Recently I’ve had a mass of ideas for sites, advertising and promotion. Some of these ideas have come from some awesome bloggers, others have been from little old me. In the past I’ve had this thing where I spend hours thinking about how great a project would be if I did it, but then never bring myself to actually do it.

This is just what I’m trying to do now to make sure that great ideas don’t just stay as a few lines in Notepad.

Collect all ideas/notes for the project in one place

It’s not good having 5 different text documents splashed across your desktop, a few bookmarks sprinkled through Firefox, and a couple of scribbled down notes on your desk.

All the ideas need to be collected together in the same place.

This includes stuff that’s in your brain, make sure to download all that to the same place. Don’t worry about processing any of the information, just make sure you have every scrap of info about the project/idea written down.

Organise the Data

How?

Take the related pieces and put them together. Anything to do with the content generation of the site, group that together. Then anything to do with link building, put that in another pile. This process should probably happen naturally for more experienced marketers, but for me I find it helps to work exactly what I’m going to do for each project.

Create a Rough Guide

The natural progression is to get the ideas written down in such a way that you can refer to it by way of a quick glance every now and then.

I want to stress that this whole process up to now shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. If it does, you’re over-thinking - paralysis by analysis. The whole point of this exercise is to be able to get the projects off the ground as fast as possible, without making too much of a mess through lack of organisation.

The Important Step: Develop Content

This is the most important part of everything I’ve said in this post. If you remember nothing else, remember this. All that planning will not count for anything if you don’t put your back into making the content.

My past experience of starting a project has been something like this:

1. Think about the project
2. Day dream about the project
3. Think about it some more
4. Start designing the site, messing with layouts and cPanel and whatever
5. Never get around to writing the content

It’s imperitive that we get the meat of the site done first. Perhaps this applies more to the types of sites I’m developing now, which would be blogs, but content is still one of the most important parts of the building process.

Before I even think about playing around with a layout now, I make sure I have at least a “base amount” of content first. For a standard blog that would be at least 30 posts. This way I ensure that when I start getting the site built up, registering a domain, and putting on the finishing touches, I actually have a site with which to send people to.

I don’t pretend to be a guru, I am more a noob than anyone at times.

If you’re also a noob reading this, take my advice and do what I’m doing. If you’re not then feel free to laugh in my face because of your awesome superiority.

We all know that time is money, but how often do we put this into practice?

Recently, I’ve found that I haven’t been giving my time the respect it deserves. The problem with internet marketing is that there are an infinite number of projects and ideas you could work on. Newbies in the industry often find themselves running backwards and forwards from one plan/guru/idea to another, not really knowing where they are going.

I’m not suggesting to have only one project at a time. I love always having another project to work on if I get stuck on something and need to take a break, but I always try to focus the majority of my time on the things that are most likely to be successfull.

This doesn’t just apply to internet marketing. Today I was thinking about selling my old and broken laptop on eBay. But then I realised there’s some info on the hard drive I’d like to irradicate first before I sell it, and I have no idea how to get to the hard drive to wipe it as the laptop is broken.

Now, the maximum price I reckon I can get for the laptop sold as spare/repairs is £40. I know from previous experience of trying to physically fix technical things that it’ll take me a long time to work out how to wipe the data of the hard drive. A few hours work at least I should think, and I’m not wasting my time doing that for a one off £40 when my internet marketing efforts can produce the same amount of money week after week without me even doing any more work.

My advice to you is: focus most of your attention on the projects that you envisage the most success with. This is hard for newbies who don’t really know how likely things will be successful, so the best thing for them is to stick to one or two ideas that a more experienced marketer have verified as being viable.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on time management
• Project Management Tips for Successful Projects
• Time-Management - Important To Achieve A Goal — by DEEPTI PAWAR