Lesson Seven

Batching Your Tasks     

I learned early in my first management role just how important batching or if you prefer, grouping your tasks is.

Guru J reminded me that being an Internet marketer meant returning to some of those key disciplines from earlier in my career.

You see in my role managing a large corporate sales team I always had someone to delegate the jobs that I didn't like doing, like all the tedious checking processes.

As an Internet marketer I was going to be all alone and needed to develop some strategies that meant the menial but important things got done, not just the big picture creative ideas.

The headings below will show you all of my must dos each day on line and a little later in the lesson I will show you an image of my on line diary for the week.

Check Each Day

Emails

1. I am a big Google fan as you already know so although I have many email addresses they all get copied into g mail where I can simply put a little star next to emails I need to save and then categorize.

2. Cull all unnecessary emails "typically about 30 each morning" gone with one click.

If I am sick of someone's stuff I un subscribe immediately so about three get shot each morning.

3. If a response is required I simply copy and paste the message into my Google calendar for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays as these are the mornings I respond to email questions.

4. If the question or response needed is urgent I tag it as a code Red and I always check my code Red section in G mail before going to bed each night and respond no matter what the time is. If a subscriber really needs my help with something I know the value of delivering good service promptly.

Affiliate Balances

1. Check each account balance and leave all of these open.

2. Take snag-it screen shots of each account balance and date them IE. Save as the affiliate products name.21.09.2007.

In Lesson 12 I explain the importance of starting and maintaining a quality screen shot diary as it gives you undeniable proof of your success on line to start joint ventures and to give you credibility and establish you as an expert in your niches.

The above step takes me about ten minutes each morning but as well as having a brilliant log of my business sometimes a buyer will request a special bonus from me and the affiliate program I am promoting will not have this buyer flagged in my accounts.

I then simply send a copy of the buyers email and of course my account gets credited.

"Trust no one" To read more about the screen shot diary go to Lesson 12.

3. Check pay-pal, click bank, pay dot com, balances and again take snag-it screen shots of all.

Excel

1. Enter new sales on the appropriate excel sheet.

Refer back to lesson 4 to read more about why this step is important.

2. Fill in and highlight any payments that seem to be missing or overdue.

I always just highlight the cells in yellow like this when something is amiss.

3. Step Three makes it easy to complete a weekly email to every affiliate programs web master when I reconcile my accounts on a Thursday night.

 4. If you are paranoid like I am, take a quick snag-it shot of your excel spreadsheets then save and close each one.

Although some of the above may seem like overkill in the early stages of your Internet marketing business I really stress the importance of beginning as you wish to continue and building good, thorough records.

Can you imagine how easy your tax will be to complete with records as detailed as these and once you get a pattern happening it only takes a few minutes each day.

Auto-responders

1. Check your lists for growth

2. Take note of any opt-outs and re-read your messages to any list that is getting an inordinate number of people opting out.

Then adjust the messages accordingly.

3. Write any new broadcast messages that you need to send list out to your lists.

Article Directories

1. Check out stats in the big Three

2. Take snag-it screen shots once a week of your reader stats.

I will explain what snag-it is shortly as it is an incredible tool.

3. Write two articles

Obviously when you are new on line this one will not apply but please try and write at least one article each week remembering that the bigger article directories all have terrific page rank and will get you great back links to your websites and blogs and you can promote your own products and other peoples by the use of your signature on an ezine.

The headings below show my week long plan that I follow rain, hail or shine.

You will note that I am using my goggle calendar, which makes life easy because I can use goggle documents, calendar and G mail all in unison.

Video Seven: The Guru talks about time management.

Watch Video <<<here>>>

As you can see by the list of things I give my attention to each week this really can become a full time job fairly quickly, but the trick is to automate your business as much as possible and keep all the balls in the air with solid methodology.

So put in the hard yards early on and get organized.

The most incredible thing to remember about this business is that some of the 7 figure gurus on line only work on their businesses for about 5-10 hours each week.

That's automation and it is also having a plan to Batch Your Tasks.