Not Enough Hours In The Day For This Internet Marketer
Written by ady on October 2, 2008 – 3:47 am -I started working at 9am this morning and its now 03:25am and I’m still not done! While it sounds extreme its a pretty normal day for me and judging by the forums at PLRPro and Portal Feeder, It’s the norm for most internet marketers.
I know for a fact that I don’t make the most of my time. I tried to do something about it last month when I signed up at Simpleology to try and bring some kind of order to my time management. While the lessons were ok I found using the daily planner a waste of time. You are supposed to spend your first 10 minutes at your desk writing down what you have to do and what you want to get done in the day ahead.
The trouble is, I can often spend a whole morning fixing a problem that occured during the night or investigating where a sale came from, extra traffic appeared from or disappeared to, answering emails, replying to comments and ping backs or threads in forums I am following etc etc. It can often be dinner time before I actually start doing what I want to do.
Being on GMT means that most of the action on my sites happens just as I should be going to bed, a major problem for PPC campaigns for example (you try sleeping when you are getting 100’s of clicks a hour on a new campaign!). It also means there is often long delays between emails so problems can take longer to sort out.
Paypal sent me a mail the other day saying my payment to PLRPro had failed because the card had been refused. The card had actually been cancelled because I had been issued a new one. I logged in and entered the new cards details. There is no option to cancel an older card so all I could do was make the new card the primary source of funding.
Now maybe I am thick but I assumed by making the new card the primary, any future payments would be taken from it. Not so, today I get an email from Paypal saying because my card failed again they had cancelled the subscription and I would not be billed again.
I checked my other subscriptions and they all still had the old card as the source of funding instead of the new card so I assume this is why the PLRPro payment failed. Today I was informed by Paypal that the new card only applies to new payments or subscriptions set up AFTER i set the new card as primary.
I just don’t get how they can have that set up to work. All cards have a life span and need changing periodically so surely they should allow you to cancel an old card once a new one is entered or at the least make the primary card over ride all others you have in the system?
The other maddening thing about it is that they simply cancel the subscription rather than warn you or give you a chance to say why it failed. Luckily I’ve been in PLRPro a few years now and know Daniel and Marc so I can get back in even though the doors are closed but its still an almighty pain in the butt as the guys are in Australia so the time difference cannot get any worse.
Problems like this are always cropping up. I doubt I go a day without something or other ruining the good intentions I had for the day ahead and setting me back several hours, sometimes my own doing and sometimes not.
One of the first things a new internet marketer has to get over is the distraction of working online. It can be so easy to set off to research something and end up a million miles from where you first intended going.
I got over this problem some time a go when I realised if I were to make any money online I simply had to concentrate on what I was doing before moving on to the next. It’s why I like to clear my inbox in the morning before starting the days tasks or project.
The downside to that is that it’s now 3:40am and I’m still not done!
Tags: internet marketers, paypal, PLRPro, time management
Posted in Life Of An Internet Marketer |
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Hey Ady,
If you use Simpleology as taught it will help resolve a lot of these problems for you. You’re putting stuff that doesn’t bring you closer to what you want ahead of stuff that does. Start your day with your DTP first - do what you need to do - THEN check your email, fix your software driver, etc …
You can allow these small things in life to dictate your direction … Or not. If you do your DTP you’ll know the difference. Ironically it’s the very thing you’re having trouble with that the software prevents. MAKE time for it - and see what happens …
Mark Joyner
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I hear what your saying Mark and I promise I will get around to it once I find the time
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:32 am
[...] I hear what your saying Mark and I promise I will get around…» Hey Ady, If you use Simpleology as taught it will help re…» We had our site with Studentwebhosting. Then it got hacked b…» I admire your [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I am looking for some idea and stumble upon your posting
decide to wish you Thanks. Eugene
November 13th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Ady,
I’m a real life example. I was looking for something else around and found your blog and this post, instead…
Funny!
Regarding the time management, the focus and the various daily chores, I have a few tips I’ll share with you and your readers.
I’m still a newbie (and I guess I’ll still be a looong time from now on, as there are much too many ways to approach this IM phenomenon).
Consequently, I’m on a huge number of marketer’s lists. I’m almost always subscribing, at least for the sake of seeing what they’re offering behind the walls.
I came to interesting conclusions, that hopefully will become my future - first - eBook product of my own… sometimes…. when I’ll find the spare time to write it, I guess.
Given that, the Inbox would be quite a mess, normally, while my brains would probably fumigate…
But I have a solution - it’s no joke:
TIP
I read my mail in the morning, on my PPC phone, while I sit on my ‘throne’, trying to - you know what, the nature’s calls, right?
It’s at least… inspiring, I should say.
For instance, many emails, promoting a product or another, come in bunches with even the same subject, sometimes even from ‘big names’ or ‘gurus’; one would expect them to market better, or more thoughtfully, don’t you think?
I usually keep one or two that appeals to my tastes, even if I have no interest to buy the product, but to study the successful one’s methods, instead.
It takes sometimes 15′, maximum 30′ to do that. I leave the rest for a later session, to be able to study them more thoroughly.
However, what pi**es me off is the trend of using videos instead of the written word. This is so time consuming…
When I read, I can do it diagonally. Yet my eyes still catch the most of the words.
Therefore, I usually prefer not to watch these videos.
I believe that the marketers claiming this is the new breakthrough may be right, in terms of how many people might watch them say… on YouTube.
However, I wouldn’t recommend, on a large scale, using the videos INSTEAD of other marketing tactics. The watchers might not be buyers at all. In the IM world, at least. Maybe on some other niches.
I would share more tips but this comment is already too long, so I leave it for a later time.
Steve Lorenzo
November 13th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Wow!
I’ve almost written a blog post of my own.
I should definitely expand this into one, back on my blog.
You should visit it. I’d appreciate your comments. On this forest full of blogs around the Internet, you may rarely find one with a bit of humor behinds the author’s posts.
They all tend to be too damn serious.
You’re different.
I’d like to develop a friendship with you.
Maybe we’ll follow each other on Twitter?
Steve Lorenzo
PS
I subscribed to your newsletter.
Amaze me!