Whether you are an Internet Consumer or an Internet Producer, you need to get organised with a system for storage and retrieval of valuable information, such as emails and website adresses, and of data, which may be text, images, audio or video.

1)  EMAIL – Decide which senders are okay, and delete, block and unsubscribe the rest. Create 10 main folder categories to sort emails you wish to keep for reference. This gives you an easy overview of your email universe, and stops you from the ‘Overloaded Inbox’. Then each list of subcategories that you evolve in each category can be also limited at say 5-10, so that when you click on the little dropdown arrow by the category name, the ‘Folder Tree’ does not shoot down off the bottom of the page ) . Examples of emails which are important to store could be receipts for purchases and login details for product websites. If you have emails you want to peruse later then make a folder for them. The important thing is to keep your INBOX lean. Have a look at Paula Brett’s blog and see where you might fit as an ‘emailee’.

2)  PASSWORD MANAGER  - Get yourself a secure password manager. Make it a habit to add the username and password for each secure site you are member of. eg memberships and support desks. Make sure you do this straight away with a new membership, or you will forget the details and waste time finding them. I use Roboform, which lets you store about 10 free logins, before you need to upgrade to the pro version which has unlimited slots. It is also excellent for instant form filling and will save you heaps of time and allow you to generate passwords when needed. Google has a basic Autofill tool, but I don’t know how secure it is.

3)   FAVOURITE WEBSITES – The object is to limit the Favourites dropdown menu to 10 categories, to start with. Have you ever noticed categories that made sense 12 months ago, now seem irrelevant ? Your mind is expanding – change the labels on the filing cabinet. If you already have Favourite websites that dropdown into a maze of categories that no longer make sense, then start a new category called At The Top, or some other title staring with the letter A (eg Action Today, At Home Business so that it will be easy to find at the top of the menu. Create a list of 10 subcategories, and these will be for websites that you use a lot, making them quick and easy to locate. This is your new FRESH SLATE tree. Then you can go through the old categories and delete/reassign the saved urls into the new Tree, according to how relevant they still are. As long as you have the 10 rule going for each branch of your folder tree, then you can keep your menu display small and save time and distraction when locating the favourite.

4)   HARD DRIVE  - When it comes to retrieving stored data, it is important to have easy recall, and once again don’t have too many Major Categories. So you might have stored it under Documents>Subject eg Internet Marketing>Name of  Vendor>Name of Product with Date of Acquisition. Generally I look for stuff based on the Vendor eg John Thornhill or Ewen Chia etc, but if you want to cross reference based on say Listbuilding, then rather than filling your hard drive with duplication, you can just have a subfolder with a brief note on which vendor product is the source. Remember when you unzip a compressed or ‘zipped’ file to access the contents, you are duplicating content and eating up disc space, so delete the zip file to keep your folders uncluttered, and preserve disc storage.

All Righty Then - now we are ready to go out and meet some people on the Internet, but stay sober.  Look in again soon, in fact why not subscribe to my blog and get notified of my next update, when I’ll give some tips on dealing with fast-talking pickup artists and other sales people who might try to ‘spike your drink’  :o)

Ciao JJ

While the The Kaizen Way is normally associated with Big Business like Toyota or Canon and evolved from the postwar rebuild of Japan, it can be applied by anybody, to any process or product. It doesn’t mean revolutionary change, but more sustainable, gradual improvement in ‘baby step’ fashion, and it needs less time out of your day. By implementing simple small steps, you avoid  fear and stress, which tend to lead to procrastination, blocking success and the achievement of desired goals. The other benefit is that it implies that we can never attain complete perfection, that there is always room to improve, and reflects the dynamic nature of  time and tide, which waits for no-one )

For example, I noticed while reading another blog, that the author was replying to comments with a bracketed answer below the comment, thus avoiding a separate post. I would rather my blog sidebar just references the comments from visitors, without my answers. I can do this from my control panel. This saves space and streamlines the post. Perhaps an associated small improvement would be to notify the commenter by email when I answer the comment, which gives a good reason to revisit my site and look around again, perhaps subscribe if not already, and make my visitor feel more valued.

