How To Use The 80/20 Rule For Your Online Business

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Whether or not you are running an online eBay store, selling affiliate products, selling your own informational products or managing Amazon niche sites, without good time management you are most likely going to end up piling yourself with tons of work that will never seem to end. That is where the Pareto principle or commonly known as the 80/20 rule comes in very helpful for your business.

Remember we only have 24 hours a day and all of that can quickly run out without achieving anything. I remember countless times when I’ve watched the hours pass without doing much for the day. You can’t expect that “lost” time to come back but you can manage it more effectively and avoid making the same mistake again.

First off, before we begin, regardless of your methods of making money online, there are several aspects to an online business you must have. Take a look at this below:

• Niche Research
• Keyword Research
• SEO
• Traffic Generation
• Website Creation / Editing
• Content Creation
• Email Newsletter
• Social Media Marketing
• Graphics Editing
• Analytics

Optional: PPC (for advanced users), Offline promotional strategies.

As you can see here, there is a whole lot of things you need to do whether you choose to blog to make money online, setup a forum or setup your own SEO company. You cannot say one is less important than the other in the list BUT YOU ALSO CANNOT DO EVERYTHING THERE. Those who have been successful online hire freelancers, virtual assistants or have a mini crew of people working for them to be successful. No one works alone and expect to be successful in a short time.

Now that you’ve already had a reality check on what you need to do, it is time to give you an outline of principles so that you can make full use of your time and increase work productivity.

80/20 Rule Tip #1: Do a Reality Check and Cross Things Out (From That List)

This is probably one of the most important step but sometimes it only comes with experience. Personally, I like creating content but I just suck so bad at social media promotion. I have improved but not that much still. So I’ve crossed that out of my list (among a few..) I can do a little bit of graphics editing but it is just too time consuming. The time I spent fixing up my ebook or my website is the same amount of time I take to write 1 or 2 pieces of article for my projects.

So isn’t it a waste of time?

If you encounter this problem, make a note of it and consider removing it from your to do list!

How to tackle this problem?

Outsource it! There are tons and tons of people all over the world who are willing to work for cheap money just to do banner graphics, ebook cover. Trust me, places like Elance, Odesk and Fiverr are filled with workers hungry for work like this.

You could suck so bad at link building or SEO but whatever you are not good at, find someone else to do it.

Don’t complain of the money you spend on this people because you will know how much “extra” time you have after doing this. Remember time is MONEY and this is so true even in the online business world.

80/20 Rule Tip #2: Go Through That List and Find the Most Effective Way of Achieving Them

There is a whole bunch of things you need to do on that list but have you found one what works effectively for each of them? This is another thing that comes with experience and it varies between marketers. What works for me does not necessarily work for you. Before you begin, you need to brainstorm and ask a couple of questions in your mind. Write them down and examine each one carefully.

Let’s take social media as an example..

Do you know what are the best social media marketing methods for your business?

• Is it Twitter
• Is it Linkedin?
• Is it Facebook?
• Is it worth it to pay $5 to someone on Fiverr to blast your tweets to 50k followers?
• Is it worth to hire a social media manager?
• Is it worth to learn that new course on creating Facebook Pages
• What is the most effective means of getting more fans?

As you can expect, there is a certain degree of trial and error that goes along the way. There will be some time wasted in the initial phase but I can assure you that low yield things like “blasts to 50k followers” are worthless. They are non targeted traffic and the most you’ll get out of that is 50k visitors with no opt-ins or conversions.

I don’t have the answer for you in this area but sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Find out what works for others and give it a go. If it works great for you, do it and make it work 110%!!!

80/20 Rule Tip #3: Examine Your Link Building Efforts

This is an example of the previous point actually. I’m showing you how to do it.

Link building is a really tricky thing. The reason why I put this in the list is because it is one of the biggest pains about getting your site ranked and getting organic traffic. Link building might sound easy on the surface. You might have come across things like link building packets, link blasts, submissions to 10,000 article directories, article marketing etc but after being online for a while and post Panda, there are a lot of spammy submissions that won’t even be considered as good quality links by the search engines anymore. Sure you could spend $100 for 10000 submissions but is it worth it? Is this effort going to result in an increase in search engine rankings/ traffic etc.

The question you have to ask is:

Is it really worth your time doing?

Is it high yield?

My personal experience with link building is that article submissions to so-called directories or sites hardly works now. I have tried doing this and it has not actually given me good results. It probably works for a short while and then it just doesn’t. I know there are some who will disagree with me but what works much better for me are things like commenting, getting your post mentioned on other posts and guest posting. Even so, it takes time. Obviously this is better quality link building but it is going to be time consuming. Obviously, article marketing post Panda is different. And manual hard labour will yield results. If you’ve understood what you must do here, you could probably get someone else to do this for you just like how I mentioned in the previous point.

N.B Don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying don’t use Squidoo or Hubpages or any Web 2.0 sites to promote your material. Just make sure its quality.

80/20 Rule Tip #4: Find a Buddy / Partner To Help With Your Business

Even with all that outsourcing etc, you probably can’t succeed alone. Well you are not working alone but you need a buddy. You need someone who has the same vision as you, the same goals as you, the same objectives as you and probably someone with more experience. Think of it as someone who can sort of complement you and “amplify” your business to greater heights.

It isn’t easy to find someone but it pays to network with people who are doing almost the same thing as you. I don’t have much experience in this area yet but this is one aspect of your business that you should consider because the rewards can be plentiful through a partnership.

Great places to look for business buddies are through blogs, social media and in real life. If a family member of yours also has the same interests and vision as you why not partner and make your business better?

80/20 Rule Tip #5: Don’t Waste Your Time on Unnecessary Activities

Do you know what my greatest time wasting activity is online?

Analytics…

Yes. That’s right. I can stare at stats and check ranking changes for a few hours if I don’t tell myself to stop looking. Analytics is important especially finding out which page converts well for you or which page has the greatest visits etc. But spending too much time looking at analytics won’t help your business either. The key is to focus on stats that are helping you a lot.

I’m just giving you an example here but you get the idea. What is your worst time wasting activity? Is it surfing for videos? Surfing blogs? Chatting?

Your time wasting activity could be anything online. If you have already identified it, do less of it. Alternatively, make time blocks for any activity that you do. That way you know what to focus on and how long you need to focus on it.

Finally….

Feeling exhausted already or have I completely lost you??? Either way, I hope you get the idea that you need to focus on high yield activity to drive your business. Do you have anything to add? If so let me know in your comments below.

 

Tagged as: 80/20 rule, 80/20 rule tips, online business tips, online productivity tips, outsourcing principle tips, pareto principle tips