Robert Plank

Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes

1. You're overwhelmed by all the new offers you see.
2. You're switching between too many tasks every day.
3. You're doing too much of the work yourself.
4. Your to-do list keeps getting bigger (not shorter) and you can't prioritize.
5. You procrastinate and can't seem to finish what you start.
6. You're a perfectionist.
7. You're unhappy.

1. Choose one "computer free" day of the week, and one "email free" day (even when you're at the computer).
2. Only focus on ONE project this week, such as launching a new product, finishing that sales letter, or creating that membership site content.  Everything else can wait.
3. Outsource just one thing.  I recommend you dictate ten articles (2.5 minutes each) and send them out to get transcribed, that saves you one day of work.
4. Throw away your whiteboard and only write down four daily tasks instead of having a long to-do list.
5. Reward yourself with 30 minutes of TV, a bowl of ice cream, or the rest of the day off for finishing your project early.
6. Be "perfectly complete" instead of "perfectly perfect."  In other words, try to win the high score.  If your goal was to write 10 articles and you wrote all 10 before your deadline, you scored a "perfect" 10 regardless of the quality of those articles.
7. Use the extra money from internet marketing to go on a vacation, pay off your mortgage faster, spend time with your family, or send your kid to college.  In other words, use the money to do something you enjoy.

How about you, what do you think?

Reading time: 5 - 8 minutes

If you've seen any of the comments on this blog, you know that my posts get a lot of response.

If you've been inside any of my paid webinar classes, you know that I have a lot of successful case studies and success stories from people who did exactly what I told them to.

How do you clone exactly what I did? You use one of these 4 methods to get your followers to take action.

"Know" Phase #1: The Blog Comments

Something you can do right now without launching a new product, even without making a new blog post, is look at the most recent post you've made on your blog and cap the number of comments at 10.

Put a note that says "as soon as that blog post gets 10 comments, you're going to disable comments." You would not believe how many people have told me at live events that they had no interest in leaving a comment on my blog until they heard that they might miss out on it. That's how most of your viewers are as well. They are just barely on the fence about whether or not to comment.

It's up to you to give them that one extra reason. If having 10 blog comments seems like a lot, here's a secret. You should be replying to your blog comments. This means that if 5 people leave comments on your blog and you reply to each individual comment with a comment of your own, that equals 10 responses total. When I say you should cap your blog post at 10 comments, you really only need 5 people to leave comments and then for you to respond to each one.

At first, you might have to pay people $1 per comment or have some of your friends leave comments, but after a few posts, when the social proof is there, people will leave comments as long as you are sending traffic there from your forum and from your list.

"Like" Phase #2: The Retweet Campaign

When I launch a blog post, after it has filled up the 100 or so comments I like to have, I will close out comments and then mail my list a second time, telling them to re-tweet that blog post.

In the past, I tried to tell people to comment and re-tweet but this works a lot better if you devote one day and one email just to commenting, and after you've gotten what you wanted, devote one day just to re-tweeting one of your posts. On my blog, I use the TweetMeme plugin and just by having that button there, I do get 10 to 20 re-tweets or one click mentions on Twitter.

But when I specifically ask people to re-tweet, it jumps to 50 to 200 re-tweets. That means that 200 different people have mentioned that specific blog post on Twitter which gives me more traffic and more social proof, and I like that at this point, the comments are turned off because that means anyone who comes to my site now has to sign up to my mailing list to be notified when they can comment again.

You can also have fun with this re-tweet campaign by re-tweeting your blog post once per day to drive the count-up and add some kind of prize. For example, if you can get 20 re-tweets of your latest blog post, you will make another blog post this week.

"Trust" Phase #3: Free Live Webinar

Most people have no strategy when they're leaving a blog post. I always do.

When I make a blog post, it's usually to pre-launch my next class or my next email offer. You should be doing the same.

Use the responses you got from that last blog post to create your presentation or to improve the next class you will be offering.

Even if you only have 10 comments, you can pick out about four things that people are having trouble with.

