Organise your Internet Business for Maximum Efficiency

Glen Allsopp / 5 Comments / July 8th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

This is the second post in the series about building your internet business empire where we have previously covered the strategy side of things. This time I’m going to take a look at organising yourself for maximum effectiveness and efficiency in your actions.

This is something I struggled with for quite a while, I would find it impossible to launch a website unless it was perfect or I would spend hours reading and responding to emails. At times I would even get too stressed and want to give up due to having two jobs. However, I’ve been through all that and dealt with it, hopefully you can learn from my experiences and what I have to share.

My Situation

Just to give an idea of what I know on this subject I thought I would briefly share my story. At 16 years old I was a full-time college student, I had a part time job that required me to work all day Saturday & Sunday and I had my websites to take care of. These weren’t websites that didn’t take any attention, these were community websites, some with 10,000+ members and I even administrated a website with 60,000+ active users.

On top of running websites I was offering internet marketing services to multiple clients. Needless to say I worked long hours, went through a lot of stress and when I had the time…procrastination.

Organising Your Efforts

There are numerous things that can effect the organisation of your internet business operations and have an impact on how efficient you are. The ones we are going to look at more closely include:

• Timing
• Branding
• Email
• Services

Timing, or the time people have available to work on their internet business, differs greatly. At 16, I struggled greatly in this area. So much so in-fact, that I had to retake my first year in college due to poor attendance and results. I’m not proud of this fact but I would prefer to be honest in that initially timing wasn’t my strong point.

When I started college for the second year (really the 1st year again), I took things a lot more seriously so was there 5 days per week, and was working about 8 hours per day on the weekends in a part time job. This meant that a lot of my work was done in the late hours of the night; I would often be up until 3am getting work done and then have to wake up at 8am to go to college. The reason I did this is because I love what I am doing and know that hard work is necessary to get to where I want to get; to do well online I believe you must have a similar mentality.

The average blog owner works a full-time job, yet I’m sure they would love their blog to replace that in hours and income,  instead of the few hours they can put aside. My advice for that is to really set yourself a time frame for the hours you are going to work on your internet projects. Whether it is 8-10pm in the evenings or 6-8am in the mornings, set yourself a time schedule when you are going to work on the tasks you want to complete and really work on them. Consider using a service like Google Apps for Business which will also help you access your documents from anywhere meaning you don’t have to work from a specific location.

When you are active online, there are all sorts of places that you will be connected with your online business. This can be things like forums in your niche, social networks, micro-blogging platforms like twitter or anywhere else the conversation is happening online. For really keeping things organised when it comes to branding I recommend:

• Use an email address with your domain in, for example I use glen @ ViperChill.com
• Pick an avatar for social media sites. I use my famous ‘VIP’ logo and stick to it. This will help people recognise you on new sites. Avatars are very memorable
• Choose a username that is either your actual name, your company / brand name or a close variation of that, I find that these work best and once again it helps people recognise you on new sites
• Read our post on ‘7 Steps to Building your Personal e-Brand‘

All of this can save you time in knowing which profile picture or image to use, having people friend you on sites automatically because they recognise you and doing less work to build your following. If you are running multiple sites in the same niche, good branding can make your domain choice process much easier. When I ran proxy websites I decided I wanted to use ‘oxy’ on the end of the domain. This was memorable, and allowed me to save time finding domains that are available.

Email has to be one of the biggest productivity killers, if not the biggest, that is faced by internet business owners. I was surprised when Chris Winfield told me that less than 5% of his emails are actually relevant and important, at that time around 80% of mine were. However, in the last month or two I’ve swiftly moved closer to his figure and I’m getting an increasing amount of help or question emails from visitors to my websites. Whilst I don’t mind this, it does take a lot of time away from me being able to do other, more productive activities.

There are a number of ways you can help relieve the stress on your inbox though:

• Unsubscribe to any newsletters you no longer read or care for
• If you are receiving lots of spam think about trying a email verification service or tweaking your email filters
• If you are getting a lot of the same email, save an auto-response that you can copy and paste as a reply
• Try turning off your auto checking feature, so that you are only notified of new emails whenever you have time available to process them

Fore more email efficiency tips you might enjoy the following:

- Five Fast Email Productivity Tips

- 7 Tips for Enhancing Your Email Efficiency

Although services, more specifically the outsourcing of them, were covered in the strategy post I still think they are an important aspect of efficiency. Personally, I’ve been working hard for the last 2 years to get to a point where I can afford to hire other people to do the work I can’t or don’t enjoy and focus on my main skills and the work I prefer.

It is much more efficient for me to hire someone to create a one-off PHP Script than spend months learning to make it myself. If I was getting into the programming / script business, that wouldn’t be the case as it could end up being very expensive and I’d need to know how to do things myself. Take a look at the operations you run to see whether it is more efficient to hire others to do it. Although it is an expense, it allows you to focus on your skilled tasks and you might actually make more money because of that.

The second installment in this series was quite lengthy; I hope that once again you have found value in the offering. If you have any questions on this post feel free to ask it in the comments below.

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