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Sunday, December 21, 2008

Four Bleeping Hours!

Four Bleeping Hours! Daily!
Just to keep up with your emails.

I recently had a discussion with a colleague --- someone new to the world of Internet Marketing. Like so many newbies, she had subscribed to several guru newsletters and had bought a course or two, OK, make that three or four and maybe more. What this means of course is a very active Inbox. In the course of our conversation she fessed up that going through the emails took as much as four hours every day. Four hours? Four bleeping hours! She was frustrated that after half a year the results were abysmal and was wondering if she shouldn't throw in the towel with this latest venture and start something else.

Ok, four hours may be a bit on the high end of the spectrum for just “managing” your inbox, but honestly, don’t all of us fall victim to doing exactly what my friend did? Lets do a quick inventory. How many newsletter subscriptions do you have? How many courses have you signed up for – the freebie ones, the cheapie ones, and the not so cheapies? You get emails from all of those too even after the course has run its course (yes pun intended … ok, I just couldn’t help myself). Never mind the plethora of jokes from friends who obviously have no intention of making money on the internet. Then of course those jokes have to be forwarded to your own special inner joke circle.

STOP! This is insanity! If you’re serious about becoming an Internet Marketer – one that makes money that is – then you have to declutter, unsubscribe, don’t open the jokes – or at least save them for “break” time. I save mine for the weekends, and if some don’t get opened, so what. When I was going through the
Nitro Marketing Blueprint course, Kevin Wilke told us to be ruthless in unsubscribing. He told us that no matter how good the info may be that we are receiving, that is not what we are focusing on now, that they distract us from the job at hand, and steal our time from us … actually, it is we who are stealing time from ourselves. It even takes time to delete – so best not to receive in the first place.

The first thing that newbies need to know is that the internet is not a free ride. It is a continuous process of learning, and, unless you have the basics down pat, you're never going to join the ranks of the gurus whose newsletters you so readily subscribed to and from whom you bought the courses and for which you now have no time because it takes you four bleeping hours every day just to read all that good stuff that comes into your inbox. FOUR HOURS!!! … and there is so much information you don’t know where to start and then you get frustrated because nothing is working and you throw up your hands in frustration and start looking for the holy grail of the internet and you can’t find it! Whew! Months go by, even years and still nothing works.

Good News/Bad News. The good news is that you know more about the internet than you think you do. You’ve gone through kindergarten. You know the basics of being on the computer: open, close, send & receive emails, browse, google something. You might even be active on some social marketing sites ... you know, Facebook, My Space, Twitter and many more. Later on you will learn how to use these sites as valuable marketing tools, but not so fast Little Grasshopper! Some basics:

One: Unsubscribe. Yes, all those newsletters are full of great stuff, but you are not doing anything with it. These are time wasters. If you are married to some of them, save the subscription links or the name of the guru, and file them away to return to later… I mean, four bleeping hours! Give me a break!

Two: Go and review the courses you bought. Pick the easiest one and resolve to complete it, beginning to end. Not just reading it, but actually doing the exercises and implementing what you are reading. Hey babe! You’re building internet muscles!

Three: Email all your joke buddies. Tell them that you love them and appreciate their jokes but could they put them on hold for several months. Tell them that you are working on a very important project and are ridding yourself of all distractions.

Four: Calendar time to work on your course. Whether you decide to devote 3 or 4 hours a day schedule it. This is very important. I would recommend scheduling some time on a daily basis, but if the weekend is all that you can realistically devote to your course, then schedule about ten hours, five on Saturday and another five on Sunday.

Five: Resist the temptation to check on your inbox all the time. I check my inbox in the morning, at noon, and then before I close for the day (the time varies). I have heard that the gurus only check twice a day.

If the thought of going through your library of unopened e.courses is too staggering, I began with Nitro Marketing Blueprint. It is easy to follow and is updated every year. I often go back to a section just to refresh --- and surprise, surprise! It gets easier! Build them internet muscles. The time you invest will bare gifts of dollar deposits into your bank account. Don’t let the slow start discourage you. As your foundation builds, the growth will take on speed and the income too will begin to take on exponential growth

To Your Success!

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