This is a longer post than usual today but if you believe you suffer from Information Overload then please take the time to read this post fully as I believe it may be able to help you.

Yes it a hot topic of discussion amongst Internet Marketer’s and for a very good reason. If Information Overload is not dealt with early it can lead to inevitable failure.

We all experience it day in  day out, some will just shut down for the day and think, ”its all too much ill start again fresh tomorrow ” thus wasting valuable time that day and others will stop that day and never ever return to Internet marketing. You see information overload is the Internet Marketing achilles heel, if you let it take you down, you may never get back up.

After suffering with info overload for far too long I decided to hit back and make sure that I do not secum to its evil any longer. It may seem so simple to say but it really is this simple- GET ORGANISED! You may also have heard the abbreviation KISS which simply stands for:

KEEP

IT

SIMPLE

STUPID

I personally believe business is simple, it is us humans that make it complicated and one way us Internet Marketers make it complicated is by falling fowl of Information Overload time and time again. But do not fear there is a way to overcome this horrible curse and its a lot simpler than you might imagine.

After many months of trying to find a way to avoid this achilles heel I decided to note down on a daily basis the ways I can avoid getting caught up in all the nonsense the Internet has to offer and reading endless amounts of drivel following one link to another until my head is spinning and I turn off my PC.

Organise your day in units of time

As simple as it might sound I organise my day into units of time. So if I am planning on working 8am- 2pm on my IM business I will break up the day with the tasks I want to complete that day. I find it much more useful to use 2 hour time slots rather than 30 mins or 1 hour as it gives me a little bit of flexibility in my day for possible banana skins such as my Internet connection crashing or having to watch a resource video more than once to fully understand it.  Of course you don’t have to use 2 hourly slots like me, you can simply split your tasks by AM and PM slots. See my post: http://steve-wilkins.com/168-hours-a-week-for-all-of-us/ for an example of my daily tasks.

Allow time for reading emails but only at the end of your working day

This is a really important point if you want to avoid the information overload trap. How many times have you gone to your inbox before you start your day’s work. You open it to find countless emails from fellow IMers who you signed up with offering affiliate products and One-Time Offers. You slowly work your way through them one by one coming across many tempting offers you believe you just cannot live without or new free valuable reports if you click the link then sign up at another page to receive them then you go back to your email to confirm then click another link to finally download the free reports and that’s just one email!!

Do you see where I am going with this. You can easily use 30 minutes of your valuable time just reading and clicking through one email for a report you didn’t really need in the first place. I should know as I once spent 1 hour 45 minutes reading my emails and downloading reports when I was supposed to be working on my IM business. So my advice to you is, give your self a 30 minute slot at the end of your working day to check your inbox and read your emails but DO NOT CHECK IT until you have completed all the IM tasks you set yourself for that day.

Use different emails accounts for business, pleasure and Opt-in’s

Checking your email at the end of the day is all well and good but what if you need to respond to customer emails/queries.? My advice here would be too set up as many free emails accounts as you need for each separate part of your business. For example I currently use 3 different emails accounts.

Email account number 1(Personal emails)- for friends, family, face book, online shopping accounts etc

Email account number 2(Opt-in emails)- for member sites, blogs or Internet sites I have signed up to.

Email account number 3 (Business emails)- strictly for my Internet Marketing business needs, e.g emails from customers, blog comments etc

Obviously email account number 1 is the one I will check only in my free time, but absolutely never during my working hours as there will be far too many distractions.

Email account number 2 is the account I will check in my allotted 30 minute time slot at the end of the day so I can see what offers I have received and any news and tips from fellow IMers I signed up with. Again I make it a rule never to check this during my normal working hours for the reasons I mentioned above. When I do check these emails during my appropriate time slot I will make sure that any IM offers I come across that interest or tempt me I immeditaly store in a folder called IM Offers in my internet favourites section. This way I can review them at a more convenient time and if I am still interested I will make the purchase but often what I find is that when I return to these offers  a lot of the buzz and excitement I found before is now gone so I am no longer tempted by the ‘impulse buy’ and I simply delete the ones I am no longer interested in from my ‘IM Offers’ folder.

