I have been working online for many years now and over that time I have discovered a common trait amongst people who can’t seem to make money online.

It seems so many people run around like headless chickens and never really get anything productive done.

There are two main causes of  “headless chicken syndrome“.

1. Information Overload.

2. No Direction.

Both of these causes feed off each other, but if you can cut off the supply to one, you can ultimately kill off the other and free yourself of the “headless chicken syndrome” forever.

It’s tough and it takes practice, but it can be done.

Let’s look at the first point, information overload…


Information overload attempts to latch on to it’s prey through emails, rss feeds, blogs, forums, skype, social media sites and much more.

But for most, email is the number 1 culprit.

Everyone has an email address that continually spurts out distraction, after distraction, after distraction.

If you are one of those people who signs up to every mailing list available, who downloads and reads every free report, who watches every free video, who listens to all the free audio, you will be suffering from information overload.

I am not saying you shouldn’t sign up to mailing lists, or read ebooks, or watch videos or listen to audios, but there is a time and place for them.

In fact, there are many ways you can use all these marketing emails to YOUR advantage, and I will discuss this in a later post.

But right now, I want you to realize that there are more productive ways to spend your day.

Do not waste your day jumping on top of every email that hits your inbox.

You have to control the amount of information you expose yourself too.

There is no easy way to do this, it’s cold turkey for the headless chickens I’m afraid!

You have to cut it off at the source, your email inbox.

If you do one thing today, limit the amount of times you read your email.

Take action today, limit yourself to only reading your email TWICE a day.

Now I know that this might send ripples of panic through your body.

What if you miss a special offer.

What if you miss out on a limited access call.

What if you miss that email containing that one magic link.

Trust me, there is no magic link.

Focus your attention onto the idea of building a real online business for real profits.

I am glad to say that I have recognized my personal information overload and I am battling it.

My first step was to reduce my email access to twice daily.

And boy it was tough.

Seriously, the amount of times I was so tempted to have a sneaky peak at my email inbox was unreal.

I never thought I suffered from information overload until I started to complete “daily-did” sheets as instructed by Alex Jeffreys.

A daily did sheet is just that, a detailed list of what you did that day.

I was completely shocked when I wrote out and read my own daily did sheet.

The amount of time I wasted each day was such an eye opener to me.

I was wasting time left, right and center, looking at my daily did sheets showed me that around just 30% of my time was spent on productive tasks.

From the moment I woke up and started up my pc, I was destined to spend my day wasting time and doing nothing productive towards building my online business.

In fact, it wasn’t just my pc that brought distraction, even my mobile phone, buzzing away with text messages distracted me in other ways too.

Now I have addressed this issue, about 95% of my time is now spent on productive tasks.I would love it to be 100% but I am, after all, only human.

When you begin working online you should remember that time is money.

Not everyone has the luxury of working online full time.

Most people have full time jobs offline, which means they essentially have very little time to work on their online business.

That’s why it is vitally important you maximize your time.

You need to squeeze every ounce of productivity from the amount of time you have to build your business.

I have seen many comments on this blog, and received emails from people stating they work full time jobs and only have a few hours to spare working online.

A few hours is more than enough.

But those few hours have to spent on the money making tasks, not the money chasing ones.

If you can master the art of making every second you have to spare productive, you can easily build a solid business that makes you money.

With so many people online wasting their time, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of them.

But you need to get productive.

You have to stop the distractions.

Write your own “daily did” sheet.

From the moment you log onto your pc, write down every single thing you do.

Now this might sound like wasting time right?

It’s not.

If you can spot the distractions and eliminate them from your day, you will immediately increase your productivity.

You are going to create a plan to make everything you do online benefit you and your business.

That brings me to my second point, no direction.

The reason so many people are easily distracted online is they have no direction or no goal.

No day separates itself from the next one.

Without a specific path or goal, you go nowhere and so does your online business.

Think about it this way, if you enter a maze, the whole point is to get out right?

Your intention is not to wander around the maze for days, weeks or months, it’s to get out.

Or you could also think about football, the point of the game is to score.

Professional players don’t throw or kick the football around the park using the hit and hope method.

They have a plan or strategy they follow.

They have back up plans if the original plan fails.

You don’t see a team give up just because a plan to score didn’t work.

The players don’t throw off their uniforms and lay down on the grass.

They regroup and try again with a different plan.

You are not so different from them.

The only difference is you may not have a plan.

In order to achieve success online you need to know what direction you are headed in.

When setting off on a journey, you normally need to know your final destination right (unless your off on a magical mystery tour of course).

You need to know where your going so you can back track.

It’s the same online.

Once you know the direction you want to go in or the goal you want to achieve, you can trace back the steps and then follow them.

For example, let’s say you want your own blog.

A blog is needs a script such as wordpress to run.

A blog is hosted on web hosting.

Web hosting has to be pointed to a domain.

So you now know you first need a domain name, then web hosting and then the blog software.

Once you have all these, you have achieved your goal.

Or let’s say you want to write and sell your own ebook.

Again thinking backwards from the end result.

The ultimate goal here is that someone buys your ebook, downloads it and reads it so…

Download page.

Sales Page.

Ebook.

A very simple process it seems.

But once we break it down, it gets a little more complex.

The download page would need:

a download link to the ebook.

maybe a link to a free bonus.

A sales page would need:Graphics

Sales letter

Payment button.

The ebook would need:

Uploaded to download page.

Compressed into a zip file.

Converted to pdf.

Written

Researched

What about traffic?

Not even mentioned in the first steps is traffic.

Which is highly important, without traffic people wont even see the sales page.

Now I am not saying you complete these tasks in reverse order.

It would be pretty stupid to start driving traffic to blank page.

You only use this method for direction.

Once you know your end result, you can back track and plan the actions that will get you to your final destination.

Decide today what your end result or main goal online is.

Do you want a website?

Do you want a blog?

Do you want to run a paid membership site?

Do you want to write your own ebook?

Decide right now, establish you main goal, plan it backwards.

Write down what it will take in order for you to reach that goal.

Once you have your plan, work through it in stages.

Write out a “to do” list.

Work through your list with laser focus.

Ditch all the distractions.

Focus your full attention on your daily tasks, don’t let email and other distractions coax you away from your goals.

Utilize the time you have, no matter how little it is.

Make every second of your time productive.

If you can do this, you will achieve success online and money will flow to you and your business.

Don’t worry if you write out your plan then suddenly discover more steps you hadn’t thought of.

This is very common, don’t let this throw you off your goal.

Your first plan won’t be perfect.

You don’t need to get it right first time, just take action and get it going.

As problems or new steps crop up, regroup and conquer them.

Most important of all, make the decision right now to GET PRODUCTIVE, remember you are money making not money chasing.

Sally :)

PS. Have you filled out my quick survey yet? You can fill it out here: Sally’s Quick Survey

Filed under: Internet Marketing

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