Time Managment Help – Are You Overwhelmed?

I recently wrote a series of Time Management Help but I see so many of my friends in Internet Marketing suffering from a sense of being overwhelmed, that I feel compelled to revisit it with some hard, cold advice.  I hope this helps you.

When I was right out of graduate school and in my first corporate management role I was really revved to get ahead.  It seemed that my fast-paced company couldn’t go fast enough to fully benefit from what I thought I had to offer.  I was constantly inserting my ideas and my recommendations and opinions into everything I could.  All I could imagine was how I was being held back by this monstrous bureaucracy.  After 6 months I was actively looking for another company.  To me the grass was definitely greener on the other side of the hill.

Fortunately for me I had a mentor who happened to be my boss and a world class PR and Advertising pro.  He watched as I restlessly struggled and pushed.  It must have been humorous to him, but he saw something worth working with and helped me understand a great truth.

In one of our weekly lunches he told me the story of how he was also young and aggressive early in his career, and he had a mentor as well who saw something worthwhile that should be grown and nurtured.  Certainly in his case it must have worked.  So I asked him what it was that his mentor had told him decades before.

The advice was timeless he said.  And just as great advice always is, you’ve got to let it sink in a bit to fully appreciate it.  The advice his mentor gave him, and he was then passing on to me was simple.  “Bloom where you are planted”.  With all that build up I was expecting something like “don’t invest in derivatives”, or “go raise capital and start your own firm”.  But “bloom where you are planted”?  What was I, some kind of an Orchid?

But over time this advice rang through my racing mind and helped me settle and focus more and more.  My career began moving and I was on my way up the ladder.  By forgetting about the grass on the “other side of the hill” and focusing on my own patch, I was able to grow my own reputation, departments, and responsibilities into something valuable for my company.

If you are a network marketer or an online marketer this advice is absolutely good for you too.  It seems that so many of us fall prey to the “grass is greener” syndrome, just as I did as a young manager.  In the case of home business, this results in joining additional companies, hopping around from training to training, or system to system.  It really doesn’t take long until you have more than you can manage.  In many cases your businesses are all in start-up or stalled because there is not enough energy and attention to move them forward.

So it becomes a matter of focus.  As I have written before, focus is the real key to success.  Well, there are others, but focus is definitely on the key chain.

So “bloom where you are planted”.  If you have multiple businesses and none of them are performing well, decide which one you most want to grow and focus your attention on that one.  Sure people in your other companies are going to be disappointed, and some of your downline in those companies may ask you to reconsider, but focus.  Work one business at a time until it is running smoothly, then add.

If you are distracted by offers for training and tools, focus.  Look at your business and decide what is necessary to grow it.  You may find that you already have all the training and tools you need.  Decide what needs to be done in your business, make a plan, and then do it with focus, energy, and do it with massive action.

Bloom where you are planted my friends.  I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me.  I have to dust it off once in a while and remember myself.  Best of luck!

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admin, February 24th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Time Management

Online Marketing Classes Part 1 – The Big Picture

I want to make it much easier for newcomers to learn online marketing by creating a structured overview, a construct or framework, upon which newcomers can begin developing working mental models of the business.  Unfortunately the current learning curve for online marketers takes most people a year of hard work, lots of expensive training, courses and webinars, and a lot of trial and error.

Most marketing disciplines have the advantage of academicians and theoreticians who devote inordinate amounts of time to structuring and dissecting their disciplines.  While we wait for the academic world to catch up, I intent to create a series of posts and videos I will construct a newcomer’s framework understanding and mastering the new discipline of online marketing.  I hope this can help you.

