How To Increase Productivity-Kick Procrastination To The Curb
Learning how to increase productivity by eliminating procrastination can play a huge factor in how smoothly your online business operates.
You know you have a priority task, or number of tasks to complete. When juggling so many tasks you might start feeling somewhat guilty that you haven’t begun some of them. So, you find yourself doing things like cleaning the kitchen or washing some clothes when you know you should be working on your #1 priority task. When it happens to me, I find myself doing things like organizing my desk or going through papers.
Yes, we are talking about procrastination
My name is Sonja and I am a procrastinator. And If you too are a procrastinator, you’re not alone. I’m sure that it ranks pretty high as one of the biggest productivity killers of all time. But, there is help. Here’s how…
Find Root Cause Of Procrastination
You need to understand exactly why you’re procrastinating. In order to solve the problem, you need to know what the root cause of your procrastination is; that is if you want to stop it.
Grab a piece of paper, and at the top write “why am I procrastinating?” Spend about 10 minutes writing down anything that pops into your head. Don’t think too hard about it, just start writing without doing any changes. Let your mind flow.
When you are done, you should have your answer as to why you are procrastinating. Then you can work on learning how to remove the tendency to procrastinate.
Look at your list and select the most unpleasant task first. Don’t even think about how much you don’t want to do it or how much you’ve been dreading it. Just get straight to tackling the task so you can put it behind you.
It’s like jumping into a cold swimming pool. The more you sit on the sideline thinking about how cold the water is, the more and more you will dread getting in the pool. Often it is the thoughts that are worse than the deed itself. But, if you just go ahead and jump in, all those fears are left behind.
Which brings us to our last step…
Learn to take action by making small steps towards a very large task or one that you think is unpleasant to do. If you learn to break it up into little steps and take action on those, before you know it, the task will be done. You know what they say about how to eat an elephant, you eat it one bite at a time and that’s the only way you are going to finish it.
You Can Beat Procrastination
The key to beating the “procrastination monster” is to (1) identify why you are procrastinating, and (2) take action quickly. Usually, procrastination is a symptom of fear. You may fear the success or failure associated with whatever task you are doing, or it could just be that you simply dread doing a particular task.
Whatever the reason, remember that the cure is always the same. Identify the problem and take action. Once you begin to jump in, the fear immediately disappears.
Review-Otherinbox.com Email Organizer
An article over at TechCrunch led me to the beta email service called Otherinbox . I had been battling the email monster for years, and no matter how hard I tried the monster just continued to get bigger. I tried setting up automatic filters, using folders, using separate email accounts and to no avail hadn’t been able to effectively manage my email.
Currently all of my various email accounts forwarded to my one gmail account, so I am in touch with all accounts at one time. The advantage to this is that I have the ability to see all of my email in one place. The disadvantage is that it becomes somewhat cumbersome to manage. That’s why when I read about Otherinbox I decided to give it a try.
After using Otherinbox for a little while, I think it depends on what you’re looking for that will determine whether or not its for you.
Otherinbox Advantages
Let me tell you what I do like about it. I like the fact that you can create emails on the fly. Meaning that if I am signing up for something I can quickly create a prefix, add it on to my email addy and voila! Once the email hits Otherinbox it automatically creates a folder. So I see all of my emails in one spot and in folders.
That I do like.
Otherinbox works like this, on initial signup, you are required to give a name that will be your main email address. Choose this name wisely. Let’s pretend I used the name flashbulb. If I visited Jane Doe’s website and wanted to sign up for her offer, I could create a on the fly disposable email address named JaneDoe@flashbulb.otherinbox.com.
The problem I found is that after I did that about 20 times at different websites, I had that many folders in my account.
So I decided the next best thing would be to create category names such as cars or ebooks and use these instead. This creates higher level grouping vs a separate email address for every sign up. The disadvantage to this method is that if you start getting spam and want to delete that email address, you will delete all of your subscriptions to that email address.
Otherinbox Disadvantages
What I don’t like is that the reading screen is too small. It’s like reading in frames with the a window pane on top displaying the messages, and then the actual message below in a second pane. My gosh is that pane small and the little bit of resizing available doesn’t help much. I would say its equivalent to reading your email on cell phone…well maybe not that bad but close to it.
Despite these shortcomings I will stick with it, because I find that I can manage my email better. Note that I still use my main email account quite frequently and use Otherinbox to manage email that I don’t have to check on a regular basis.
What Time Is It In Your Part Of The World?
“What time is it in your part of the world?” is a common question amongst internet marketers or people just casually participating in social marketing.
The world of internet marketing personifies fun and excitement for me. I can connect with people from every nook and cranny around the entire world. It is a pleasure to talk with people who live outside of the US to discover different views on society and ways of life.
I’ve made connections with people in Australia, Germany, Phillipines, etc., and guess what? Each one of these people are on a different time zone….so when I am wide awake they’re in bed and vice versa 
There have been times when we’ve needed to meet on webinars or teleconferences. There was always one common question in determining the meeting time. “What time is that for you?” Thing is, none of us knew the answer to that!
