Web 2.0 Difficulties & a General Ramble

Caroline, definitely hear your frustration.

My biggest challenge too is making best use of the time - there are always more “urgent” things to do than time to do them.

I’d be real interested on how you make out with squidoo. I came across it when Seth was first getting it going, but failed to do a lot with it (time constrained as usual).

Now it’s a zoo there, and as you say, 40 zillion marketers have a thousand lens each - so much so, it’s hard to see any value there any more.

Set up some lens a while back, but haven’t seen much from them. Probably would’ve been more successful had I focused on it when site was new.

Anyhow, what I keep coming back to is staying focused on working my sites, and yes trying some new things, but mostly just doing the daily work just to keep up.

Especially hard when trying to spread oneself over multiple sites - hmmm, I probably should catch a clue from that - lol

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Caroline, are you living my life? :) My main guideline for this year is to Focus and Simplify, so I’m divesting myself of several activities that take a lot of time but haven’t paid off financially after several years of trying. That and blocking my access to an online solitaire site should help me spend more time on worthwhile activities.

Like you, I’ve also been playing with more Squidoo lenses and you have it right, I think - you have to do the 30DC thing and pick a low-competition key phrase if you want to get found on there. OTOH I was surprised to get 58 visits the first day on my new Kitchen Designs lens, (but less so when I realised it was a Stumbleupon traffic spike.)

Hi Caroline,

Oh how familiar does the delaying of necessary work by doing something familiar sounds to me. Countless times I’ve chosen to write another post instead of researching new keywords or doing something that I was new to..

The key is to schedule to do it in advance, that way your mind would be prepared for the job ahead. At least it works for me.

Anyway, cheer up and don’t despair. I believe the theory of successful blogging is right.

Cheers,
Alex.

Alex at Net-Entrepreneur.com’s last blog post..Best Example of Thinking Outside the Box

Don’t get too discouraged. Despite your frustrations, you’re exactly where you need to be. Anyone who tells you that you can learn everything you need to know from reading a book hasn’t ever done it. It takes lots of “in the trenches,” do-it-yourself learning before things really start to click. Some people hit success right out of the gate, but I would venture that that’s actually a negative for them rather than a positive. It lulls them into a false sense of security that people who struggled longer to get there don’t have as much.

Keep plugging away!

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We have all been there. It is much easier to avoid “facing the music” by completing what is familiar. I am in the same line of thought as Alex….set aside a specific time for my less than desirable task and have at it.

Keep up the good work and hang in there.

Hi Caroline I totally understand where you are coming from with staying, with what’s familiar because at one time. I used to be exactly the same but what I found was I kept holding myself back because I was a bit afraid to put my toe in the water, at one stage I procrastinated that much that I wouldn’t even consider having web hosting believe it or not. Simply because I thought even before I started doing anything I was bound to fail.

But now I just tend to have a go if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work and move onto the next thing, I don’t know if you have heard of a book called flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, if you haven’t read it I would highly recommend it in that book he says that when we are pushing boundaries we tend to be at our happiest, and from how I was now to how I was before, I feel a whole lot better than I used to by holding myself back and not trying different things.

So come on in the the waters fine :)

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Hi Caroline,

I have a different perspective on procrastination. It means that we don’t want to do it! Recognising this we can look at the reasons why we don’t want to. And then decide. It may be an important signal to pay attention to - not just a signal to make ourselves do something.

I find this way of doing things easier and more helpful. Hope it’s useful.

I totally agree with Evan. Procrastination usually has it’s source in something internal, and it’s to our detriment if we ignore it.

Of course it’s a bit of a problem when that source is a general unwillingness to try new things, something I struggle with as well. It’s not that I’m afraid so much as ….terrified:)

The reward is always great though when I do step out of my comfort zone, even if the result is a spectacular failure. At least I took the chance and did it.

Caroline,

We’ve all been there. Procrastination is a killer! I’m the worst but I know you’ll pull through and find some motivation.

Ebay is VERY easy. I’m not an ebay powerseller or anything but I recently put up an auction for a product and it took me 30 minutes.