Some of the topics I will cover include:

  • o Direct Marketing Parentage
  • o Attraction Marketing – Did They Teach This In College?
  • o Internet Marketing Models – Lead-Based Marketing (typical for MLM), Affiliate Marketing, etc.
  • o Managing Your Web Resources
  • o Selecting Products and/or Services (Solutions) For Sale
  • o Communicating Your Solution Effectively (The Art of Converting Leads)
  • o Building Traffic To Your Site
  • o Just What Is A Sales Funnel And How Do You Make Them (And What Is A Funded Proposal And An Autoresponder?)
  • o Personal Branding – Becoming The Recognized Expert
  • o Affiliate Marketing – Creating A Virtual Sales Force
  • o Powering Up – Joint Ventures With Current Leaders
  • o Series on Lead Generation Marketing Strategies (Categorized as Online Strategies, Social Media Strategies, Advertising Strategies, and Networking Strategies)
  • o Series on Selling Skills
  • o Other Stuff I Think About As I Go

My intention is not to create a detailed training program.  This has already been done quite well by a few sources, and to a lesser degree by many others.  Instead this will serve as an overview, much like a survey course you might see in college.  The point is to provide a framework and a more global perspective on where the parts all fit in order to speed the learning process for newcomers, and help fill in some gaps for others.  Wish me well because your future downlines may be grateful.

Phil Jackson, MBA

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admin, February 17th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Time Management Help For Network Marketers


We all need time management help, and if you’re a network marketer struggling to be productive, you’re going to love this.  Not long ago my mentor showed me an incredible time management tool that has increased my productivity dramatically and provided me with noticeably more energy to get through the day.  What’s so amazing about this technique is its simplicity. It’s so simple I discounted its value, that is, until I tried it.  I know this sounds like a lot of build up but I want you to read it and try it for yourselves.

My mentor, Scott Brandon Hoffman, put me on to this technique about three months ago.  This technique has allowed me to focus my energy and attention and get my business rolling.  It is only right to point out that Scott got this technique from Eben Pagan, the super star of personal and business development.  It’s called the 50-10 technique.  Here’s how it works.

Most of us sit down at our computer and get engrossed in our work and don’t stop until we are interrupted or we finally get tired.  That can be hours if you’re working at home and it’s late at night and there aren’t any interruptions.  Have you done this?  When I finally stop I’ll often realize that it’s late and I’m tired and I’ve still not finished what I set out to do.  This is exactly what the 50-10 technique prevents.  The 50-10 technique directs you to work on your task for 50 minutes and at the end of that 50 minutes stop working, get up and completely change your focus and environment for 10 minutes.  This physical and mental break is what makes all the difference in your productivity.

During the 10 minutes you should get away from your work environment entirely, get some water and rehydrate.  Then step outside and get some fresh air.  If you can it’s good to take a quick walk around the block.  But you might want to grab a handful of nuts or a healthy snack.  Just make sure not to eat sugar because that can mess with your whole system and ruin the productivity.  Sometimes when I don’t walk I’ll work on chores, take out the trash or something.  The idea here is to change the environmental and metabolic experience so you don’t get stuck in a rut.  It’s when you’re in a rut that your productivity begins to decline, slowly enough that you don’t really notice it, until it’s late and you’re still not done with your task.

But wait, there’s more to it.  Another part of the increased productivity is the introduction of a starting AND a stopping time.  By focusing your energy into a 50 minute block, you get a sense of your time limitations, you start with a completed task in mind, and you can work without worrying about other tasks.  In order to free yourself from watching the clock (a source of interruption every time you look up and check the time) you should get a timer.  Eben Pagan recommends using an electronic timer.  You set it at 50 minutes and an alarm sounds when the 50 minutes has passed.   That way you can free your mind to your task completely with the knowledge that all you have to do is complete the task, or that portion of the task, that you set out to accomplish.

I hope this time management help improves your productivity like it did for me.  Oh, I’ve got to wrap up this piece now because my alarm is about to go off.  I hope you’ll let me know if this technique helps you by commenting.  Good luck with it.

9 Comments

admin, February 1st 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Beginner Internet Marketing Recommendations

I want to recommend a Beginner Internet Marketing action sequence for people just getting started in the industry. Many come into the field without a clear course of action and here is a good one for you to follow. I’m assuming for this article that you have already selected a niche market. If not, that should be a first priority today, and implementing the following recommendations should be next. I’ll post soon on selecting a niche. I’ll preface this recommendation by stating that if you have a coach or a solid marketing plan from a trusted source, try that first. I do not want to interrupt your training.