For example, I once made a post on my blog called Forfeit the Race to Free, telling people not to gravitate towards trials but instead be moving their price higher, and although a lot of people agreed with me, some people told me things like they were at first afraid to launch their product and now this advice got them to do it. Some other people argued that more people bought at a low price, which in my experience was false. More people bought at a higher price.

My favorite response to that post was that some – one of my commenters told me that somebody didn't buy from them because the price was too low and the average person thought that because it was so cheap, something must be wrong with it.

All those responses can make a great presentation or augment a presentation that's already ready because it speaks directly to people's fears and frustrations and the best part is you can use the same language, the same phrases people say to you and use that to make a killer headline based on your pressing issue.

"Close" Phase #4: Pitch And Close

You've already taught people something from your emails leading up to your blog post, from your blog post itself, and during your free live webinar. At the end of that free live webinar, all of that info should be coming in together - the emails, the blog posts, the comments, and this live training into a relevant and special offer.

You gave people a lot of tips on overcoming roadblocks but now it's time for them to pay you to get access to the step-by-step how-to system to get them from point A to point B.

Make it a special offer just for people on the call that will be increasing in price soon, have a real deadline so that there is real scarcity, and send them to at least a short sales letter explaining your offer exactly in black and white terms. That way, when people join your class or purchase your report or get your video series, they know exactly what they are getting.

Is your business model anything close to this, the KNOW, LIKE, TRUST, and CLOSE step-by-step system? If not, why not and how soon are you going to implement this? Comment!

So, what do you think?

Reading time: 1 - 2 minutes

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a software program out there, that can save you 20 minutes a day (which frees up five days per year?)

There is, and you might already be using it.

It's called Roboform.

Roboform remembers your passwords and makes it so you can login to all your favorite web sites with one click.

Even if you don't have to rummage around for that password, the act of typing in that password -- even if it's just for a few seconds -- and waiting for the page to load... adds up very quickly if you visit several sites each day like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, forums, Gmail...

So one day you can save 20 minutes a day RIGHT NOW is to install Roboform.

Want to save 21 minutes a day instead of 20 minutes a day? That means you gain 126 extra hours a year instead of a measly 120.

Just use ONE PERCENT of the advice I give you in my "100 Timesavers" report... and you'll get 6 hours.

Then use one more to get another 6 hours.  Over and over.

What are you going to do with this information right now?

Reading time: 6 - 9 minutes

The biggest benefit you can give to yourself as a business owner is to remove yourself from the equation. That means automate as much of yourself as possible ahead of time so your daily tasks do not become chores.

You might be surprised at all the ways you can pre-schedule your content and your marketing ahead of time and I'm going to explain six ways to do that right now.

1. Blog Drip

When someone says the phrase "drip content" to me, the first thing that comes to mind and the first thing that should come to mind to you is dripping out content on your WordPress blog.

WordPress is the #1 blogging platform and my favorite feature about it has always been that you can schedule content ahead of time with no additional plugins needed. When you're writing a blog post, you can choose to submit it right now or you can change the date on it so it appears as if it was written a long time ago, but you can also change the date to a date in the future – for example, date it to be next week or next month.

That post will remain in a scheduled state until the next week or next month and it will automatically be published for you on a timer. You can set not just the date but the time of day so you know exactly when that next post is coming out.

I highly recommend that instead of sitting and writing out your blog's next week's worth of content, write 4 or 5 short posts and schedule them one month apart. That way, you have the next several months of blog posts already scheduled. And guess what else, if you're using WordPress to run your membership site, you're dripping out content inside your paid membership site as well.

2. Autoresponder Drip

The next easy way to drip content is with your email autoresponder.

You might not have notice it yet but your autoresponder gives you the ability to pre-schedule posts in the same way as your blog. You can write an email that will be sent to your list and set it to tomorrow's date or next week's date, which means that you can write your next month or your next week's worth of autoresponder emails and not have to do anything for that amount of time. You could go on vacation for the next week, schedule your next week's worth of emails and now your business will run even though you are not present.

When you are launching a product, one email simply won't cut it. You need to give people multiple reasons to go check out your offer. You need to give people multiple email reminders getting them to look at your webpage. When you're running a webinar, you should send several emails leading up to the webinar to make sure everyone is on the call.