Well here’s a easy tool for you to always know the answer to the proverbial internet marketing question, What Time Is It?, elsewhere in the world. Its free so enjoy!
Simple yet very useful tool. Bookmark it to keep it handy!
Password Safety-Create Strong Passwords That Are Easy To Remember
Today when I went to log into one of my accounts, I got the dreaded password safety message that said it was time to change my password….again. 
Oh boy do I hate those messages along with any system that makes me change my password on a regular basis. When that happened, my mode of escape was to use an incremental increase of the last number.
Brilliant now aren’t I!
It just so happens I was reading today, in Tweetlater’s newsletter, about the importance of password security due to hackers. These people always make simple things so difficult. The article gave great tips about how to create tough but easy to remember passwords such as:
- Selecting 2 different starting and ending special characters (!@#$%^&*)
- Deciding on a fixed length for the middle characters
- Deciding on which location of the middle characters to capitalize
- Use the website name for those middle characters
For example, I chose @$ for my starting characters and *^ for my ending characters. I chose a length of 5 middle characters with the 3rd character being capitalized.
Therefore, my password for yahoo.com would be @$yaHoo*^.
….or for eBay it would be @$ebAy*^ (ebay only has 4 characters so I would still capitalize the 3rd character).
Pretty simple eh?
The thing to remember with this is that YOU would need to come up with your own standard. Certainly not what’s written here, because the whole world has access to this right?
Create Standard Password Safety
Be a little creative….I use the @ symbol for the letter A. I use the (!) symbol for the letter I. Just set YOUR standard and follow it religiously.
Well, let me tell ya, these are some great tips for sure, but if anyone, with bad intentions, figured out your standard, then they would have access to every password you created.
What are the chances of that happening? Probably slim to none, but nevertheless possible. So keep that in mind.
Don’t Think Password Safety Is A Problem?
Just in case you don’t think this is a problem, check out some of the top searches in the recent days on passwords:
- how to get someone’s myspace password
- how do i get someone’s yahoo password
- how can i figure out someone’s email password
- how to get someone’s password
- how to hack a password
- yahoo messenger how to steal password
- how to hack yahoo password
- how can i obtain someone email password
- how do i hack a password
- how to hack, crack a msn email account password
These are real searches that people are doing to learn how to get in to someone else’s account! Can you imagine what could happen if one of these people got a hold of your passwords?
Roboform-Password Safety Software
I use roboform which can autogenerate secure passwords for each site and store it so that I never even have to think about it again. It’s free to download and if you don’t like it you can simply uninstall it.
The disadvantage to roboform is that if you use different computers the passwords are only stored on one computer.
But, they came to the rescue with Roboform2Go which you can use on a USB port. I personally haven’t had the need to use it yet, but it’s good to know that it’s an option.
Either of these solutions should be added into your business structure. You can use the structure for your backoffice logins to your registrar, hosting, email accounts, etc. You’ll have a login to so many different sites that it will just boggle your mind.
So if you haven’t done it yet, make a plan now, and start utilizing better password security in your business.
Quick HTML Reference Guide To Inserting Images In Your Sidebar
I have seen some confusion over how to insert images into the sidebar of a blog. You can insert images by either hard coding a widget, or using your widget ready theme. After working with both types, I have found that the hard coding works best for me and the themes that I have been using. Some themes work great with widgets. You will just have to experiment to see which is best for you.
I am not going to explain in detail the instructions behind why you need each type of code, but rather just give you what you need to accomplish the task.
The html codes that are needed vary depending on what you want to accomplish. Below is a quick basic guide to show you some of the codes to add images. There are color coded instructions to help you follow along. These codes can be use to add images to a blog sidebar or website.
<img src=”http://mydomain.com/image.jpg” alt=”image_name” width=”000″ height=”000″ />
The above is the basic code to insert an image, and you will only have a display of the image, nothing else. From here is where everything else is built upon. You will just be adding more code to customize the image.
Replace this with the full URL link to your image. This code is in place in case the image is not rendered in a browser. The words that are used within the quotation marks will display instead. Give it a good name that represents what the image is or what the subject matter is about. First, determine the size of your image, and then replace “000″ with the correct width and height with that of your image.
<a href=”http://AnotherDomain.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://mydomain.com/image.jpg” alt=”image_name” width=”000″ height=”000″></a>
This is the code to add a hyperlink to an image so that when you click on it you are directed to another URL. As stated earlier, we are still using the basic code and just adding another code for hyperlinking:
Replace this with the full URL to where you want people to land once they click on the image. This code changes slightly from the basic code shown above, so copy this as is and then make your modifications. The code target=”_blank” instructs the link to open in a new window. If you want it to open in the same window change the code to target=”_self”.