That’s it. The process is simple, the only hard part is writing the sales copy (but you are a pro at that). I set mine up as a classified ad, it stays up for 30 days and only cost me $9 and has already made me $75 in 4 days.

Get off your lazy butt, get on eBay and get that auction posted already :)

Good luck with the Warrior Forum, they are very friendly but it can be intimidating.

You can do it!
Mike

Take it easy and take it one at a time Caroline. It will work out in the end.

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@Alex, the way I’m trying to approach it is to do things like processing email at the end of the day and not the start of it. It’s difficult to schedule work time at the moment as my life has been in turmoil for a few months but it should settle soon I hope and then that might be easier.

@Shane, oh yes that’s so true. These days I try not to spend too much time reading and just get on with it but its annoying when I have to report failures on the blog - but that’s what I signed up for when I decided to blog out loud hehe.

@Evan, that’s right and that’s what I meant by the bad vibes thing. From a Law of Attraction perspective, my bad vibes about doing that lens is telling me that it would lead me towards something I don’t want which tells me that it probably would have failed. The trouble is that this is not a LoA blog so I try not to explain things in that way in the main body of the blog posts!

Maybe sometimes it is because of the Internet is becoming a major part of our lives and the to-do tasks (mainly for the Internet) made our online tasks seem to be more like a job now.

The good part is that when we have this little weakness turned around, we will surely learned something on productivity. ;-)

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Sometimes in general categories, yet to be taken keywords are hardly available. But thanks, I realized I’ve to start building my blog around keywords..I’m off to Google trends right now!

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@Black Zedd, I’ve tried that a few times for this blog and whenever I try to do some keyword research for a post I never get anywhere so I rarely bother these days - I just write! I think it would be different for a more ‘nichy’ blog though.

I rank #2 for my name, Mike Huang, on GOOGLE!

WHOO HOO! :)

-Mike

Mike Huang’s last blog post..Quality Over Quantity, Is It Optional?

For a ramble, this was fun to read :). Finding the right keywords to rank for is something that can be a real PITA. Making money online is clearly taken, but there might be some room in “freelance blogging” or something… I’m still pondering on a keyword for my blog niche (free hosting and webmaster tools) that doesn’t look spammy.

I also seem to have the same problem. Just can’t find any good keywords. Even if I do sometimes, the niche is just too boring and I have absolutely zero interest in it. Guess all the good keywords all have massive competition…

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One Day = 24 Hours

I’m embracing a concept that helps me to overcome the angst you portray in the Ramble section: outsourcing.

The wildest thing about my mindset is that, although I have yet to outsource a single assignment, the very idea that I don’t have to do this alone liberates me.

I have referred to this as the Henry Ford / J. Paul Getty philosophy:

“I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done. ”
- Henry Ford

“I would rather have 1% of the efforts of 100 people than 100% of my own efforts.”
- Jean Paul Getty

I am free to create grand designs, knowing that somewhere on Elance, somebody can help me turn them into reality.

Dream Big!

Cheers,

Mitch

Mitchell Allen’s last blog post..Six Simple Sounds Summarize Self Story

@Mitchell, nice quotes :) I do have a tendency to try and do everything myself which is something I’ll need to adjust over time.

Hi Caroline,

I wouldn’t give up on the Squidoo lens. As a last minute TDC effort, I created a really simple lens for my daughter…about recycling old socks to make webkinz clothes. Admitedly, not a lot of content, but it’s gotten some traffic and resulted in the only product sale in all my efforts, thus far. Sigh.

Squidoo is easy to update and they “offer”/”suggest” various tags that make it easy to experiment. So, while this is VERY small potatoes, the ROI wasn’t bad.

Rgds.

In the world of Web 2.0 marketing, every dog has his day and IMHO for Squidoo that day has come and gone (as it has for Weebly, Hubpages, Scribd etc etc).

This does not mean that you shouldn’t use those platforms for getting back links to your content, you should. But your expectations should be tempered by the fact that you are unlikely to get top SE placements for your content on these platforms.

So what to do? Well, you either continue to seek out the next best thing, or build links, links, links to unique content on your own domain which is a strategy that worked 10 years ago, 5 years ago, today and will continue to work forever.

Just my opinion,

Guru Bob