How To Save Time While Making Money Online
This week has been amazingly busy for me. Also this weekend is going to be even busier. A friend of mine hired me to help his parents get their vacation lake house wired up for Internet, television and telephone and also to help get their computers all networked together both with wired and wireless capabilities. The list goes on and on. They want their computers wiped out, reformatted and Windows Vista installed… also they have an xBox 360 that they want to get all set up and hooked into their home network. I’ll be gone most of the weekend, but will be online off and on checking how things are going.
So anyway, with everything that has been going on this week and with the upcoming weekend, you may be wondering how I can do so much offline yet continue to make money online. Here are a few tips that I think can help you make the best of your time online, assuming that your time is limited.
1.) Email – Checking and processing email is very time consuming. A couple of months ago I was at my wits end trying to process email. I would literally spend about two to three hours a day processing email. Today I only spend about half an hour.
How can this be done? Simple… set up your email account so that only really important emails hit your inbox. For me, I set up filters in my Gmail. I have a Blog Replies, Contact Form, Google Alerts, Newsletters, Payments and Social Media filter.
Basically over a short period of time (maybe a week) as I continued receiving email into my inbox, I started assigning everything a filter to it. Fast forward to today, every email I receive has a place. The only email that hits my inbox are ones that need to be processed within 24 hours.
All of my Aweber and FeedBurner subscriptions go into the Newsletter folder and I read those messages when I can. Anything that deals with money goes into the Payments folder. I can quickly review invoices, sales I have made, or payment receipts. The Social Media folder has emails such as notifications of new people following me on Twitter.
All in all, creating an email system can totally save you tons of time, I strongly recommend doing something or creating a system that can help you reduce the amount of time you spend checking email.
2.) Raise The Dead Content – If your blog is like mine, then you are getting new subscribers daily. If that is true, then it is unlikely that all the new people that find your blog today read your content you wrote a month ago.
If your time is very limited, but you’re stressing over wanting to keep your blog fresh and up-to-date, then dig in your archives and find a few posts you like and bump them back to the top. All you have to do is change the date and update the post and instantly your old post will be back on your home page. The update will hit your RSS Feed and all your subscribers will receive a notification.
For the subscribers who already read the post months ago, many will not even remember, and those who do remember will appreciate you bringing the old topic back to the forefront. Content you have written has a value to it and many bloggers assume that content only has one life. Content doesn’t have to be used only once, you can bring content back that you have written years ago if you want.
3.) Social Networking – If you are busy, not only is it is very hard to update your blog, but socializing in the networks can be near impossible. To keep your social profiles on life support, simply put them on auto-pilot.
Many social networks allow you to pipe in various RSS feeds from other networks. I have spent time splicing and wiring up all my social networks so that pretty much any activity I do online, there is something that documents what I did. If I write a post on my blog, people will know this on FriendFeed, Twitter, Plurk, and even FaceBook. Writing one post on my blog makes it look like I have made my rounds across four different social networks.
While I am on the topic of updating social network profiles, I’d like to suggest to you to closely consider your post titles. I talk a lot about optimizing post titles for search engines, but also there is yet another element to consider as well.
Are your post titles optimized for social networks? For example, most of my posts on Blogging Questions are titled in the form of a question. These post titles automatically post on Twitter. People who follow me on Twitter feel as if I am asking THEM a question. Consequently, the success rate of receiving a comment directly from Twitter because of how the post title was formed is very high. Much of this same style is used on GarryConn.com and other blogs.
These are all things I do to help me save time, especially when my time is very limited. What are some other things that you can think of that can help people save time when time is very limited?
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22 comments
Your point about changing the time stamp on posts can work very well. I’ve also found success by writing a few extra paragraphs and alerting readers with an UPDATED IDEAS comment – it brings together content from ‘way back then to this day.
Data points, Barbara
Number two is fantastic and something I’ve used from time to time. If you pay attention to your analytics you probably have keywords updates, additions and other SEO tasks to optimize your old articles, use that opportunity to revive the old and improve both your content and value to readers at the same time.
Thanks again and keep up the good work,
Bill
Funny, you say that about email— I am addicted to checking mine… My day has gotten significantly more productive since I turned off the alert informing me that I have new emails coming in. It is important to check you email frequently, but schedule times so you are not distracting yourself all day!
“2.) Raise The Dead Content”
How far back should you go? Obviously (I think) the older the post the better, but is there a minimum age a post should be before you resurrect it?
Interesting tips Garry Conn.
But usually I’m busy with social networking sites only. Twitter, Orkut, Facebook and Stumbleupon are favorite social traffic builders.
After 2 months I’m started my blogging again… May be my readers can expect at least 2 posts per day..
Thanks.
Kumar from Edubook
I’m with you… I switched to Gmail about a year and a half ago and I ALWAYS keep up to date with the new features in the Labs and what not. I don’t think I could live without Gmail.