This thought process involves me looking at what’s around in a positive way, giving credit to fellow ‘netizens’ where it is due, and allowing me to have small successes on the way to a profitable online presence. I opted-in to this big name blogger, and on his confirmation page he had shrunk all the whitelist stuff to a small box with links, and then a video popped up which built more recognition in my mind – I noticed that it didn’t stream that well because my wireless broadband is a bit patchy, but it is an upgrade for the future. Then I thought how about a little audio file, which makes me more real to my visitor, would be an improvement …… and probably download more easily.

Anyway Dear Reader, I felt this was an important subject to enlarge on, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

CANCEL any current memberships that are not actively valuable NOW in building your internet business, and get REFUNDS on any purchase that is still within the 60 day Clickbank money back guarantee (or whatever Affiliate network you bought through- a big advantage of only buying through them). Don’t feel guilty if you’ve not got around to checking out the product, or you feel some sense of old-fashioned obligation because you’ve had a look inside and you might use it someday. The person who took your money, no matter how honest and well-meaning, knows that 95% of  buyers will probably never do anything with the product. There is always more WORK in the product, than you are led to believe, regardless of how valuable you might think the product is to you. The money back guarantee is there to be used UNCONDITIONALLY.

Next, take an ‘axe’ to your inbox. DELETE and UNSUBSCRIBE without FEAR or FAVOUR – speedread the ‘From’ and ‘Subject’ columns. If the sender is not one of your top five marketers, then get rid of them (with the exception of Masterclassmates ) They will send you another one tomorrow – if you haven’t unsubscribed. So many emails are from competing affiliates. It’s a good habit to block delete at the end of a day or a week, any unopened email, as you have probably opened all your favourite senders. At the very least, move the unopened emails into a reference folder and out of your inbox.

If you are like me, you could have hundreds of emails clogging up your inbox. A good way to prune them is to click the ‘From’ column, which orders every sender alphabetically, and you can easily see whole chunks of senders you have no interest in, so DELETE. Then do it again with the ‘Received’ column so that they order by date received, which will let you cull all those out-of-date ones. If you do this for ten minutes you will be amazed at how you can empty your inbox. Unsubscribing can be time-consuming, but worthwhile if there is a former favourite that is now out of favour, we wouldn’t be human if we weren’t somwhat fickle.

Well that’s enough slashing and burning for now. Stay tuned for my next post about how to start with a  fresh slate.

ciao jj

The most basic approach is to organise our time and give priority to tasks and topics. For example, what is the first thing you do after you turn on the computer? Do you open your email, launch your browser and check the news stories, open up your favourite online game like bookworm or freecell, or go straight to your blog and work on a new post? Whatever your priority, when you finally get down to reading then the faster you can do it, the more progress you can make towards completion. How fast do you read? How much do you comprehend? How much can you take at a sitting.

 I remember reading somewhere that the information age is doubling the amount of knowledge every 5 years. I see stuff in my children’s school science books, that was university level, back in the day. In 1973, graduating from Massey University after 5 years of  study, where we were required to digest huge amounts of information, mostly text and pictorial, the academic side of a very hands-on practical profession in Veterinary Medicine and Surgery, I increasingly found myself with a mental block towards the written word. I became very unwilling to read professional journals and textbooks, which was a necessity for continuing education, and when I did force myself to read anything, I found my attention span was very short. I felt that I was fighting a losing battle against the proliferation of knowledge.  

 Finally after several years of mental constipation, it became such an issue for me that I did a speed-reading course. I had to ‘unlearn’ my reading habits instilled from my childhood.  Like ’sub-vocalisation’, which is when you say the words mentally or even verbally as you read; re-reading because of losing the place on the page; focussing on too small a section of text, and many other revelations. This really did open my mind to accelerated learning and gave confidence that you can continue to learn about new subjects quickly, and that in fact your intelligence can increase through better understanding of any subject you care to study.

Such knowledge should empower you to embrace the challenges of building an online business, with an enjoyment of the process of gaining the new knowledge and understanding. Audio and video information should make it even better for us, as long as the presenters make them fun, informative and relevant and respect that our time is as valuable as theirs.

I will be posting a review of three experts in the field, so if you are interested in giving your brain a spring clean, please sign up to my blog and I’ll let you know. Until then, here’s to life in the Fastlane of the Information Highway.

ciao jj

Homecooking

 My life as a Fly is drawing to an end, and I hope to metamorphose in this analogy, to a Spider, only I want to build my part of the web from good quality Silk, so that my Flies are happy!  Now that I’ve spun this rather clumsy yarn I’ll leave you with an awesome image, photographed at the macabre insistence of one of my daughters - and I have no place in my story for the Bee, I’m sorry to say.

