For all those who have been in touch with me through this Blog I hope that you are looking forward to Christmas. For me Christmas is such a great time to be at home and for me a trip back to Ireland to see all family, cousins and friends is a real treat.
I would like to wish all who visit my Blog a very merry Christmas and every success with your online businesses in 2009.
In 2009 I will also be announcing some other projects I am working on and will hopefully help even more of you make a successful living online.
What I love about the Internet is that not only does it help you earn an unlimited amount of money but likewise it also allows you to share information with others. As such I thought I’d share a little secret.
Although this first post is a bit long I guarantee that it is worth your while reading. A real eye-opener!
For those of you who have already worked with will know that I keep going on about how to ‘work smarter - not harder‘ at your Internet business and how this has helped me to become a lot more productive and successful online. The following shows you how you too can evaluate your own business and apply the same principle to make your more productive and successful.
Before I divulge this ’secret’, maybe you can think about the following:
- Are you always under pressure from your ever-expanding To-do list? People to see, places to go, people hassling you, people wanting more and more of your time?
- Does your day just never seem to have enough hours to get everything done?
- Do you put some of your family commitments to one side for the sake of your work?
- Wouldn’t you just love to have a few hours extra per day so that you could spend it on something a little more worthwhile?
- Are you not finding enough time to devote to family and friends?
Well, I don’t know about you but if you answered yes to any of the above then you need to grab a coffee (or your favourite beverage) and sit back, read the following, and where possible apply it to your daily life.
The secret in question is called The Pareto Principle, commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule. Pareto was in fact an Italian economist, full name Vilfredo Pareto, and he created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country. He observed that 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth. And then in the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran inaccurately attributed the 80/20 Rule to Pareto, calling it Pareto’s Principle. The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are trivial.
So how does this apply to any of us in real life?
It can apply to the most mundane of everyday activities to the most important daily work tasks that are responsible for helping us make money.
For example we wear 20 percent of our clothes 80 percent of the time or we spend 80 percent of our time with 20 percent of our friends and family. All you need to do is look around and you can see where this principle is already in action. Although bear in mind that sometimes it may work out at 90/10 or 70/30 and even sometimes it may not always add up to 100 percent.
Here are a few more ways in which this principle applies in everyday life:
- 20 percent of those in jail commit 80 percent of the crime
- 20 percent of the football (soccer) team score 80 percent of the goals
- you eat 20 percent of your favourite foods 80 percent of the time
- 20 percent of the sales team generate 80 percent of the sales
- 20 percent of the customers generate 80 percent of the revenue
And a really important one is:
- 80% of your measurable results and progress will come from just 20% of the items on your daily To-Do list. The major problem is that most people are so busy fighting fires that they never get around to completing the main tasks that lead to the best results.
The bottom line is the Pareto Principle reminds us that we should only try and focus on the 20 percent that matters. Which when applied to our daily workload will eventually lead you to freeing up a lot more time from your working day.
Here are a few examples from one of my first Online Businesses
Part of my online business is based around Affiliate Marketing. Although I am pretty ‘hot’ at PPC my main source of traffic for my network of 90+ affiliate websites is through organic search or SEO, mainly Google searches. You can imagine the amount of work needed in order to design, build and then rank all of those websites in the search engines. No mean feat but the biggest task for any SEO Affiliate is keeping the sites high up the search engines. This is done mainly by getting links from as many sites as possible to link to your site for specific keywords or search phrases. This can be done manually using a variety of methods such as Article distribution, link exchanges with other webmasters, Blog postings, directory submissions etc etc.
It then suddenly dawned on me that after a while 80 percent of my time was being taken up by only 20 percent of the tasks on my daily to-do list and the main thing that caused that imbalance was the constant and never ending search and creation of links to my large network of sites.
You can imagine the volume of emails I had to send websmasters just to get links to my sites. For every 20 link exchange requests I made I might only get 2-5 giving me a link. And with 10’s of sites to get links for the amount of work was staggering, so you can imagine why I was working 10 hour days and 6-7 day weeks.
There is only so much you can take and eventually I thought there just had to be a bettwer way. A smarter way to do all this work. I then sought and discovered a way to create those links on auto-pilot and within 1 week I was back to completing 100 percent of my daily activities, which in turn made me a lot more productive, which in turn…you can see where I am going here… made me a lot more money!
And by the way, just for the record, and this is indeed spooky:
- 20 percent of my affiliate sites now generate roughly 80 percent of my revenue
And finally
Sometimes you get caught up with the daily grind and take your eye off the bigger picture. Over time you can get sucked into doing tasks, which are just not making you productive. Effectively, most of what you do is likely to be a complete waste of time. And your ‘Not to do‘ list becomes even more important than your ‘To do list‘.
But by remembering the Pareto Principle you can finally discover the 20 percent that generates 80 percent of your results. And you can then put your heart and soul into that 20 percent. As a result I can guarantee that you’ll be a lot more productive, resulting in much more success and happiness.
And this can be equally applied to both your business and personal life.