|pros • per • ly|

Last night as I was waiting for my wife to come home so we could watch “The Office” together I decided to do a little channel surfing. I came accross a show on Discovery channel called “Treasure Quest”. It is about modern day treasure hunters who look for ship wrecks at sea and try to find gold and other valuables. They recently made a discovery of over 17 tons of gold and silver from a ship wreck.

Any way this peaked my interest so I started watching and they interviewed the captain of the ship. He told of how he was a Navy captain who went into work at corporate America where he was financially very successful.

He then went on to say how when he was offered this current job it was a big pay decrease but he then went on to talk about how they gave him a beautiful new ship and said go find stuff with it. I could really hear the joy of his new journey in life. It wasn’t just about money for him but doing something he loved to do…and the money came later.

I have talked alot about how much I value my freedom and working for myself. I value it alot more than I value money. I chose to go out on my own and build my internet business and live my dream of coming and going as I choose and doing the things I wanted to do during the day. I have loved every second of it. Even when in the beginning I was making just enough to take care of my family.

Years later the joy remains and the money has come. I have been truly blessed.

“Well you know. Money isn’t everything, Jim. Not the key to happiness. You know what is? Joy. You should remember that.” – Michael Scott

I use a simple method of task management that was taught to me by a multi-millionaire last year:

I grab a piece of paper out of the printer and I write the date in the top-left corner.  At the beginning of each day before I check email or do anything else, I write down what I would like to accomplish.  As I accomplish those tasks, I cross them off.

If the day ends and I haven’t completed a task, I write an arrow to the left of it.

When the next day begins, I write a new date, carry over the tasks I didn’t complete, and write down my new tasks.  I repeat that same process for the next day.  If ever decide not to do a task, I simply write an ‘x’ next to it.

When the paper has three days on it, I flip it over and begin again on the other side.  When the other side is full, I scan it and look for any ‘x’-ed items and decide if I want to do that eventually or forget about it completely.  If it’s something I am interested in doing eventually, I’ll write in on my google doc where I store long-term ideas.  I review that doc whenever the mood strikes.

Why do I do this on paper when we have such wonderful technological tools for managing our to-do lists online?  (Here are a couple if you’re interested: Remember the Milk, Ta Da List,  Toodledo, Voo2do,  Blablalist, Tu Du Lists…and the list goes on and on and on…)  Because it’s easier to do it on paper.  My list sits on my desk to my left, beneath my second monitor.  I have a pen nearby.  I don’t need to log in, I don’t need to switch to a new browser window, and it’s nice to not have to type.

Keep Coming Back to the List

The key is to keep going back to your list.  You’ve made your priorities — now stick to them!  Don’t allow distractions to squash your productivity.  Being online is an invitation to ineffectively multitask until you look back and realize you haven’t done anything of significance for three days.  This is even more dangerous when you actually begin working online full-time.  (Especially if you do it the Prosperly Way, since you won’t have that many incremental things to do in the first place!)

I’ve been using this method with great success for quite a while.  Hopefully it helps a reader or two out.

Mark over at TheKeywordAcademy.com nailed it.

And that’s probably what spurred my thoughts along these same lines.  Oh, and also perusing BackyardChickens.com for an hour last night.

Mark basically says most people looking to make money online have an information addiction (the ease of publishing on blogs surely hasn’t helped):

The reality is you read blogs because it’s a mental escape. It gets your mind off your job, your bills, your stress – your life. It does all the same things for you that xbox live does for 7th graders. Why is this so dangerous? Because time is not only your most precious resource, it’s the one you can never get back.

I believe I also have an information addiction with a different twist. I want to become an expert before I take any action whatsoever.

I’ve been reading Omnivore’s Dilemma and now would like to raise my own chickens.  If you don’t want to want to start raising your own chickens, then do not read that book.  As always, with any new undertaking (whether it’s making money online, or raising chickens), I begin gathering my information online.

And I gather…

and gather…

and gather…

and gather…

And I guarantee I won’t be gathering eggs at this point.  I’ll still be gathering information.  I want to know how everything works, from A to Z, before I even remotely get started actually doing something.

Did you know you need to rotate an egg an odd number of times each day while you’re incubating it?  Two times — you’ll likely have a deformed chick.  Three times and you’re golden.  Did you know pine shavings are best for the floor of your chicken coop?  I didn’t either.  And there’s a whole lot more information out there that I could ingest before it finally becomes so scrambled in my brain that I forget completely what the heck I’m even doing in the first place.

You don’t need to know everything before you get started.  You can figure things out as you go.  Learning by doing.

What’s the best headline? How do you increase your conversions? How do you grow your list? What type of product should you sell?  How should you do fulfillment?  What’s the optimal price? Where should you truly be spending your time (short answer: where you add value).

Your questions will be endless.  And, as bad luck would have it, with the advent of the internet and one-click publishing…information is endless as well.

The phrase “proceed with caution” still has a very important word in there:  proceed.  Move. Keep going forward.  Don’t just stand around attempting to become an expert without doing anything.

Now…I’m off to find a chicken coop vendor.

I have been in the internet marketing world for many years now, but I don’t know everything. In fact there is so much I don’t know that I continually spend time trying to learn new principles. I will attend webinars, join email lists of other internet guru’s and so forth.

As I was reading an email this morning from a internet marketing guy (Jimmy Brown) that specializes in building email lists. We haven’t discussed list building much on Prosperly yet but we will be covering it because it is vital to the success and growth of an internet business.

Anyway, this guru was talking about the 3 things you can spend your time doing that will have the biggest effect on you making more money with your website.

1. Develop your offer – even though I teach that it is effective to push other people’s products as an affiliate, I also teach that if you want to sell your own product that is great too, just make it a digital product. – Anyway you need to have something to offer to sell to people. So spend one day a week working on something you can offer to your visitors. Even if it is a $8 ebook, you should work on this.

2. Build your email list – Again this guru specializes in email lists and I am a very strong proponent of building email lists so this is the second thing you can do. Get a email list going and do all that you can to get more people to sign up. Offer a free report, give a discount on your product but do whatever you can to get them to sign up.

3. Traffic Development – He mentioned this in terms of both increasing the amount of traffic you get to your website, and increasing the conversion of the traffic you are getting. You should always be trying to increase traffic and testing things on your site to get better conversions.

If you spend most of your time doing these 3 things, I guarantee you will make money online.

First of all, this is front page news in any industry. I was born and raised in Arizona and have been a lowly Arizona Cardinals fan for the last 20 years. So when I tell you that I’ve heard every joke, taken the countless hours of ridicule and have endured being a fan of the laughing stock of all sports, you can truly understand why I am now as giddy as a schoolboy on Halloween.

The Cardinals improbable run into the Super Bowl makes me believe one, that anything, and I mean anything can happen, and two, all of my suffering over the last 20 years was not in vain. I booked my trip to go back to AZ to watch the big game with my brothers. It will be a once in a lifetime celebration because this truly is a once in a lifetime event.

If nothing else, let this occasion inspire you that you too can make a full time living on the internet. If the Arizona Cardinals can go to the Super Bowl, no one in the world has any excuse to accomplish anything at anytime.