Staying Focused

[CoolSpot]

I'm going to start with a pretty big assumption here, all of us have down days, days where you are just unmotivated to get what you need done.

Or maybe the issue is you don't know what to do next.

From my experience, these "brick wall" moments are when you often feel like switching out your offer, and before you know it you have 20-30 offers, that are all unfinished. This was defiantly what I found when I started my first few offers, I would find myself unsure of what to do next, and then come across a new offer and start working on that thinking the problem I had on the last one might not come up this time. It always does.

So I thought I would share my tools for helping to get around these problems.

My toolkit

Google accounts - I set up a new google account for every offer I am looking at running, i found this is helpful for a few reasons but the main one is I find it helps keep things more organised, I can sign up for all the other services I need and they will only show me the information relating to what I am currently working on.

Google Task Manager - In the task manager I lay out a step by step process of everything I need to get done to get the offer up and running.

Google Calendar - Used for marking down dates on when I want each task to be done by and also any other important dates to that offer.

Google Drive - Used mainly for a back up of all the files I use for that offer.

LastPass - Used for password management.

Evernote - Used to grab web snippets of thing to be re worked or useful information for that offer, Evernote is great for this as you can put everything into separate notebooks.

Photoshop - Obviously used for graphics such as banners.

WebFlow - This is an amazing little web app where you set up a fully responsive website or landing page using the bootstrap framework.

Skype - I'm sure This needs no explanation.

Music - Because I find nothing gets me motivated like an awesome playlist.

So that's my basic daily toolkit.

Feel Free to share yours

 

[Ezbren]

Thanks for your toolkit.

Yes your asumption is true at least here. And like you said I think that comes from don't knowing how to continue, what to do next. So I found it really helful to mind map what I'm going to do.

I use MindMup: Zero-Friction Free Mind Mapping Software Online - Mind map in your browser

The best thing is that you don´t have to lose time with the design of the map. Simply you concentrate in your content. And It can also synchronize with your Google account

Another good advice to clean the mind is to not start your day sitting in the computer. I mean if you have your work space at your home, like most of us, you jump from your bed to your desk. A good idea is to go outside and take a walk or run a little.

 

[BorisQuanticoo]

Nice List, very similar to mine.

Personally I am into GTD, using toodledo for my setup.

 

[CoolSpot]

Nice List, very similar to mine.

Personally I am into GTD, using toodledo for my setup.

What is GTD?

I have seen it mentioned a lot lately but haven't managed to find out what it is yet.

 

[rigby]

What is GTD?

I have seen it mentioned a lot lately but haven't managed to find out what it is yet.

GTD stands for "Get Things Done".
I'm not sure if it's a simple catch phrase that has been made famous through the book "Getting things Done" by David Allen.
I don't really remember reading this book, but I've been digging his book "the 7 habits of highly effective people" (a book worth reading, but that can definitely be summarized in a short one pager with bullet points, in pure GTD style.

Personally I use pretty much the same tools as you do.
On the other hand, I've learnt to use evernote the way I use it today thanks to "the secret weapon" website (look it up online, there's videos available to get you started setting up your system).
I used to use evernote to write content too, but then it was driving me crazy and I ended up doing my commonlacing and content work through OneNote (yes, a free Microsoft product! Microsoft is pulling out so many good products lately, like the office365 cloud offer and the new Windows 10).

Onenote and evernote symbiotically live on my desktop, with a personal preference for OneNote because it really is like writing on real paper. I still use OneNote2013, even if Win10 just got an upgrade of OneNote but I don't really like it, even though they've made such a nice effort to integrate it with the new Edge browser (internet explorer rebranding efforts...).
Edge + OneNote is a great tool to take care of your online commonplace (with so much material to read online and so many websites to steal ideas from that there around, you definitely need something more than pen and paper to get your insights written down).

Another tool that I'm extremely thankful for, is Pocket (I had to buy the premium version. Why? Because they give away so many features for free that I've felt obliged to buy the premium version, even though it i really not necessary at all).
One issue about online marketing is that it is definitely an overwhelming world.

Knowledge matters. But staying focused on acquiring information is pretty hard when it is scatterred among so many different sources, written by different people with different targets in mind : while who writes a book wants you to stay focused on their book, so they can explain longer concepts to you, the majority of the stuff that you will find online has the very simple objective of turning you into a customer, so they will make an effort into diverting your attention onto their own offers.

With Pocket, I can batch read over coffee very early in the morning, if I don't feel like grabbing a book. Plus, my iphone fits perfectly into my morning walking habit.
Eventually, I save all the articles during the day, only that ones that hijack my attention and seem to be worth reading (usually, I go for long form articles only).

I guess you didn't mention Excel as a tool simply because it is the tool that anybody is expecting you to be able to use as an online marketer. I pretty much live on exel spreadsheet, using it to keep an eye on my long and short term goals, building website content by analyzing keyword research etc.
Also, laying things on a nice spreadsheet allows me to have a more holistic view, so I will know where my next effort will go towards.

