Managing Your Time for Ultimate Effectiveness

One area where a lot of people have problems with running an online business is time management.  Too many of us spend too much time on the things that don’t matter and not enough time on the things that do matter.

Recently I’ve been reading “The Four Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss, and since doing so have really improved the way I use my time.  So in this post I want to share a few ideas that I’ve taken from his book.  I hope they help!

Pareto’s Law

Most of you have probably heard of this by it’s other name, the 80/20 rule.  Sometimes the ratio is different, but the principle is the same: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

So what does this mean to us as internet marketers?  They way I look at it, it means that you can easily waste a lot of time!  But what if you were able to identify the most important things that you can do to move your business forward every day?

Read the rest of this entry »

A Review of Online Marketing Strategies to Use

I wanted to take a minute today and talk about online marketing strategies in general, and just give a reminder of all the different things that you could be doing to promote your online business.  The fact is that you need to be doing multiple things if you’re really going to see some long term success.  So let’s do a quick review of some of the main strategies.

A Tip About Online Marketing Strategies

Below I’m going to review a bunch of different marketing strategies that you can use.  I don’t want you to get overwhelmed, but you need to look at your own business model and see how you could take advantage of testing these different strategies.  Test, tweak, find what works, and then optimize what works!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is probably the one strategy that everyone is familiar with and want to learn how to do.  And for good reason!  Who could pass up free traffic, and tons of it if you can get ranked for the right keywords?  It’s a great thing!

Read the rest of this entry »

A Little More on Excuses

I came across this Nike commercial a while back and thought that it was a great example of overcoming excuses.  This guy goes through a whole bunch of excuses you could give yourself.  Granted it is more of a sports/athletic approach, but how many times have you made the same excuses for other things in life?

Watch this video and then share with me below what you think:

Stop Making Excuses for Yourself

I wrote a post today on my site SupplementPricing.com that I feel applies to more than just health and fitness.  So rather than rewriting the post here and applying to eCommerce, I’d recommend you head over there and read the original post.  Think about how the concept relates to a business or anything else you’re looking to accomplish in life.  Then come back here and leave me a comment about what you thought.

Here’s the quote from Tom Venuto that started it all:

You can either make excuses or get results, but you can’t do both!

Here’s the link to the post on SupplementPricing.com: Stop Making Excuses, Start Getting Results!

So here’s the challenge: stop making excuses for why your business isn’t going as far as you’d like.  Look for the excuses you’re making, and then get over them and start working on results.

Here’s another great quote from Mark Sanborn:

Fear nothing in life but to waste the present moment.

Make every moment count.  If you do something, don’t let it be an excuse later.  Do things consciously, with a choice.  Then you can start working on making the right choices that will move your forward rather than being pushed around by life.

How to Find the Best PPC Ads to Spy On

I just learned a really cool PPC (pay per click) tip from a newsletter I got from Perry Marshall that I thought was worth passing on.  Speaking of which, if you haven’t signed up for Perry Marshall’s newsletter you should.  Yes, he’ll pitch product to you from time to time, but he also pumps out a ton of great info.

How to Find the Best PPC Ads to Spy On

As you probably well know, one of the things about search engine marketing in general is that there is a lot of competition for good keyword phrases.  And when it comes to PPC one of the tricks is knowing who to spy on.

So here’s the trick: if you go to Google and search for something you’ll get both types of results.  Well, hit search a few times and you’ll notices that the list of Sponsored Links gets smaller.  Do this a couple of times and you’ll be left with just a handful of ads.

Read the rest of this entry »

An Easy Way to Save Money Online

A lot of you probably already know about this tip, but I know that there are plenty of you out there that have probably never done this before.  So in this post I’m talking to YOU!

An Easy Way to Save $$$

Ok, here’s the deal.  When you go to buy something online there is a really easy thing that you can do to save some money.  This won’t apply to all sites, but it will apply to most large sites.  What you do is this: search for coupon codes.

Let me give you an example from today.  I had a domain name that I needed to renew.  I was renewing the name through GoDaddy.com and it was going to cost me like $10.88 or so.  Well, there is a point on their shopping cart where they show you a summary of your order and there is a box that says “Enter Promotional Code” or something like that.  This is an obvious indicator that they must have some codes out there!  Now you just have to go and find them .

Read the rest of this entry »

How to Fix Messed Up Permalinks When a Blog Already Has Content

I’ve run into this problem a couple of times and finally figured out the easy way to fix it.  Someone probably figured this out a long time ago and if I had looked hard enough I probably would have found the answer, but oh well.  At least now I know!

Ok, so here’s an illustration of the problem.  You’ve just started a new blog and even written a few posts.  Then one day you realize that you have ugly URL’s.  For example your URL’s are something like www.blog.com/?p=5.  And the you realize, “OH CRAP!  I forgot to set up pretty permalinks!”

So naturally the next step is you go into your permalinks options and change it to something like /%category%/%postname%/.  Then you breathe a sigh of relief, until you go to your blog and all of your pages cannot be displayed!!!  OH NO!

Ok, so I’m being a little dramatic with this, but it’s happened to me a couple of times and who knows, it may have happened to you as well.  So here’s the quick fix that I used today and it worked:

1. Revert to the default permalink structure.
2. Log into your hosting account.
3. In the root folder of your blog, find the .htaccess file and delete it.
4. Now, set up the permalink structure the way you want it and save it.

That should fix it!  At least it did for a blog I was helping someone with today!  If you have any other tips on this, feel free to share, but hopefully that saves you some headaches.