When you make a blog post, you should send traffic to that blog post and even send reminder emails, which means you can schedule your blog post and schedule your autoresponder emails for that blog post.

3. Sales Letter Drip

If you know a programmer for about $5, you can get content on your sales letter dripped out. There's a little thing called "if else" statements.

That means if you want to slowly increase the price of your product – say increase it by $10 once a week for 5 weeks, you can at a special bit of PHP code that will replace your order button with a new one at a higher price every few days. You can run seasonal specials. For example, every month you could rotate in a different bonus for your offer to give different people a reason to get in.

4. Squeeze Page Drip

You can apply the same "if else" technology that you use on your sales letter to your squeeze page as well and you can use it to do the same things – rotate a monthly or weekly offer, and this can be a different headline, a different bonus or even an entire page swapped out for another.

You can switch out one of your opt-in forms after 2 months for a different one and have the first opt-in form send people to a page where they are supposed to re-tweet one of your free audios, but after 2 months, now direct them to a page where it sends them to your blog, which is now filled up with content.

More often than not, if I have a hard deadline for something, if I know I'm going to increase the price, change the headline, change a redirect, I will set it on this timer instead of doing it manually because otherwise I know I might forget.

5. Social Media

Now that you've dripped out your blog post, install a WordPress plugin such as Twitter Tools to leave a Twitter post or a tweet everytime you make a new blog post.

Also, if I know I'm going to be tweeting about something for the next week or two, I will use a scheduling service such as SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) to write tweets but set a publication date on them, which means I can write 10 or 20 tweets a time which will be posted once a day or once a week.

If you don't know what kind of scheduled tweets you should put out there, just use 30-day reminders. If you're posting about a blog post today, schedule another tweet in 30 days, reminding people about that old blog post.

6. Traffic Drip

Even third-party services allow you to drip out your content, even if your content appears on other people's sites.

The Traffic Geyser service allows you to upload up to 90 videos at once and determine when they will be scheduled. (I wish Tube Mogul did too.)  When I was using this service for videos, I would record 90 videos at once, upload 90 videos and set the publication date for each and everyone - meaning that I could leave it alone for 3 months and it would send out a new video to the video sites once per day.

EzineArticles even has a premium option which means you can schedule all your articles and determine what date they will be published. Meaning, you can use the same strategy, write or outsource 90 articles, upload and schedule them all and the next 3 months' worth of traffic building are now automatic.

I hope that one of those 6 ways to drip content automatically opened your eyes and made you realized that doing things on a consistent basis doesn't always involve you and doesn't always have to be a chore.

So, which one do you like the best? The blog drip, autoresponder, sales letter, squeeze page, social media, or traffic drip? Post below, letting me know. Thank you.

Agree or disagree?

Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes

Quick question: how the heck are you going to send an e-mail every day to your list, if you don't already?

Inside "Time Management on Crack" I show you the five different types of e-mails I regularly send to my list... and six more types of blog posts I write.  Guess what, every time you send a blog post is a chance to e-mail your list three more times per blog post.

Oh yeah, plus I have a formula to launch a product in five-step e-mail sequence.

Guess what all that gives you?

• Five follow-ups (per thing you are offering)...
• Six times three blog post notification e-mails (that's 18 more)...
• Plus five e-mails to launch the product... even if you're only promoting as an affiliate.

Five plus eighteen plus five is 28 e-mails. So yes, you can promote one thing for a month, or even one week at a time for four months.

You Just Gotta Follow a Formula!

That and remember e-mails should be short and only have one call to action.

Never broadcast an autoresponder email with signature links.  Or with 3 SEPARATE URLs.  It's ok to mention the same URL multiple times.

But you might say, Robert, I've got 10 different URLs.  People need to see them all.

Fine.  Just space them out over 10 weeks.  Week 1, all you're doing is giving different reasons, and on some days just reminding them, to visit URL #1... every day of the week.

During week 2 you transition into URL #2 and keep promoting that all week.

And so on.  So now you don't have to give people a 10-step process (because they WILL get confused)... just commitment and consistency them.

