The Early Marketer Catches The Dollar or Early To Rise, Late To Bed?
Spot On Tuesday October 23rd. 2007, 9:37pm
Today’s Spot On tip of the week is about getting the most out of your marketing efforts by better utilizing your time. I will begin this article with two quotes, one I am sure everyone is familiar with and the other you might have never seen.
The early bird catches the worm.
Early to rise and late to bed.
So my quote of the early marketer catches the dollar is a little off from the original. However, as a search marketer, when someone tells you the early bird catches the worm then you need to think of it as the bird catching the dollar. Do you wake up at 10am. or even 11am. and begin your day? For some reading this then you are shaking your head yes to that question. You should notice I said wake up and not begin working at those times. Most that wake up in the morning do not start working right away. They may take a shower, eat some breakfast, take care of the kids (if you wake up at 10 Am. then I will assume either you have no kids or the wife/girlfriend has taken care of them) or you may catch the morning news. You might start working at 11am. or even noon if you are waking up at those times. When you start to actually work you may check your email, hit a few of your social media sites, send a few good afternoon instant messages or just read the MSN home page news. What I would like for you to do is keep track of your normal routine, keep track of the times you are most productive and what it is you were doing during that time. Then I would like for you to keep track of the non productive things you were doing and what times of the day and or night.
Why should you keep a log of what it is you do during your time of work? Well one of the words to the answer is in the original question and the other is about managing it. Time Management, it can make or break you, some people have it and other’s do not. The people that have it are mostly already successful in there line of work. They got to be successful because they knew how to properly manage there time, they are one of the early birds that catches dollar bills while you are still catching your Z’s and sleeping. In the same aspect they are also the ones who are going to bed late. Either to get some more work done or setup for the next morning or to just socialize on there favorite forums or social media sites. I personally get more work done early in the morning and later at night after the family has gone to bed. Lunch time hours for me seem to be my slack time, unless I am in a meeting with a client of course. I make a list of things I need to get done and also on things I would like to do, like start a new website project. Each morning I respond to some of my emails, and then I begin working on that list. I do not respond to all of my emails, I do this for two reasons. One being I do not want to get side tracked for the next few hours on nothing but emails, by doing this I would take my motivation for the morning and put it on slow motion since I would have been doing emails for the past few hours. Reason two being I wouldn’t have much else to do during my slack lunch hour time, or I should say hours.
This may sound crazy to some of you reading this, but I want you to take the log of yourself and make a list of things you will need to do the next day. I then want you to force yourself to wake up at 6am. and start working by no later then 7am. This gives you an hour to actually get out of bed and get your motivation for the day. There are two groups that start this early in the morning, your competition and the successful people in the same industry as you. Now some will argue with me that they get up at noon and do not start working until 2pm. What time do you go to bed, 3am, 4am. 5am? Those people still get more work done. They are the ones that are later to bed. I start my day around 7am and normally end it by 12am-1am. I do have down time from 6pm-10pm for the family, but the last few hours are spent writing a blog post, setting up new campaign ads for clients, sketching to landing page ideas and sometimes just unwinding with some forum reply’s. That is me, early to rise and late to bed.
What it boils down to is time management, either you start it now or you can continue to drag the extra weight on your shoulders that will continue holding you back. I understand people want to succeed online; they read the make money online blogs like shoemoney, doshdosh, darren rowse and think that it should be them. Well you do not make money online by working a partial schedule, you need to bust your butt and take the initiative to succeed. In the world of search marketing there are always new things to learn, new ideas to test and try out. You need to be on top of your game, not afraid to fail and by all means understand that time is valuable. Take full advantage of every hour you are in front of your computer and working. I understand we all need an hour or so a day to just relax or slow down so we chat in forums, chat rooms, instant messenger or whatever. You are still working though because you are networking with other people in the industry, or at least I hope you are lol.
I want you to make a schedule for the next day and force yourself to get up early. Now I understand the first day or two might be hard and you might feel like this is a waste. However, by the fourth or fifth day I bet you will sit back and see that you are getting more work done. So by all means be the early marketer that catches the dollar.
This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.