It is also really important to organise your email accounts with the approritate folders. For example, my business email account has several folders and sub-folders so I can easily store and track emails I have received and sent. Below is an example of some of the folders I have created on my email account: 

Customer Queries- sub folder 1- New queries- sub folder 2- Resolved Queries

Blog Comments- sub folder 1- Approved Comments- sub folder 2-Unapproved Comments

D9 Hosting emails

Accounts and Passwords

1 & 1 Internet account emails

Sales Folder

JV partners emails - sub folder 1- JV offers received sub folder 2- JV offers sent

I think you get the picture now, I actually do this for all my email accounts as it keeps things organised for me and means I can quickly locate an email instead of trawling through 786 email messages in my inbox. Only the other day I realised I had forgotten my passwrod for an IM member site I had joined and so had to locate the welcome email from that site. So I simply went to my  appropriate email account and looked under the folder-IM Membership Sites and quickly located my password. Had I not organised my email account I would have spent about an hour looking through all my messages in my inbox for that one email, wasting more valuable time I could be using for my business.

Accounts & Passwords

As Internet Marketers we need to join many IM sites and forums whether it be for research purposes or for free reports or resources. We also need to create numerous accounts for our business needs such as web tracking, adsense, affiliates, web traffic, hosting, domains and many more. I currently have around 37 separate accounts that I use for my business. Sometimes the site will let you create your own name and password for which case they should be fairly easy to remember, however some do not so it is impossible for us to remember every single user name and password for all of our accounts and forums we set up and join. It is for this reason again that you must be organised if only not to waste your valuable time, you have heard the saying right ‘you can always make more money, but time is something you can never back’ so I would suggest you set up some kind of filing system for all your accounts and passwords and then most importantly- BACK IT UP.

I currently have a secure password file on my blackberry phone and I also have a file on my computer as a back up that I update every time I create a new account and password. You can also use your email account and every time a site send syou your confirmation email of your user name and password you can store it in a file called Accounts & Password (note: if you choose this option then make sure your email is absolutely secure and no one else can gain access to it as you will have some very valuable infromation that can easily be exploited should it fall into the wrong hands)

If you are still reading then you are doing great and you have got this far so you may as well read my final point of this very long post

Purchase a Memory Stick (USB Flash Drive)

This has been one of my most valuable assets. I’m sure you have all heard of these so I wont insult your intelligence by explaining what they are. However I will explain how very useful they are and how they stopped me from making excuses for not completing my IM tasks.

As you might already know I currently work 9-5 in my accounting job and work part-time on my IM business in the evening and on weekends. I use my lunch breaks at my current job to work on my IM business also so effectively I have my IM work spread over 2 computers, my work PC and my laptop at home. This can be far from ideal as I download a lot of files to my work PC then find I don’t have it to hand when working on my laptop at home so I decided to purchase a memory stick. I picked up a 8GB memory stick from eBay for just under £10 which I think is excellent value as I have no where near used my allowance yet and I have hundreds and hundreds of files stored on it. In fact I think i have only used around 2GB so far and it means that I can easily copy a file, report or web site to my memory stick, take it home and transfer it to my laptop. I keep my little stick on me at all times now just incase I use the PC in the local library or I’m at a different PC and need to to save something to it.

It has proved to an incredibly useful device and I would recommend that everyone has one. Before I had one I would make an excuse for not finishing a project because the files I needed were on my work PC and I couldn’t access them, we all know how easy it is to make these kinds of excuses and my little best friend makes sure that I always have access to the important files and documents I need.

Okay this long post (or should I say mini-ebook ) is just about finished, so before doing anything else take the time to look at the areas of your business you can improve with a little bit of organisation.  I hope the tips I have provided prove useful to you, it has certainly helped me improve my efficiency

Thanks for reading and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Steve.

Feel Free to follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/swilkins2525

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