Just one call to action, simple steps, and follow a formula... please.

If you think daily emails will "annoy, overload or confuse" your subscribers... the internet marketer known for unsubscribing from lists that mail too often, is still on my list after years and years.  And I mail every single day!  Here's what he had to say when I asked him:

"You're right. I don't usually stay on lists that email me every day. Your stuff is short, useful and interesting enough to keep me reading. Doesn't hurt that your products rock, either."

-- Paul Myers

There you have it.  How often you mail is irrelevant. What does matter is: short length, interesting messages, and good offers.

Do you disagree, or do you think I'm awesome?

Let's talk more about this... can you do me a quick 30-second favor and leave a comment below?

Reading time: 5 - 8 minutes

If you are in business for yourself, you need to have good time management habits. You no longer have a boss looking over your shoulder, making sure you get things done. You can no longer get paid by the hour and run out the clock and make money doing nothing.

You need to do something to make money. That means you need to get the most out of every single day. You need to be busy and not just productive. Take a look at these 8 time management habits, figure out which one you're not applying and apply it to yourself right now.

Habit #1: One Project At a Time

Many people fight with me or don't trust me when I tell them they need to have one project going at a time and yet they wonder why I get so much accomplished. Don't have a big long to-do list. Instead, decide what is your focus this week – are you writing articles, are you writing a sales letter, are you making a new product? And this week is only for completing that project.

You will wear yourself out if you try to write an article in the morning, build an AdSense site at noon, make a product in the afternoon, and post on forums in the evening.

If your focus today or this week is to write articles, have a goal such as 30 articles... write a handful of articles everyday until you're done and then that project is finished forever and you will never have to go back and worry about it.

Habit #2: Finish What You Start

If something is 99% complete, it's not complete. Write that report or finish that sales letter and launch it, even if it's only version 1.0.

Habit #3: Stop Doing What Loses Money

I have known far too many marketers who had a successful information product business working for them but then they abandoned it all to move towards a new niche or to move towards membership sites. If you have something that is making you money and you want to try something new, add it to your business.  Don't simply drop one thing and get a new thing.

The (basic) definition of insanity is to continually attempt an action and expect a different result to happen. If something is not making you money, if building AdSense sites are not making you money, if pay-per-click is not making you money, try something new.

Habit #4: Repeat What Makes Money

Once you find that one thing that works for you and it might be freelancing for the moment, repeat it but in a bigger scale. If you're freelancing, that might mean to charge more for your hourly rate. If you have a low ticket info-product, that might mean to get more traffic or make new joint venture connections.

Find one thing that makes money that's been proven to convert and to sell and course-correct. For example, if you find that writing 10 articles on a certain subject gets you lots of traffic, opt-ins, and sales, then write 100 articles on that same subject.

Habit #5: Simplify It

Although many gurus get money from you by selling their complicated system or by throwing out fancy terms for you, the things that work and the things that you are able to wrap your head around are the simple things.

Most of the systems I use for writing sales copy, making articles, writing blog posts are only around 4 or 5 steps long. Think about Steve Jobs and Apple's product line. What do they sell? Desktops, laptops, Mp3 players, and phones. When in doubt, if you can't fit it on a napkin, it's too complicated.

Habit #6: Be Fast

It's one thing to say you're going to write 100 articles but if it takes you a whole year to do it, that's no fun. You want instant gratification and instant results, that way, you know that what you're doing is working.

You need to be fast in order to stay excited... you've been only working on something for a few days, it's fresh, and it's new and it's not some chore you have been forced to keep up for the last several months.

Get used to going from an idea to a finished concept quickly and be used to making snap decisions, whether it's to choose what you'll do today, what your project will be or even how to outline it and what the structure of that project will be.

Habit #7: Do What Makes You Happy

Here's the thing most people won't tell you about working for yourself and working on the internet – it is much harder than any day job. Why deal with that? Because the idea is: even though the thing you are doing is tougher than a day job, it's something that you are excited to wake up and crank out.

You can focus on what excites you, what niche excites you, for example, webinar training, and what activities about that excite you, for example article writing to get traffic. You might work harder and might even work longer hours being self-employed than at a day job, it's something that you're excited to wake up and complete. So that way, it's really not a job.

