Focus and better organize your time

This post addresses some of the problems every one will face sooner or later when trying to make money online. I for one try to get pass them and i often fail, but from now one I’m going to try a lot harder because all these are time eating non-efficient habits that hurt our activity a lot.

It’s very important to focus and try to organize your time when working online. You should make yourself a schedule, a daily schedule, where you should write the things you plan doing that particular day. Try to pick realistic time plans for those things and live an extra error margin, just not too big.

You’ll understand more from the example: let’s say you plan to set up a new site today on a niche you already studied. You have to buy a domain, set up a CMS (Wordpress rules here), add a theme and the plugins, write at least 5 posts on previous researched keywords and also write another 3 to 5 posts for directory submissions (like ezine or goarticles) . All these should not take you more than half a day:

• 30 minutes to find the domain and register it
• another 30 minutes to install Wordpress + themes +plugins (i advice you to have a premade folder with all the things needed so you just copy that one and start the other things).
• 1 hour for setting the blog and making minor modification on the theme and plugins (you’d actually require a lot less then this) .
• 3 hours for writing the content – you should write informative 500+ words posts that provide value for your readers. 3 hours means ~40 minutes per article, but if you’re familiar with the topic you will be able to write those a lot faster.
• 1.5 hours to rewrite the previous articles so they will be unique for the submissions.
• All these total around 6 hours, so there’s enough time left in your day for other things also. I for one do this a lot faster, as i can set up everything in just 3-4 hours if i know the niche.

It’s important that during all this time you focus on the job and give up distractions like:

• messaging programs, twitter, etc (especially if you use popups these will cut down productivity a lot as you will always get distracted by some things your friends say to you via these programs)
• socializing programs (facebook, myspace, hi5) – these are the biggest time consuming aps online and they won’t pay the bills (except some cases, but that’s another story)
• e-mails (if possible, turn your outlook off when working and only check it once every couple of hours)
• don’t and i repeat DON’T check your stats and your earnings more than once a DAY . I would even advice you not to check them more than once a week for the new sites. Just make a strategy for your content and link building activities and stick to it. You should start checking stats only when you already have traffic in order to see if you can optimize some posts to rank better for some particular keywords (so only a couple fo moths or so).

There would be many things to add here. The important part to remember is that everyone should make their own schedule but should try to divide time between work and other kind of activities as best as possible. When it’s time to work, we work as hard as we can, when it’s time to have fun we enjoy it as much as possible and so on. Am i right or what? I’m looking for your feedback in this matter .

Tags: efficiency, stats, work