Second your thought about having an awesome playlist. It'd be fun to know what fellow marketers are listening to during their work, hopefully not just whitenoise.
I go for repetitive music that I know very well : mostly I go for high speed free_tekno (yes, the music that has been fueling raves all around europe in the 90s) and a lot of Hi-speed psytrance.

This is a trick I've got from Ryan holiday, of american apparel fame.
He claimed in a few interviews that he listens to crappy pop music that he has known for years and he eventually doesn't change the playlist at all.
I feel like this music gets hardwird into your brain, eventually reshaping your synapses (can music do this? I guess so...). Once I know a track/playlist/djset too well, it will be easier to listen to it while working, so you won't get distracted by the "novelty" of new enthicing music

Sorry for the small Off topic :^

 

[CoolSpot]

I guess you didn't mention Excel as a tool simply because it is the tool that anybody is expecting you to be able to use as an online marketer. I pretty much live on exel spreadsheet, using it to keep an eye on my long and short term goals, building website content by analyzing keyword research etc.
Also, laying things on a nice spreadsheet allows me to have a more holistic view, so I will know where my next effort will go towards.

Second your thought about having an awesome playlist. It'd be fun to know what fellow marketers are listening to during their work, hopefully not just whitenoise.
I go for repetitive music that I know very well : mostly I go for high speed free_tekno (yes, the music that has been fueling raves all around europe in the 90s) and a lot of Hi-speed psytrance.

This is a trick I've got from Ryan holiday, of american apparel fame.
He claimed in a few interviews that he listens to crappy pop music that he has known for years and he eventually doesn't change the playlist at all.
I feel like this music gets hardwird into your brain, eventually reshaping your synapses (can music do this? I guess so...). Once I know a track/playlist/djset too well, it will be easier to listen to it while working, so you won't get distracted by the "novelty" of new enthicing music

Sorry for the small Off topic :^

I actually don't use excel, but i do use google sheets (part of the google docs system) I try to stay away from Microsoft products because I have so much hate for windows as an environment, but have to keep going back to it when I need to do graphics work since photoshop wont run on linux stably, but recently it has been having issues on my windows system, the day I can afford to go out and buy a new mac i will as for me it's the best of both, but that comes at a price and at the moment the price is to high to justify when I can buy a computer for 1/10th of the price and get that running with just about everything I need, it's a lot more messing about to do it but I have more important things requiring investment.

For me, I listen to anything that's for lack of a better word fun, things like beefy and megaran but also a lot of things like sublime, streetlight manifesto, mad caddies or reel big fish. I find audio books can be pretty good as well, but they are hard to find with decent readers, one of the best I have found was hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy read by stephen fry

 

[rigby]

I actually don't use excel, but i do use google sheets (part of the google docs system) I try to stay away from Microsoft products because I have so much hate for windows as an environment, but have to keep going back to it when I need to do graphics work since photoshop wont run on linux stably, but recently it has been having issues on my windows system, the day I can afford to go out and buy a new mac i will as for me it's the best of both, but that comes at a price and at the moment the price is to high to justify when I can buy a computer for 1/10th of the price and get that running with just about everything I need, it's a lot more messing about to do it but I have more important things requiring investment.

For me, I listen to anything that's for lack of a better word fun, things like beefy and megaran but also a lot of things like sublime, streetlight manifesto, mad caddies or reel big fish. I find audio books can be pretty good as well, but they are hard to find with decent readers, one of the best I have found was hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy read by stephen fry

stephen fry rocks!
If you don't have to move around the much, an older generation mac mini will do the job, right?

I don't see why I should not use Excel just because it's "a microsoft product".
I mean (no offense here, lol ) : WHAT THE FUCK?!
Are we discussing sports?
Excel is a tool, it doesn't matter who makes it. Everybody else it's using it.
There is a reason.
I mean, this is the only M$ tool you can't really talk anything bad about, it just works pretty well.

On the other hand, I use g.docs extensively and you don't have to be a pro-user (I'm clearly not ) to see the limitations of it (while it has some nice and quick xml scraping features... comes really handy when doing keyword research).

Anyway, latest gen of microsoft product ain't too bad at all. Price wise, the latest office suite rocks! and the win10 has been released pretty much for free O_O

 

[rigby]

WebFlow - This is an amazing little web app where you set up a fully responsive website or landing page using the bootstrap framework.

Talking about webflow, how does it fit in your workflow? Use it as a temporary/mvp website builder?
Sounds pretty awesome, but I'm wondering if I could just use it to build and then have them hosted somewhere else.

 

[CoolSpot]

I dont use excel because it's not compatible on linux (the main reason why I stay away from microsoft products) which I tend to use when I dont have to use photoshop or if I am on one of my older computers so it dosnt make sense to learn excel when google doc's has a spreadsheet tool that's platform independent, free, supports auto saving and everything is always backed up. Anything thats more complicated than google docs can handle and I just use a database.

You can build the entire front end in webflow, export the code (in html, css and js) and host it else where or link it into a backend system from there.

The below video gives a pretty good overview of it.