Tall Batting Order

This morning, I clicked on a couple of links from my inbox email.  They were from names I know, they weren’t any of the daily Launch Fever Offers. I was taken to a couple of sales page videos, I checked how long each video  would take to watch, because now I begrudge 10 minutes if I’m not in the mood. I looked at a couple of how-to videos and I started to feel anxious,  none of it seemed to make sense. I felt very out-of-my-depth and hopeless. I looked at a couple of other Masterclass blogs, so professional and promotional. Everyone in my inbox was trying to sell me something or give me something, so that they can sell me something later. I walked out of my garage office into the sunshine and cut some bunches of grapes from my pet vine, said hello to Tintin (the dog) and went inside to make a coffee.

New Zealand was playing India in the second day of the first cricket test ( a game that can last for 5 days FYI – if you are American). I watched a few overs on Sky TV and began to feel better. Successful batsmen bide their time, they wait for the right ball to hit, they accumulate runs over a period of time. They know there is always another ball to score from. I realised later on that I had actually suffered a panic attack – so much rides on the success of my online business that I am getting stressed about it.

This is about staying focussed on my game plan. I am in the Thornhill Masterclass for 36 weeks, to learn how to create my own product, and market it online. I will learn what I need to know when the time is right, when I’m ready, just as a batsman waits for the balls he can hit, and lets the rest go. There is no need to worry about the runs that others are getting on the board, because there will always be another game, another day.

I was relieved to see an email from John Thornhill to Masterclass students, letting us know that we need to be wary of getting side-tracked into other products or programmes, even though they could be very good, simply because of the overload factor. I need to keep writing to my blog, it is the one part of the internet that I can control, where I am creating content in the only way I know so far.  I let my little light shine, as the song goes. This week we are in the process of brainstorming topics from which we will choose the niche(s) we are most suited to. Now I feel better.

I am Sachin Tendulkar (the little Master) at the crease, Mike Filsaime is the bowler, no worries mate !

My own product? Trepidation! A fancy word for Fear ! The Fear Factor ! Feel the Fear and do it anyway.  To take a leaf out of John’s latest blogpost you or I should not be afraid to put a high value on the stuff we know. In the same way that we are confident when we give advice to our children, or clients in our business, or younger colleagues, we should be aware that potential customers for our knowledge are searching on the Internet for information 24/7. 

Each of us is full of pent-up Intellectual Capital. Our experience and knowledge from thousands of hours of living. To quote Henry Ford  “One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.” And guess what, if there is anything more you need to know, you’re on the internet, and you can find another expert to help you.

So go on, Call Yourself An Expert, and then call yourself An Expert

If you’re any age and have a family and a mortgage, have put in consistent daily work for many years, then you know how the promise of  making consistent money off the internet is so attractive, especially when it can be so flexible and passive. With the publishing of this blog I hope I am on a stepping stone of the path to Rehab, where internet marketing success will give back money and time, and hopefully help others to find a path.

Leave your comments in the rehab-story collection box at the door )

As Jim Cockrum puts it so nicely, the temptation we all face as Internet Marketing Prospectors is to go for ‘Shiny Objects’, that turn out to be Fools Gold. The Internet is like a Goldrush, and back in the day those who did best were the ones who sold stuff to the prospectors. There are two kinds of Gold-diggers ). I’m looking for someone who will not only sell me the shovel but will also show me where to dig and what to look for, a mentor.

I got into John Thornhill’s Marketing Masterclass  four weeks ago, and so far I think I’m digging in the right places – that’s how I got this blog up and running. I’ve spent thousands, to no avail, on internet products prior to this, including attending three Internet Conferences, two of them in Australia ( I am a New Zealander – as you’ll see on my Tshirt ) That also says something about my need to focus, as I have been a bit of a magpie, with those ‘Shiny Objects’. So I need a proven path to follow, a Yellow Brick Road, to stay motivated and to do the work knowing that I’m not wasting priceless precious life-time.

I invite you to keep an eye on my progress as I feel quietly confident that John’s reputation as an honest ‘Storekeeper’ is well founded, and that I can ’strike gold’, and help out other ‘Prospectors’ in turn.

ciao jj

PS  if you’re interested to check out John Thornhill as a goldfield guide, he has a monthly mentorship programme. Check it out here