From the category archives:

Productivity

Are You Busy…Or Productive?

July 13, 2009

I heard a great quote from Armand Morin. He said…

“Be productive and not busy”

That is a great thought to think about. As business owners running our own business it is very easy to stay busy for 8-10 hours a day. But are we being productive is the big question.

Here are 2 examples of being busy:
-Answering support questions
-Responding to emails

But are these tasks productive. On the outside looking in most people would say yes they are. But in all honesty are any other these tasks adding to our bottom line?

NO.

Being productive means doing work that will lead to more sales. Like writing articles, creating new products, improving our sales processes and so on.

Answering support questions and responding to emails are important tasks that need to be done but they can most likely be handled by someone else to free up more time for you to work on tasks that help grow your business.

We only have so much time in a day and that time needs to be spent on the most important tasks.

So next time you are working on your business, ask yourself if you are being busy or productive. If you are just being busy, jot down what you are doing and hand that task off to someone else like an outsourcer or your assistant.

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10 Free Online Tools I Use Daily In My Online Business

June 3, 2009

There are numerous free tools that I use every single day in my online business to save time, be more productive and most importantly make more money.

Here is a list of them:

Google Apps Gmail – I have a personal Gmail address that I use but I also use Google Apps for all my domains. So instead of having 20 different email accounts to look at each day, they all go right into my 1 Google Apps Gmail account. I can not even estimate how much time it saves me on a daily basis.

Google Website Optimizer – This is a great tool for split testing landing pages, salespages, and affiliate pages. Pretty much every single salesletter I have is always running a split test. Testing is one of the easiest and quickest ways to increase your income. You can double the revenue of any site by either doubling the traffic (hard work!) or doubling the conversion rate (much easier, especially if you have never tested before).

Google Analytics – By far the best analytics program I have used. I used to use Statcounter but once I tried Google Analytics I was hooked. It gives much more in-depth stats and you can hook it up with your Adwords and AdSense accounts to get some really cool features.

Jing – Jing is a free screen capture and screen recording software. While I do still use Camtasia for recording longer video, Jing is great for short videos because you can quickly capture the video, they host it online, and then give you a link you can email or post.

Firefox – I said good bye to IE a long time ago and switched to Firefox. I find Firefox to be much faster, easier to use, and the features and add-ons are awesome.

SEO Book Toolbar – This is a great tool for SEO purposes. Way too may features to list but you can read all about it for yourself.

OpenOffice – I wouldn’t say I use this one daily but I do use it quite often to turn documents into pdf format. Writer let’s easily export any document as a pdf. Great time saver.

Google Keyword Tool – For quick keyword research I always use Google’s keyword tool and several of their other tools as well (Sktool & Insight).

Wordpress – Of course every online marketer should be using Wordpress in their business.

iGoogle – I use iGoogle to subscribe to the RSS feeds of the blogs that I read daily. There are obviously a ton of RSS readers but this is my favorite way to do it.

Ok, so there you have my 10 free online tools that I use daily. Sorry for all the Google love but they know how to make some great free tools. Hopefully some of these can help you be more productive in your daily activities and increase your business.

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