AFP 11: Maximizing Efficiency As Internet Entrepreneurs
February 23, 2012 Many people working in the Internet Marketing industry are doing it part-time and it can be extremely difficult to stay focused after a full day at work. Â For those of us who do it for a living, it’s critical that we effectively use our time rather than getting sucked down the rabbit hold of random surfing or getting involved in deals that don’t match our skillsets or goals. Â It’s extremely easy to be busy, but much more difficult to be effective.
Creating the Ultimate Efficiency as an Internet Entrepreneur
In episode 11 of the AdSense Flippers Podcast, we cover our best tips for maximizing efficiency through explaining and detailing a move from task-based to project-based management, discussing when and how you should say no to new projects, and how best to manage your daily schedule to improve the effectiveness of your work.
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It was interesting for us having “John the intern” on the podcast as we thought he brought a fresh perspective and inquisitiveness to the show.  Did you like it as well?  Let us know on iTunes! Here’s the link to the podcast on iTunes.  Thanks in advance!
Topics Discussed This Week Include:
- Introducing John “The Intern” as he finally made it over here to Davao!
- How to effectively transition from doing it yourself to task-based management and then finally to project-based management.
- Organizing tasks is for small business owners, organizing projects is for entrepreneurs.
- Why saying “No” to money can make you more of it!
- How to tell people “No” and keep them engaged so that you can ultimately get to a deal where you can say “Yes”.
- Pointing people away from you and towards others when you can’t do it well is the right move.
- Increase the urgency of what you’re working on to get it done and take breaks away from your computer
- Great email tips to improve your efficiency and to help make getting to “Inbox Zero” fun!
- AdSense Flippers Podcast on iTunes – Check it out!
- Our latest Flippa auction – 5 day auction starting 2/23/12 $121/month 20 sites 4K Uniques/month…
check it out here! Sold…wow, that went quick! - Hell Yeah!…or No – Great post on when to say no to projects from Derek Sivers
- The Dip – Awesome and quick read from Seth Godin…much of which talks about when, how, and why you should say no to projects
- The AdSense Lifestyle – Joe’s post about a typical day in the life of an AdSense Flippers partner
- Four Hour Work Week – Great book overall that talks about batching tasks and process-oriented businesses
- Boomerang – Plugin for gmail that allows you to schedule the sending of emails or will remove and replace an email in your inbox after a certain period of time
- “The Email Game” – From Emailga.me that turns getting to Inbox Zero into a game
- Evernote – Great cloud-based note taking that syncs across all your platforms
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Discussion
Just listened to this podcast. This is also something that I struggled especially when I was new. It’s very easy to get distracted especially when there’s so many interesting stuff on the web. I think once I stuck with it for a while it slowly became easier to distinguish what actually had to be done to start making money. Scaling and hiring out tasks has been a really big part of our growth as well. We’re constantly working on this, but I realized a good thing was to start writing everything down. Whether it’s on paper or on your computer, writing down tasks allows us to better turn things into a good routine.
Awesome Josh, I hope we helped you with our suggestions as well.
I am a Adsense publisher and been using it past 2 years.I am happy with my earning but i want to increase my earning further.Can you suggest me some other PPC programs with which i can add adsense and the other PPC to increase my earning…I heard Infolinks is best to work with Adsense.Please do let me know.
Hey Anu,
Thanks for stopping by…maybe? Feel free to ask any questions you like, but don’t leave super-spammy links here…just not very cool.
Google search “Alternatives to AdSense” and you’ll find a bunch, or consider checking out our post here:
http://adsenseflippers.com/internet-marketing/adsense-account-disabled-what-should-i-do
Missed the boat on a few of my own $1/day AdSense sites last month but this month they are definitely going up on Flippa! Thanks for the yet another awesome podcast guys.
Nice, Anshul…best of luck with your auction!
I’m watching your Flippa auction right now and I see you guys have not accepted any of the bids at this point. Can you explain the strategy here?
Do you hold off and kind of let that play it’s course to see if bidders will bid higher?
