pat Flynn.
• Reach into email, podcasts, and YouTube.
• Continue to help people; stay ethical in helping first, selling last.
• Check out the Thinktraffic.net manifesto. 

Get Pat Flynn's podcast on getting more traffic here.

No Email Subscribers? I Feel So Listless

Making Peace With Mail

I knew all along that great projects need months if not years or lifetimes of momentum.

Yet, following through has been my weakness.  I've built my own app, published my own ebook, and I have two of the biggest websites up and coming, but nothing has been really maintained, or come back to.  It's all just been a lot of scattershot attempts that have discouraged me because I haven't gotten instant success.

The best image for getting an online business going was mentioned by Pat in an early podcast: it's like pulling a train by your teeth.  Getting it to move that first micrometer takes a concerted effort.  In those first few moments, you've already gotten some momentum.  Somewhere, someone is reading or sharing your first post, hoping for more.  If you can get back to them in a day or so, you've held their attention over time, and you have a fledgling regular reader.  It's even possible to get distracted and have some of these people come back, but in most cases, it may as well be like you just started again.

As a beginning marketer, the point is to get past where disappearing out of public view for a second will cause everyone to forget you.  This assumes, of course, that you'll still work on other parts of your site, and not just take a break.

"Mmm yom yom.  I can almost taste the success... right after this nap."  *Drool*

This is where I'm stepping in with a mailing list.  For the longest time, I've hated using them.  I think it was from making my mailing lists too easy to subscribe to.  People would unsubscribe because my newsletters tried to cover everything, and so they would wobble in their focus.  Either my all-in-one newsletters would try to thinly cover 5 or 6 topics, or they would focus on one topic at a time, and the rest of the subscribers would get turned off.  I can understand that.  Pretend I had a sports site and my only newsletter was about... sports.  How difficult would that be to please everyone every week, with people expecting me to know exactly what they wanted to know about sports?  If you were a football fan, would you read about baseball, basketball, hockey and rugby for four weeks so you could read a newsletter about football every five weeks?

This Way, Please

This is what I'm trying to address in this blog and at my other upcoming sites.  For this one, I'm dividing newsletter topics into three newsletters.  The first one, Tips, is no-cost or low-cost how-tos for beginning marketers and people who can't or don't want to spend money yet.  It also offers summaries of each SPI post I put up here.  The second, Strategy, is a combination of what has worked for me and the products I am paying for (at this rate, Aweber is the only one I'm paying for until my WordPress e-book starts taking off, and it's still possible to go free for fewer features via MailChimp).  The third newsletter, Discounts, doesn't talk down to people who already know how to word their action buttons or practice effective SEO.  If they want to know about discounted products I'm using, or products my guest bloggers created, they can get notifications with highly optional review links.  Doing this comes from rule #8 of several rules I learned years ago, The Travis Rules.

Anyhow, this site isn't LionelHoudeWins, so I'll have two podcast reviews tonight.  Thanks for reading!

Where The Heck Have I Been? Organizing Google Drive For Future Success & More!

Hello Flynn Wins readers,

I know that in the long run I can just change my post dates so no one will care, but I just wanted to let you know the reason I haven't posted much in the past week.  This blog hasn't lost my attention; for the first time in a long time I enjoy writing something at every opportunity.

I was (and to some degree will always be) a compulsive note-taker.  I have always been motivated to dissect successful money-making systems, especially those online.  I used to figure that, if I filtered something successful into my own notes, all I had to do was take the time to come back to it and speed through it.  There are a lot of similarities to being a kid in a candy store.  A few pieces of applicable information bring bliss.  A fistful (or short-term memoryful) makes me queasy.  And trying to take the whole thing home?

Well, as a result, my Google Drive has been a complete mess, one or two folders max at that, each with barely relevant docs inside.

I thought having everything at top level would work, and it did for a while, but after a few years it turned into a hostile mess.  By last week I only had one doc I was using regularly.  I didn't bother creating new ones because there were many duplicates of what I wanted to create that I'd have to sift through.  Some information was totally outdated.  Others I had to Other docs had just a fraction of value and I'd have to create a document just to recap all valuable old info (which I had three of)!

There are side lessons that I pick up after extended amounts of time studying an expert in his or her field.  One of these is that it becomes very easy to get lost in the multiple aspects of an endeavor, especially online.  Blogging schedules.  Online tool maintenance.  Social media.  Business regulations and compliance.

I have a new Google account with 6 docs, and I switch back and forth to my old one sometimes.  Today I switched back, edited one of those docs, and looked at what a total crapfest my old Drive was, kind of like my old alter ego Grubbie was running the show.


I've cleaned stuff out before out of my inbox, and after a while I'd get lost in threads of correspondence, references to products requiring logins, you name it.

This time I came up with a better solution: a couple of folders whose names admitted I didn't have the focus, desire or time for a lot of junk.  One was "Outdated", for projects I didn't do.  Another was for files I could have used if I spent a lot of time getting familiar again and cobbling their info to my current plans. "Unused & Time Sinks".  In this folder, I have another called "No _______ Clue".

This is where all my mysterious .txt files, spreadsheets and the like go. Maybe they're super important for something, but again, I don't have time.

This made a huge difference.  Doing things this way prevented me from bogging down on each document's makeup.  Are any of them worth checking out someday? Maybe, but not now.

Here's my new folder structure:

• Biz Rules & Regs
• Old Info To Cull (subfolders Unused & Time Sinks, No Clue)
• Personal
• Planner
• Site Overviews (subfolders Client Sites and My Sites)
• Templates/Drafts
• Web Technicals (subfolders Blogging, Coding, Custom Tools, Ecommerce, Email, Passwords, Podcasting, Social Media (sub-folders here for each platform), Strategy Notes (like on Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income site).
• Writing (Call this Copy or delete it, up to you)
  

All my old documents are where they should be now (most of them in the trash and out of mind), and this will be a big help in the days to come sorting and storing information.  I hope this helps you if you're struggling to keep it all together online!

The other big news is that I have two websites picked out to turn into my revenue sources.  The first one will be for my WordPress design company, SeacoastWP.com, where I'll be offering WordPress services, personally written guides, and one-on-one training.  The second will be my website BizDL.net, a ClickBank/Amazon site where select business leaders can promote their free ebooks and paid materials alongside occasional reviews by yours truly.

I hope this article helps.  Please leave a comment or share if it did.  Thanks and see you soon!