If you do what makes you happy, even if it's slightly more work, you will be able to sustain it for longer and it will have a much better payoff. When you're happy with what you do, your life has meaning.

Habit #8: Don't Do It Alone

For me and many others, we became much more productive when we had someone making sure we stay on task. I'm not necessarily saying a boss who gives you orders. Just someone who makes sure you stick with your own orders.

Have somebody who will read your task list everyday, have somebody who you can report to and at the beginning of the day, tell them what you will be working on and at the end of the day, you can tell them if you completed those tasks or if you failed. This way, if you fail, you'll feel bad, but if you succeed, you'll feel happy.

You will be a lot more motivated if you're worried about letting someone else down as opposed to letting yourself down.

Those are 8 habits you should be adapting right now to make yourself more successful...

Change of plans today: I will also RESPOND to your comment, if you click the retweet button in the post above, and your Twitter "first and last name" is the same as the name you leave in the comment.

1. Leave a comment.  2. Click the retweet button. 3. I'll respond to your comment.

Out of the 8, which was your favorite? Please let me know in a comment below.

If you think of anything I left out of this post, please feel free to put that on the comment.

Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

Why are so many other people in the world more successful than you?

As you read this blog post, you are not only going to discover the answer, but you are going to be surprised that most people who get more things done than you don't have MORE stuff to do in their life. They actually have LESS things to do.

Let's figure out what you can REMOVE from your life to become more successful, more productive - and therefore make more money.

Clutter: Paper And Notes

I have told you before many times how much I hate paper. Paper is imperfect. You write on it and you can't really change what is on the paper. It takes up space. You can't always find it. And it distracts you.

I often hear people recommend you do silly things like write the amount of money you want to make per month and put it on your computer monitor. Or write your daily "To Do" list and put it on your wall. Or even (the silliest of them all!) have a whiteboard! Yuck, I hate whiteboards.

Are you kidding me? How often does your whiteboard really change? Chances are, when you first got that whiteboard, you wrote on it every day. But then you let it sit for a month or longer with the same exact stuff written on it.

You can't have all that stuff around your office distracting your attention. If you have got something to write, send it to someone in an email. Or write it as a blog post. Or post it to your Accountability Blog. Or write it in EverNote. But put it down and file it away so it doesn't distract you.

And because it is filed away in a computer system, it is very easy to find, especially if you need to search for it.

Remove paper from your life.

Time Killer: Cable TV

I don't think it is a coincidence that five years ago I stopped getting cable TV, and that was also when I started to get a lot more accomplished.

With TV, it is way too easy to sit down, flip channels, and before you know it, an hour or two has gone by. If we all lived for ever, cable TV would be a great invention. But because you will never get tomorrow back, or last week back, last month, or even last year, back, you shouldn't waste time on cable TV.

I am all for watching a DVD or watching a movie. But having that ability to wander and get distracted, especially by commercials, is not a good thing.

Remove cable TV from your life.

Distractions: Instant Messaging, Email and Pop-Ups

Back when I hosted webinars for people, so many of those webinars were interrupted by someone's chat box appearing. You may have heard the statistic that "Once you get distracted, it takes you at least fifteen minutes to regain focus."

That means that if you were distracted twice, by only a few seconds each time, every hour, you have just lost half of your productivity.

Your computer needs to be a hot seat. When you have a task you need to finish, such as posting on forums, replying to emails, writing articles, scheduling blog posts, finishing that chapter - whatever it is, close your instant messaging, close the browser that is open to your email. Otherwise you will see that "1 New Message" and HAVE to click on it!

Close Tweet deck or any other program that can pop up and distract you with a new message. It's okay - the world will still be there when you turn those programs back on after your pressing matter is finished!

Turn off the instant messages.

And those are the top three things that you should definitely remove from your life if you want to become twice as productive - or even more.

Are you going to remove one of the three from your life? If not, what one thing can you remove from your life RIGHT NOW to eliminate distractions and get more accomplished?

Leave a short comment in the form below.

What questions does this raise for you?