Hey Ryan, that’s correct…especially when some of the early bids are quite high. Part of our strategy is to get quite a few bids, putting us on the Most Active section. We’ll typically accept within 24-36 hours, though, so we’re not waiting too long. You can read more about our sales strategies here:
http://adsenseflippers.com/flipping-websites/site-flipping-secrets-selling-websites-at-a-premium-on-flippa
I was wondering where you guys get the images for your sites from. Do you take them from the Internet or do you buy them from some other source?
Hey Mike,
We’ve purchased at times from istockphoto, but the huge majority we take from Google. We won’t use what look to be “original” photos from the website…only those that have been used fairly heavily elsewhere.
Hey guys,
Most of my new websites index within a few days after submitting to pingler and ping farm. However once in a while there are some sites that just won’t index. I’m figuring that someone owned them in the past and got them banned. How have you guys dealt with this situation?
Yes, we have and no, unfortunately I don’t have a good answer. Sometimes they come back, but more often than not it seems to be a permanent penalty. You could submit a reconsideration request but they might open you up to whole new set of issues. Better to move on and call it a loss.
Yeah, I’d rather take the loss then open up my accounts to further scrutiny
Hey guys, apparently a lot of webmasters in the past couple of days have reported getting messages in their webmaster tools account from Google telling them they have been penalized for unnatural link-building. I was just wondering if you guys received it as well? Have your rankings been effected at all?
This kind of stuff happens all the time! It’s frustrating for sure, but there are ways to beat it. We have found that siloing, or completely separating, your sites into small groups helps insulate you from possible penalties. This includes things like having no more than 25 sites on one hosting account, varying your themes, and not interlinking your sites. This will protect your sites from being related should one be marked as spam by the Google search team.
In link building, varying anchor text is critical. I really think this is a number one reason sites get penalized as most people just use the primary keyword to build links.
We have definitely seen this happen to portions of our network before, most notably in September 2011 (see the September income report for more info) and a smaller issue more recently which Justin will cover in February’s income report.
Couldn’t agree on the anchor text bit Joseph. In fact that is probably the number one reason why anyone doing tons of link building aren’t seeing the results they should be.
I changed my anchor text strategy a few months ago and have been blown away by the results with many of my sites which never saw daylight are now sitting pretty in top 10.
Hey guys, congrats on the sale!
I’m fascinated by the amount of product-based keywords in your list. I have about 75 in my back pocket that I haven’t used yet, as I’ve been sticking to other keywords. Honestly I was saving them for a try with Amazon but never knew that they would be any good with AdSense. Do you find that they convert well? Or rather, have you ever had higher earners based on product keywords, like $1-5/day?
I’m also surprised by the trademarked domain names. Have you guys ever had a C&D issued by the trademark owners? I could come up with a ton of exact match domains and keywords using brand names but I can’t bring myself to pull the trigger because I don’t want to lose my site.
Andre
Product related sites, in the right niche, are absolute gold for AdSense. Think about it, advertisers pay the most for these keywords as they have an actual commercial intent, meaning that visitors who click through on those ads covert well for the advertiser. Some of our best sites are product related especially those in female targeted genres.
We have only had one C&D issued in over 1,400 sites created now. GoDaddy contacted us, we removed the sites, all files, and domain from our account which means we lost nothing. In fact we gained a little from the AdSense revenue over the few months we had the site.
We have had about 15 companies contact us directly regarding trademark issues. Most contact happens in the first 30 days of owning the domain, so not much is at risk. We have various of degrees of success using a series of delay tactics and bargaining positions (I should really write a post on it!). Some trademark owners have actually purchased the domain as they felt it was cheaper than coming after us legally, some got to a point where we felt giving up the domain to them was better than allowing them to proceed legally, and most never followed up with us at all, allowing us to keep the domain and site intact. The thing to remember is these companies are huge and slow moving so paperwork often gets lost in the shuffle.
Hope that answers your questions!
