How To Build A Residual Income Online | Clean Up Your Digital Mess
(Based on the article originally posted at Residual Income Streams: Organize)
In your Internet Marketing aspirations, do you ever feel dispersed? Going off in all different directions at once in your online income-generating pursuits?
Do you have a folder (or even worse, a desktop) full of downloaded E-books, the ones you paid for as well as a zillion “free bonuses?” Does the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” menu in your toolbar have dozens of bookmarks, to sites that you “want to get back to one day?” Is your inbox full of newsletters and offers that confuse you and have you spending your time going off in all different directions, to the point where you never seem to have time to actually build your website or create content?
Is your computer or your fall full of Notepad “To Do” lists or sticky notes?
And then I supposed I can guess how you feel when you get another email offering you a fantastic deal where you can now receive 60 hours of recorded audio or video training, 500 pages worth of E-books, and a subscription so that you will receive 12 hours of educational materials every three days … you have probably realized by now that you could make a full-time activity of just studying Internet Marketing, reading your emails, and researching the newest greatest way to do something, without every DOING ANYTHING.
Needless to say, you would probably not earn a cent this way. But you might be able to get discounts on train tickets by saying that you are a full-time student!
Do you try to log in to some article directory or website, only to realize you have forgotten your password or user name, and then spend 30 minutes trying to find it? And in the meanwhile, do you get another email and go off in a different direction?
When your head is spinning, when you feel like you don’t know what to do next, I have a bit of advice for you.
STOP EVERYTHING. ORGANIZE.
Take a deep breath, and sort out your digital mess.
Here are a few points you can address:
1. Your email. Go through your inbox. Find which newsletters and subscriptions are actually valuable (but which you probably never have time to read because they are drowned in so much other garbage) and which ones are not really needed. Unsubscribe from the duds. Delete them on put them in a folder of “to read one day if bored.”
Organize your email into folders. For example, I have a folder called “Accounts Logins,” another called “Accounts Financial,” another called “Accounts Webhosting” etc. I have folders for each mentor who I really trust so that I can store all their newsletters in there to read in sequence at the right moment.
Organize your mailbox however suits you best. Delete unnecessary emails. For example, I just deleted a few hundred email notification which informed me when my own blogs were updated.
If you use an email account that has a feature like “flag for follow-up” I really recommend you use it where applicable!
Go through and handle every email you can - try to get your Inbox as close to empty as possible.
2. Your downloads. Organize your E-books, free bonuses, videos, zip files, software downloads, ad infinitum. I have a folder called “Recent Downloads” where every new download goes. Later on, after I have downloaded, I can sort these items into applicable sub-folders, install new software, etc. But all of the latest downloads are in that folder so the folder itself is a kind of a “To Do” list.
I also have a folder called “E-books and References.” I also recommend you sort those into folders. Such as “Read,” “Want to Read,” “Read if bored” “Not Very Good,” etc. You can also go through and clean them up - you might find some you want do delete.
3. Your computer desktop. You might want to make a simple JPEG desktop background with squares of different colors named for each category of item you keep on your desktop. For example “Work In Progress,” “Shortcuts,” “Plans and To Do Lists,” “Notes,” etc.
4. Your bookmarks (in Firefox) or favorites (In Internet Explorer): Go through these and organize them into folders. Like “Logins,” “Work in Progress,” “Training,” “My Websites and Blogs” “Social Networking Sites,” “Social Bookmarking Sites,” “Outsourcing Tools,” “Keyword Research,” etc.
5. Last but not least, YOUR PROJECTS! I recently realized that I could organize a large section of my “To Do” list into a simple Spreadsheet where I could keep track of what had been done on the creation and promotion of each one of my websites and blogs.
This goes for other items as well. Lets say you are submitting videos to numerous video sharing sites. You can make an excel grid to keep track of each of your videos, which sites they have been submitted to, which sites they have been published on, etc. If you are submitting your sites to directories or Social Bookmarking them, a similar grid might be good. But I much prefer to outsource this type of thing as it is so time-consuming but also so easy to out-source (you can see Social Bookmarking Outsourced for information on that.)
You can make such a grid for your websites as well as for your blogs. It can help a lot to keep track of which steps you have already taken: in your offsite SEO, onsite SEO, optimizing, building, designing, etc. So when you start up your computer and think, what should I work on now? You can simply look at your grid and get a “birds-eye view” of your projects at a glance. You can also avoid losing time attempting to redo actions you have already done but have forgotten about.
The above are a few examples of how you can clean up your digital mess, clear your head, and probably free some space on your hard drive as well.
Do you have other ideas? Please leave a comment at my blog, Residual Income Online to share your ideas on how we can organize our digital lives and get more done. I would be happy to share your ideas with others who are working online.
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