Form good business habits from the start
by Robert Nixon
Every business has normal hours of operation.
You should treat your internet business in the same manner. Set certain times for promotions, researching, phone calls and whatever other tasks associated with your business.
1. Promotion times
The internet is world wide which means that there will be times in your area when the 'traffic' on the internet is much less, let' s call these the 'peak times' for promotions. Not everyone is on a broadband connection, so these times are quite noticeable when you observe the speed of connecting when using your submission programs. You will not want to spend an hour doing a tasks that will only take half the time if you perform it at another time due to factors beyond your control.
You can determine this in various ways with trail and error being the most common.
Another good way to determine this, though not the only way, is by viewing your 'stats' provided by your hosting company. For my domain the best time for me to promote is before seven am and after ten pm, as those are the hours of the least hits to my site on the average. Since more and more people are using the internet at work today also another good time for my promoting would be during the holidays.
Here is an example of my typical schedule starting at 5:00 am. ( Remember, I normally leave for my day job office at 7:00 am and set two hours aside in the mornings and two in the evenings for my promotions, upon my return home to my internet business, your times may vary according to your schedule)
Most people check their e-mail first thing in the morning before leaving for work or upon arrival or in the evening upon getting home or just before departing work. I want my message to be among those checked at those times.
What exactly do I do during this time?
A. Respond to e-mails:
I have a couple of FFA type of sites ( not one hosted and maintained by me), one of which is set for an auto response only and one that saves the e-mails of those that post. The one that saves the addresses allows me to change the copy of my response. This is useful when I use a special tracking url or a certain page that I will put in the copy for them to visit to determine the effectiveness of the copy itself. If you have your own FFA type of site, then you will want to go to the e-mail boxes where traffic is sent from the submitter programs used by others that have listed your site with them, clean the boxes after sending out a response to their posting.
Check my e-mail boxes of concern using my webmail site. These are the boxes where the newsletter subscriptions and removes are sent, my personal, advertisement request for my website and newsletter, and request for additional information pertaining to certain products or programs.
B. Use my submission programs:
These are the programs that send to networked sites, such as FFA's ( traffic producers )and classifieds.
I use my safe list submitter that goes out to hundreds of safe list and submit to a few of the other ones that I have found with a large membership not listed with the submitter.
I use my search engine submission programs to submit the new pages,and the pages with the least hits during the last month. NOTE: I do this once or twice a week and the pages I submit always vary according to the trends in hits a page may be getting in response to keyword searches. ( I may even edit the keywords before submission at this time also ).
C. Check my 'referral' sites
These are the sites that generate income to me when prospects purchase items ( which could be a product or service or program).
Once again, I will check my domain for hits to the site via my domain pages links. This is where using 'tracker' urls really comes in handy. IF it tells me a certain site is getting a lot of hits going to it, but the site itself tells me the income generated is not in ratio to the traffic that I am sending, I can determine if some other action may need to be taken. This may include contacting the owners about this trend to resolve issues or solutions.
2. Call back and research times.
This is normally between seven pm and ten pm my time and when I make phone calls to those that have indicated to me they want personal contact, edit my site pages that need it, publish articles and look for items that may be of interest to subscribers of my newsletter and write letters and stuff envelopes for snail mail, and YES, respond to e-mails sent to me during the day to certain boxes again. I DO NOT do submissions at this time.
That's it. Four or five hours a day is all that you really need to do at the least on a daily basis. IF your organized and keep your goals in mind this will become a habit in a very short time. It will not be long and you will notice your productivity has increased as your time spent decreased.
Robert Nixon
http://www.cpucash.net
