I was thinking about SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins‘ reply to our discussion whether onsite blogging provides value: “I find it so difficult to live-blog a session and actually pay attention to the speaker. Some are better at this I think.”

So the conversation seems to have shifted from whether “onsite blogging” provides value, to how difficult it is to “liveblog a session” because of the multiple tasks involved:

• Pay attention to the speaker
• Live blog the session

Here’s a secret I learned as a former journalist. I together with the reporters from the Reuters, Associated Press and Bloomberg news wires, sat listening to Microsoft, HP or some other company make their announcement, and we used our strategies, following that, we’d file our reports (the newswire guys generally filed their reports within 30 seconds to a minute to someone in the newsroom), the reports would go live.

Due to our ability to effectively process the information successfully, their reports would be circulated all over the world, and my news stories would make it to page one of Singapore’s business daily, or it’d make the front page of the tech session.

Compared to everyone else, we have the same brain, the same abilities, but yet we’re able to achieve different results.

So the question is:

What made the difference?

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Before we get into that, consider all the tasks you have to get through every day.

You need to:

• Check and respond to email
• Collaborate with joint venture partners
• Develop your own products (or project manage if you’ve outsourced it)
• Update your blog or submit news articles/press releases
• Manage the sales team in following up and marketing your services
• The administrative stuff like filing paper, and probably the least exciting activity (at least for me…) filing your taxes

On top of that, we all only have 24 hours to finish this in.

So again: What makes the difference?

Your time planning and execution strategy you use make all the difference.

I won’t go into time planning, but focus on the execution aspect.

Many business owners and new entrepreneurs fail because:

• They fail to realize what’s important
• They fail to do what’s important
• They fail to follow up on what’s important

The Pareto principle states that 20% of the people in a city in Italy owned 80% of it’s wealth. Since then, the Vilfredo Pareto’s principle has been generalized to:

“20% of what you do will lead to 80% of your results” — So of the 10 things you do, you need to complete 2 of them to become really successful. The problem is that most people choose to do maybe 5 or 6 things.

Unfortunately, those 5 things (more…)

• Internet Marketing
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There’s a focus on getting maximum productivity to generate more traffic, build your list or developing more products.
After all, there’re only 24 hours in a day and rushing your product to the market, and building your community are priorities

But, there is value to taking a half hour out every day to use quiet time to think about your current projects.

Quiet time is NOT about sitting on your couch and watching TV.
Nor does it involve looking for a quiet corner with a six-pack.

Rather, it’s a form of (more…)

• Internet Marketing
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Is this you?

I’ve had the chance to talk to a number of aspiring Internet Marketers (aspiring because they haven’t started yet) over the past couple of weeks and frankly, I’m shocked at some of the expectations.

“I want you to set up an online business, which will make me lots of money on a long term basis, and I don’t have to do anything. Oh yeah, and I’m not willing to pay you much for it”

I don’t know about you, but some people are seriously out of touch with reality…

If there are expectations that someone would spent time and resources creating online businesses which generate huge, long term income and do it on the cheap, there is a major disconnect with reality.

And we’re not even talking about the 15 minute worth of setup for niche research, traffic gen and monetization efforts Kris Jones alluded to during Elite Retreat which I mentioned in “PepperJam’s Kris Jones Dishes Out Super Affiliate Marketing Tips” yesterday.

The expectations I am talking about are to have a complete, turnkey, self-sustaining business where all they have to do is to sit back and count their profits every day.

If you’ve every had these thoughts, or even worse still harbor them, please note, you could be setting yourself up for business suicide if these are your thoughts about Internet Marketing.

There’s an adage that goes:

If you do nothing, nothing will happen.

If you do something, something will happen.

“Something” may not always be what you want, or even what you expect, but “something” goes beyond earning your first $10 off an affiliate marketing, CPA or adsense campaign.

“Something” often translates into cold hard experience, which goes beyond what any ebook, system, seminar, workshop or coaching program can give you.

Obviously it’s helpful if you’ve (more…)

• Internet Marketing
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I had a blast at Affiliate Summit West this past January (though it seems like a year ago…) and besides meeting up with luminaries like Shoemoney, Scott Jangro, Shawn Collins, the enigmatic e-book “crusade” Jon F of WickedFire, PlanetAndrea, a major highlight was meeting PepperJam head honcho Kris Jones in the flesh.

PepperJam head honcho Kris Jones and Andrew Wee at Affiliate Summit West, Jan 2007

If you’ve been reading the PepperJamBlog for any length of time, you’d discover a treasure trove of information and can bump up your Internet Marketing efforts.

In his latest post “Affiliate Marketing – Thinking Outside the Box“, Kris dishes out the dirt on how he recently executed a campaign grossing $30,000 in sales, netting $15,000 in profit. And while some Super Affiliates may net six or seven figures in income per month, consider that Kris spent 15 minutes setting up this campaign.

So Kris has made a killing off UGG Boots.

How would he further enhance his efforts? (more…)

• affiliate marketing
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The major problem why many fail at Internet Marketing has to do with a lack of systems.

Increasingly over the last couple of weeks I’ve received emails along the lines of:

“I earned a couple of hundred dollars over the past few weeks using XYZ adsense system from XYZ guru. All of a sudden, the product doesn’t work anymore. What happened?”

Or

“I used this affiliate marketing product and surprised myself by racking up 30 sales in my first month. Now I’m getting 1 sale a week. I’m never going to be able to quit my day job and go fully into Internet Marketing”

It’s a constant refrain and I can understand the situation that many are going through.

During my first couple of months in Internet Marketing, I was pretty psyched too, especially when my sales were doubling every month, from $1,500 the first month, to $2,500 the next month. And it just seemed like sales were set to continue doubling every month. Each time I sent out an email, it was just a matter of waking up in the morning and refreshing my payment processor screens to see the sales flying in.

I was really feeling happy till three days went by without sales.

Then a week. I was getting really concerned.

Then a couple of sales came in, but nowhere near the phenomenal level I had seen starting out, where seeing $500 a day in net profit seemed to be business as usual.

Going from my high earning days to consecutive days of zero sales was demoralizing.

It was only when I discovered (more…)

• Internet Marketing
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Reader Darren Lim Asks:

Hi Andrew,

I’m just starting to get my feet wet with internet marketing and your website was 1 of the first I had visited through a chance of luck about 2 weeks back. Since then I had hummed and hawwed, tried to focus amidst the mountains of information set upon me, setup PPC campaigns that just netted me 1 sale and I still couldn’t focus on 1 plan of action with that much options swirling around me.

Fast forward 2 weeks later and I find myself back at your blog and I decided.. why not see how you did when you first started and I went all the way back to dig your posts back in July 2006. Thats when I realised that it was all about focus and hardwork at the start which I’ve been unsuccessful in doing so far. I’d just like to ask, was it that tough for you initially?

Cheers
Darren

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The short answer is that everyone always starts out hard before it becomes easy.

This sounds counter intuitive to computer game players because we’d usually set a game to level 1 before progressing to higher levels.

But if you think about it, the most difficult part of any task is (more…)

• Reader Questions
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