I try to convert as many of my non-Gmail friends but some are just too stubborn… sucks for them I guess.
Email is my nemesis! But I’m getting better lol. Like Erica, I was every 10 or so minutes at one point.
Post titles – although i definitely throw the main keyword in there, I also write those for readers, usually with a question. It REALLY brings in the participation.
You sort of mentioned this in your post:
I personally like to create extra posts each day that I write and have them scheduled to be released throughout the week. I do this just in case i’m unable to write and still want to keep my readers reading.
Email, for me hasn’t been that much of a deal…. I just deal with it. Still, that’s a great idea you presented in your post about labeling and filtering email that you receive.
Nice tips i am also facing the problem of less time as i am a student. I dont much time.
u do lots of video blogging have u tried adsense with youtube. ??
Great tip about bringing archived blog content back to life by changing the date. I also like Barbara’s input, updating the post so it does have a fresh element to it for returning readers.
Thanks for posting.
Karl
That is a very good idea Barbara. Most WordPress blogs such as mine offer a way for people to subscribe to receive an email notification when future comments are left on a post and by adding a comment yourself you trigger an email sent to the existing people who commented.
Hi Bill,
Good call. Indeed, if you take a moment to review your existing article content against Google Analytics to see what kind of keywords your page is getting hit by, you can totally rewrite some of the content to better optimize it for search. Excellent suggestion.
Hi Erica,
Totally! Even after I got a nice email system in place with filters, I still have the tendency to check for new email. The good news in my situation is that I simply don’t have any new email in my inbox and the other email that automatically goes into my folders don’t really need any processing.
Hi Kumar,
Actually you shouldn’t feel expected to produce any certain amount of quantity. In your case, being very active in the social networks, you can write a post and then work towards promoting the post within the social networks simply by spreading the word.
If you monitor your traffic levels, you will see the initial SPIKE in traffic exposed to your article and once that SPIKE dies down, then you can conclude that the content has been exposed to the majority of people within your resource and work on producing your next post.
Hi there,
I don’t think that there is like an “industry standard” rule to this. You need to use your better judgement. Also, consider that some of your older content may actually be expired or outdated. In other words, it wouldn’t be beneficial to bring back a post from the dead that tells everyone about Windows 98 and how cool the OS is.
For me, I determine which posts to bring back simply by how well the public reacted to it the first time around. I will review my posts in wp-admin and look for ones that have a bunch of comments.
While I am thinking of this, it might not be a bad idea to install this plugin that allows the author to know which posts received the most comments. If interested, have a look at this page:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/popular
Hi Ray,
Gmail is great. I do wish, though, that Google would improve Google Talk. It isn’t very fun to use and other instant messenger programs such as Yahoo Messenger are so much more entertaining.
For example, with YIM, I can drag and drop a picture and share it with the person I am talking to. Another example is I can copy/paste the URL of a YouTube video and watch it together with the person I am chatting with.
On the flip side, Yahoo Mail totally blows, and bad! Yahoo Mail sucks… Gmail is absolutely the best web based email program I have ever used. Everyone else, including AOL/AIM just bombard you with advertisements and don’t have even close the the features Gmail has.
Hi Dennis,
Yeah man… I am sure you get a ton of email dude, especially if you subscribe to the blog posts which you leave a comment on, which I am sure you do! I am pretty sure that you have subscribed to just about every post you have commented on, on my blog. BTW… I appreciate that.
Hi Bradley,
Did I say that in this post? I don’t remember… I do, however, remember saying that in the past and still believe this totally to be an excellent idea.
I shift around quite a bit, but there are times, when I will devote a day just towards writing content. For example, with my freelance writing job for MoreNiche, I wrote the content for the entire month of Feb. in one day and scheduled the posts accordingly.
Hi Aditya,
I have at one point in time tried AdSense with YouTube, it didn’t work very well for me so I don’t bother too much with it. AdSense in content, such as a blog works best.
I do enjoy video blogging though because of the amount of time it saves to either express a thought or enhance written content that expresses a thought. Video blogging is excellent and I am getting more comfortable with it.
Indeed, Barbara’s advice/tip was totally hot. I am glad that she was the first to comment on this post. That was very thoughtful.
@Garry Conn , Yes… Thanks for your reply..
Now I started creating back links for my blog…
I’m blogging from 2007. But Now only I found out back links is very important for page rank.
Hell yea my man! Email crashes aside, replying to one reply after another on the same post really puts you ahead of the pack. Of course the same rule applies as with the initial comment, ALL of them (with the possible exception of the final “thank you” or “you’re welcome”) better hold some substance.
In fact, a lot of bloggers even delete “thanks” and “you’re welcome” comments. Even though the person receiving it likes it, it does somewhat waste the time of other readers. I’m on the fence with that one personally.
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