<a href=”http://AnotherDomain.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://mydomain.com/image.jpg” alt=”image_name” width=”000″ height=”000″>I can put my text here</a>
Here’s the code to add text to image. The text will display based on the alignment of the image (see the next section for more info). Notice that the text is simply added at the end between > < .
Replace this with any text you like.
<a href=”http://AnotherDomain.com” target=”_blank”><img alt=”image_name.png” border=”1″ align=”left” height=”000″ width=”000″ src=”http://mydomain.com/image.jpg” /></a>
From this point forward, you can include more customization by adding codes directly after the image URL.
For example, to add a border or change alignment of an image:
If you don’t want a border change value to “0″, or to increase the size change the value in increments to see how you like it (i.e. 1, 2, 3 etc.).
If you want to change text alignment you can try these other values: bottom, middle, right & top.
For your blog, the best way to understand all of this is to create a test blog to play around with these codes. I don’t make any changes to my blog if I am not certain what will happen. When you are testing code sometimes the darnest things can happen. Let those darnest things happen on your test blog and not out in the open for your visitors to see.
You can do the same thing with your website by testing in your wysiwyg editor.
Time Management Tips Revisited For Internet Marketers
Effective time management is an area that many internet marketers struggle with. No matter how hard you try, you can’t squeeze in more than 24 hours in a day. Father time has made a commitment to never allow that. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are, we all have a limited amount of time to do all things. Life can just put us off track trying to fit in both our personal and business needs in those 24 hours.
Sometimes we just need a little nudge to help us get back on the right path. Here are some great articles that you can pull out some awesome tips and advice to help you leverage your time and become more productive.
The Striking Post: Time and Time Management – Time and Time Management. Here is a little trick I picked up from where I don’t know and then changed it a little bit to suit my needs. Each year, sometime in November, I write down my goals for the coming year. …
Nerdy Productivity: Covey’s Time Management Matrix Illustrated … – Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix, with illustrated items from each quadrant using one of my favorite comics….
Time Management Tips – 3 Tips to Conquer the Inner Critic Who … – What if you could break free from the voice inside you that criticizes you endlessly? It’s easier than you think! Simply practice these 3 tips.
Good and bad time management habits and their consequences – As a home worker or business person, time is your most precious asset. Just as you would plan how to use other resources such as money and monitor their use, so you should plan how you allocate your time and check that …
Time Management v Task Management – The standard approach to fitting more into your day is to seek out advice on time management, right? After all, the entire field is designed around helping you squeeze more productivity out of yourself. …
7 Simple Time Management Rules For the Super Busy | Dumb Little Man – Dumb Little Man shares ideas to make the everyday person more productive in life. Expect to read tips on finance, saving money, business, and some DIY for the house.
Remember, Nothing Ventured…Nothing Gained, and if you don’t do something everything will remain the same.
Online Marketing – 6 Areas To Sharpen Your Communication Skills
Communication in online marketing is done the majority of time through the written word, although podcasting and video marketing are rising fast in popularity. So unless you are a writer, and in order to reach some level of success in online marketing, you will need to focus on how to effectively communicate with your target audience.
There isn’t an option for you not to do this unless you have deep pockets and can afford to pay others to write for you. This barrier, if it is broken or better yet never even built, will make the difference between sales and no sales for you.
6 Areas Of Online Marketing Communication To Sharpen
Ad Writing – You can have the greatest product or service on the planet, but if you haven’t learned to write effective ads that convey this message to your potential customers, its going to be hard for you to make any sales. So you better learn how to write ads.
Article Writing – You’ve heard this over and over….Content is king the king of all kings on the internet and there’s no getting around this. Just visit any site that is ranked high with Google and you’ll quickly find out that they all have one thing in common – content. So you better learn how to write articles and write them very well if you want to compete in online marketing.
Autoresponders – Here’s another one you’ve probably heard over and over…The money is in the list, no question about this. Well, getting your potential customers into your list is one thing. Keeping them there is something totally different. Unless you can provide them with a series of emails that gives them content that they can use and find helpful, they are simply going to unsubscribe from your list.
Customer Communication – Sale or not, you’ll be asked questions from potential customers and current customers that you’re going to have to come up with some good answers for. If you can’t communicate with these people effectively, you’re going to end up losing sales, repeat customers and get a bad reputation.
Creating Your Own Product – This should be on the top of your list of things you better know how to do if you want to take your business to the next level. Most product creation is in the form of digital PDF files on whatever your subject is. This involves yet another form of communication; writing in a way that educates and informs the buyer of your product. If you don’t do this effectively, you’re going to end up with a ton of refunds.
Sales Page Copy – Conversion is the goal here. When you write up a sales page, you better make certain that the copy is compelling, otherwise no matter how good the ad was that got people to your sales page, you’re not going to convert these people to customers.
The main point to understand is that communication, or rather how effectively you communicate is important for almost everything when it comes to online marketing.
Well, as you can see, communication is the heart and soul of online marketing. Without effective communication, your business just stops. It’s that cut and dried.
