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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Be Smart - Organise

Be Smart - Organise Your Day by Liz Canham

If you're running a business from home, whether online or offline, you need to be even more disciplined than if you were commuting to a job elsewhere.

There are so many temptations at home to distract you from work. Family, radio, television and personal or household chores are all things that may take you away from your business tasks. In order that these distractions don't become your whole day, you must organise your time.

Design a schedule for each working week and day, starting at the beginning of the week with a To Do List. If you don't normally work at the weekend, perhaps you could get a head start on the week by just jotting down things you need to do as you think of them. If you need to hang up the washing, collect the kids from school or go to the dentist, build those activities into your schedule. Depending on the type of business you run, any of the following might form part of your working day, in no particular order:

Correspondence Accounting Filling orders Issuing or paying invoices Stocktaking Acquiring or creating stock Training Attending meetings Networking Encouraging and mentoring teams Promoting Business development

Let's take an online business as an example where there are things you will need to do on a daily or weekly basis. Reading and answering emails: This may include admin emails from any affiliate programs to which you belong, responding to queries from your downline and answering contact messages from your website. In addition to that, you will need to dispose of spam and save important correspondence. Only you know what volume of correspondence you receive, but let's say that you need 30 minutes per day for this activity.

Accounting: In this category, you'll be recording expenditure and income for income tax purposes and also for gauging ROI (return on investment) in terms of advertising. This will probably amount to around 15 minutes daily.

Networking: You may have other networkers, prospects, co-members of an online program or a downline with whom to network. Don't miss out on this important aspect of building your online business. Visiting a forum or an online conference room can be invaluable in branding yourself, making your presence felt online and increasing your opt-in list as well as exchanging news and ideas with like-minded people. 30 minutes a day for this should be about right.

Training: You must never stop learning, so make at least an hour a week to attend an online seminar, read some articles or swat up on your Javascript or html.

Promoting: You need to attract people to your website or affiliate program, so this time should be spent posting advertisements, surfing traffic exchanges, sending mail to safelists or whatever methods you use to publicise your business. This will take another 1 to 2 hours per day.

Business development: This category includes building or improving your website(s), writing articles, compiling your newsletter, checking out the opposition in the same field and looking at your statistics. I hope that you are using a tracker so you will need to check your stats to see which adverts or web pages are doing best. Try split testing a page or advertisement by using a tracker like Hits Connect. Find out what works and what doesn't. Check your Adsense account to find out which is the most effective ad placement and type. Use their Channels to do this and experiment with different placements, types and sizes. This raft of activities can all be time-consuming so allow at least five hours a week. You will also be creating new advertisements and banners plus splash pages for those traffic exchanges.

If you have a major project on the go, like building a whole new website, you may want to make a separate plan specifically for that, breaking it up into management chunks, each of which you can complete in the time that remains each day, once the daily tasks are finished.

If you don't make a plan, you'll end up chasing your tail, wondering what it was you were meant to be doing next. If you do make a plan and find that you have significantly more time allocated to household chores than to working your business, you may want to sit back and think whether you really want to do this. It does take discipline and dedication!



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