What a detailed answer, thanks Joe! So far I have been mostly going after information keywords with high commercial intent (as per SECockpit, SpyFu, Google AdWords tool, etc.) but will circle back on what I have and build a few more test sites. I have a few product-related sites now but they are still in the ranking stages.
I’d be looking forward to more insight on the trademark issue. I just recently read a guest post on Flippa by a Domain Name attorney and the gist of it was that whenever there was a dispute that actually went to court, 99% of the time the judge sided with the complainant. So, you’d end up losing your domain. Awesome that you’re able to dodge those bullets though. Are you Neo, from the Matrix? Lol.
Thanks again Joe!
LOL, Andre! I read that article too, but keep in mind who wrote it and who it’s targeted at. Don’t buy into the fear. Lawyers have a vested interest in makingyou scared so you will buy their services. I’m not a lawyer, but I can (and will) share my personal experiences.
He’s right though, 99% of cases that go to court will be won by the trademark owner. My solution? Avoid court. At all costs, including giving up the site (they only cost us $50 to build anyway and even the large earners aren’t worth the hassle). But have a plan to delay, derail, and distract the lawyers on the other side. A series of emails works great, asking detailed legal questions but always saying that will comply once clarified. Asking for money doesn’t hurt either.
All these requests need to go up the chain of command, leading to lost emails and missed responses (on their end). I’m not saying it’s right, but it is how the world works.
Hey guys. I have a quick question and am hoping you can help me out or point me in the right direction.
I’m using CTR theme and just finished a site. For some reason all my links and even the adsense links are grey instead of blue. I checked my adsense ads and they are supposed to show the links as blue so I think there is a setting in CTR theme that I should be able to change.
Do you know how I can change this back?
Thanks in advance,
Chris
I found the checkbox under CTR options and got it sorted. Btw, thanks for the tip/keyword on Facebook. I’ll let you know how that site turns out in a few months.
Take care,
Chris
Glad you found it Chris! There are literally so many options it is tough to sort through everything.
Keep us posted on the progress of you site. We very interested!
Nice show guys, great tips, and congrats on the fire sale. Loved how you guys are beating up Joe about evernote.. .I could never stick to it and have resolved to a don’t take notes at all approach. I read it on Steve Pavlina’s blog somewhere, I tried it and never missed them.
Anywho, let’s get John some more airtime. He’s a natural ! 😀
For all the talk about what tools to take notes with, I do wonder how many notes are actually taken.
And yes, we are getting John more involved everyday!
Thanks Dan! Turns out podcasting is pretty fun.
You’ve got me thinking about the note bit. There’s definitely a window of usefulness as far as notes of any kind go. Seems like if I don’t get back to it in a few days it just gets lost in the cloud.
Tip for programmers though, if you find a script or something online that you know you need to use or modify later for a project that’s CURRENTLY in development, it can be nice to clip it to Evernote or Dropbox (wherever) real quick so you don’t have to go back and dig through the net later on.
That is one sick deal for $2700,- that’s like 24 monthly. Damn, wish I got that for my road tax site that brings in 150-180 euro/month
You can. just get a brand, a site and a list! 😉
Those sites went quickly today. Congrats!
How many new sites did you guys create this month?
Month is not done yet, but I am hopeful to get more than 150 done this month!
Way to go with slinging the ‘F’ word in the podcast… As marketers that might not be the best way to build credibility.
Hey Mike,
No intention to offend, just trying to get a point across. 🙂 Whoever that hurts credibility with…well…if they met me they probably wouldn’t like me anyway, to be honest.
Interesting, would you be less likely to buy from us because of that? Do you think the use of that word puts our entire model in doubt or makes us less of an authority?
Thank god Joe and Justin aren’t “marketers.”
Hey Justin/Joe,
Looking forward to that transcript 😉
Cheers,
Tom
🙂 As you mentioned in the email, I like how Trent from OIL does it…think we’ll follow a similar format. We’ll work backwards and try to get transcripts for them all and get them up. Thanks, Tom!