In another article/post, I have discussed ways of increasing productivity in terms of avoiding time wasting. This article shows you a practical example of how I do this.

Here is what I would do.

First, it is vitally important that you start your plan with a goal in mind. This is key and you will find in centrally placed in all goal setting guides. The reason is simple – if you don’t know where you are going, how can you plan the journey?

This can be off putting but it need not be.

The problem lots of people make is to worry because they don’t know whether they will succeed if they set themselves a goal and this freaks them out.

The fact is, you won’t know what succeeds until you try. So instead of worrying about it, in the early days, see each project as a learning curve. If you throw up 30 projects and 5 work, that’s great but you may need to ‘fail’ in four out of five campaigns in order to find the one that works.

There is a great deal of ‘suck it and see’ in this business. The fact is also what works for me may not work for you and vice versa. It’s hard to say why but I have the feeling there are many subtle factors. I may set up a PPC campaign on, say, ditieng. I create a character and a voice, structure my landing pages correctly, use competition analysis to find good ads, split test my ads and landing pages, and do everything right – but still fail.

Maybe the whole tone of the campaign is simply wrong and doesn’t connect all the way across from surfer mindset to ad to landing page to sales page.

You might do the same things as me but your tone is slightly different your character slightly better drawn – and suddenly the combination clicks and you make a pile of cash.

However, you will not know this until you actually do it.

Once you have set up a whole campaign or a website you can analyse the traffic stats or your PPC stats and try and find out what is not working and begin to split test different parts of it until you start to get better results.

However, information is power and the only real genuine information you get is from your own campaigns and work.

The point is therefore, you won’t know what the view is from the top of the hill until, you walk up it.

So let’s say you decide to spend a week constructing a website selling diet e-books and exercise ebooks.

First, do you want this to be a review site or a ‘story site’ (Hey, I was obese, now I’m skinny!) Maybe you don’t know – so lets do both and see what works.

So what do we need? Products. Then keyword research. Then a website. Then content. Then a structured PPC campaign. Then secondary websites and backlinking.

So Day 1, I will work from 6 – 8 in the morning before I go to work. I will analyse the Clickbank marketplace for high gravity products with good payouts and low refund rates. I find maybe 6 products that look good.

I will then go to each sales page and read it through. I make a note of certain keyword phrases that sounds good and write down a list of benefits the product provides and what problems it is aimed at solving. Who is the product aimed at?

Do they have affiliate tools that are useful such as keyword lists, graphics. I write this down in a notebook.

Day 2 – also 6 am to 8 am. I will take the URLs and enter them into the Google external keyword tool and analyse each one for keywords. I download these each into an Excel file.

Next, I will fire up Market Samurai or Keyword Elite and enter the main product names and the main high volume keywords the above stage generated.
I will then get MS to analyse the keywords in terms of PPC and SEO.

Day 3 – same time. I will now have a list of keywords and I will do a trick from Commission Blueprint to turn these figures into a more realistic amount.

I then work out which keywords I wish to aim for with PPC and which ones I might optimise for the sake of SEO.

I also head over to Namecheap and buy a domain name.

Day 4 – I will think about my message and what my website will say. Now I have looked at keyword phrases and products, I will have an idea of what problems and benefits are on offer as well as what keywords people mostly use to get to those products.

Using that information, I will work out a message and a character and a website map.

Day 5 – 7 – I will fire up Xsite Pro and start to create the site. I will have a home page, a blog section in a sub directory, a series of information pages, six landing pages for each product, and three review pages.

And so on – a step by step plan I can follow. So I will be able to sit down on Day 4 and think, ok I have done this, now I will need to do this because I am aiming towards this.

Once you have done this, you will find your productivity goes up a great deal and your ability to get structured stuff done will go up hugely.

Affiliate – Marketing – Just Throw Things Against the Wall and See What Sticks

I can’t stress enough the importance of this in affiliate and internet marketing.

Instead of spending hours working on one project in minute detail, create five projects that are less polished but consider them as test projects.

I can guarantee only a few things will work first time but you will learn a ton of information about each project through split testing and monitoring your results. At the end of the day, like most things, internet marketing is a numbers game.

Some people create a few websites and when they don’t work, get angry and wine in the forums. It’s understandable because when you read Guru guides, they suggest it’s all so easy. (However, read Affiliate Judgement Day to see how to not get sucked into this and to make sure you are not buying the dream’.

So people just do one or two things, sit back and wonder why they are not multi-millionaires and then complain. They were ‘scammed’.

What they need to do, instead, is to do a hundred projects quickly. Yes, a hundred!
Let’s say you are pushing some dieting e-books. You put your website up. Write a few Squidoo lenses, a Hub page and wait to hit Number 1 in Google. I mean, that’s what the Gurus teach us, right?

Yes. But where do you get? Page 25? After a few weeks? But I’ve done everything right? Why so low?

Because you’ve done very little, my friend unless there are 7 other competing phrases in Google, you have to compete. Yes, compete!

But what if you created a blog site, stuffed full of content. You wrote say twenty Squidoo Lenses each aimed at one keyword phrase and pointing towards the same keyword optimised page in your main site (often called your money site)?

And twenty hub pages likewise? And each page is pinged with Pingoat and is linked over time to many blogs through blog posting and forum posting?

It takes time, but if you did one thing a day in ninety days or so you will have a hundred backlinks to your pages. And then, you will see your site go yup and up in the rankings if you don’t do too much too fast.

Effort and time.

With PPC campaigns, you may need to try ten before you find one that is profitable. You will often loose money to start with but once you have found that one good campaign you can optimise it and turn that one into the money maker.

When selling websites, you may need to try buying from eBay and selling on Sitepoint, or on Site point and selling on Digitalpoint. You may need to try this niche or that. You might sell shell sites without hosting or fully fledged sites that have been up a few months.

After a few weeks of doing this, you will know what works. You throw twenty ideas against the wall and three stick. You then sit down and work out how to maximise those three successful ideas and move on.

So go and throw some ideas against the wall and see what works. You will learn more from doing this than in reading two hundred articles or buying top dollar Guru products.

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