What's your plans for today?

It gives me great pleasure to work on my business. Actually all of them. Each day I have a written well thought out plan though. I have short term plans and long term plans. I have daily tasks, weekly tasks, and monthly tasks. I never get bored. These tasks can be either thought of as goals or tasks, whichever you want to think of them as. They have to be achieved no matter.

To achieve them you have to have both good time management skills, and have a good plan of which order they need to be done. You also must be committed to achieving them. You have to have a sense of urgency behind each goal or plan. It matters if something does not get accomplished. Sure there is going to be days and weeks that something unexpected happens, but then it is time to get even more serious about getting things back on track.

Here in the marketing world, it is very easy and a common problem to get a serious disease called "Information Overload". It is being passed throughout the internet like wild fire. The symptoms are not knowing what to do next, and working on 5 projects at the same time, jumping from one thing to another without completing anything. I have to admit I caught that once, and it took a while to cure it.

Here is how I cured it.

I had piles of information in front of me, in DVD's, books, downloads of videos, ebooks, newsletters, audios, you name it. It was time to break it down into categories.

I wrote down my plan. I said, Mike, what is your plan for this business. I answered, To make money, and at the same time help others while doing that. You see, I learned along time ago that this is a give and take world; you must give, before you see the rewards. You do not just take, take, take, and expect to survive.

So I asked myself, Mike, what will it take to do that? My answer was offer good information, only information that will really help people and information that they want and need. That will be both my PRODUCTS and will be my SERVICE. So step one was wrote down. Find or create information products and services. So many to choose from in the internet world, Ezines, newsletters, audio's, video's, articles, and so on.

The next thing I had to think about was getting customers or guests, or TRAFFIC to my site. Without traffic, I could not help people or could I make any money. Again, so many ways to do this. Pay-per-click, writing articles, SEO (search engine optimization), the many different streams of social networking (video, my space, forums, lens, etc), shared linking, etc. I figured the best thing to do is become a master of at least one of these for a steady stream of traffic.

The next thing I new that had to be done was keeping track of what people liked and would buy and what they did not. What made people click that link but not the other. What ads worked and which didn't. It is called testing, and falls under a category called CONVERSION. I had to know what was working and what wasn't. I had to have the right key words. I had to have the right subscription box in the right place. The right color scheme. The right headlines. The right graphics. Always tweaking, and changing to get more conversion.

Copy Writing is the most important skill I need to learn to achieve the greatest amount of conversion was final analysis.

The last goal was to be able to sell over and over to the same customers. To get loyal customers that would look to me again for their information needs. I would need to have their information and make sure I over delivered, and offered bonuses, and good customer service, and make sure I thank them. Only give good quality products and services. Good BACKEND service and follow up. Emails to keep them up to date on new products and services I had to offer.

So, PRODUCTS, TRAFFIC, CONVERSION, BACKEND. That is what I have to focus on. My four categories. This will be a good plan and if I can get those synchronized and working then my business will grow steadily and I will have a very successful business. Now all I had to do is break up each category into pieces and focus on one at a time.

I normally have 4 hours to work on this business a day. Wow, 4 categories, what a coincidence. 1 hour time for each category.

You can use this same business plan. Figure out how much time you want to work on just one thing at a time. Do not have too many things going at once and finish one task before you move to the next. Create a product or find and down load affiliate products for X amount of time. Then work on just one form of getting traffic, writing an article or doing social networking for X amount of time. Then work on conversion by tweaking your site, or writing copy for X amount of time. Then work on backend by writing email follow ups for X amount of time.

Good way to focus, good time management, and things get accomplished.

I have found that listening to a series of tutorials and reading ebooks one after another is not a good use of time. You should always educate yourself and never stop learning, but watch a video or listen to a audio, on the category you are working on and then implement that new knowledge while you are learning to it, or directly after.