Anchor Yourself With A Blog. My first recommendation is to anchor yourself on the Internet with a blog. Let your blog be your online living room where you invite people to come and visit you and find out what you’re all about. If you don’t know how to create a blog, I recommend you cruise on over to and check out a free WordPress.com blog. WordPress makes it easy to create a blog and take up immediate residence on the web. Be sure to put pictures of yourself on the blog and write a good “My Story” or “About Me” page. I’ll post more on blogging soon.


Generate Social Media Friends. Next I recommend that you start making friends in Social Media. If that sounds daunting, don’t worry. It’s a lot easier than you might think. Here’s what I’d like for you to do:


• Set Up A Facebook Account. Go to Facebook.com and set up an account, it’s free. Put a smiling and professional looking picture of yourself in your profile. Also put a link to your blog in your profile too. I’ll write more on Facebook soon. I want you to add 35 friends a day. Here’s how to do that. Join Facebook Groups in your niche market. Don’t go in and start pitching your product, just don’t do that. Instead go in and comment on what others are saying. Your first post should simply be to introduce yourself and tell the group that you’re new to the group and anxious to begin interacting. My biggest tip for you is to always ask a question in every post, so people will engage in conversation. Then add them as a friend. As you see posts that are interesting to you, invite those people to be friends. Try to invite 25 to 30 people a day to be friends.

• Set Up A Twitter Account. Go to Twitter.com and get an account and start Tweeting. There is a ton of information on how to Tweet. Be sure to put the same picture on Twitter that you have in Facebook, and put a link to your blog in your profile. Let me give you the most basic ones. Never blatantly pitch your business. Your first goal on Twitter is to add 50 friends a day. I’ll write a post on doing this soon, but basically find leaders in your company or in the industry. Add followers from their follower list. Just add from the most recent 5 pages. Try to add 50 a day at first. When you get to about 200, you can add 75 a day. As you grow add a few more. Once you’re around 1,000 you can add 200 a day. After 2,000 members you can add 400 to 450 a day. Just like on Facebook, try to engage these people. Retweet messages from people who have something constructive to say. As a guideline, tweet at least 10 times a day.

Use this formula. Tweet 2 uplifting quotes. Tweet 3 informational tweets about the business, a technique, or offering a link to an interesting video, blog, or article you’ve read about the business. Tweet 2 or 3 times about daily life or what you’re interested in…just be yourself and NEVER use profanity or sexually suggestive language because a lot of people you can attract as customers will be turned off by it. And finally, be really careful, but you can tweet 1 fun and INDIRECT advertisement for your business per 10 Tweets. That’s the 90:10 Rule of Promotion. Check out my tweets and you’ll see what I mean. Here’s one as an example: “3 Things I couldn’t live without, my Family, Basketball, and this: h ttp://[yourlandingpage].com. You’ll get the hang of it. Just remember to regularly invite people to your blog and to join you in Facebook.

• After Two Weeks Add One More Technique. After you’ve become accustomed to blogging, making friends on Facebook and Twitter, you need to add a technique to your daily practice. You can select from any number of free techniques like article writing, video, Forum marketing. I personally recommend making a video that summarizes each blog post. My favorite two are:


o Video. Post that video on YouTube.com and put it in your blog (just copy the embed code from YouTube and insert into your blog post). In the description of the video on YouTube, put your blog address on the first line, starting with the http//: part. Nothing else on the first line of the description.
o Articles. If you’re uncomfortable with video, you can easily do article posting. Just take your blog and post to some of the leading article directories, like EzineArticles.com, Amazines.com, and GoArticles.com.

Add In Pay Per Click. You should add Pay Per Click when you can afford it. Don’t start until you can spend at least $500 per month in PPC advertising. As soon as your business is generating profit, begin investing that profit into PPC. This is the fastest way to generate leads, but special training and practice is required or it will be ineffective.


If you follow the Beginner Internet Marketing guidelines above, your business will start picking up steam and leads. If you have any problems feel free to contact me and I’ll get you going. Good luck!

2 Comments

admin, January 28th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Why Get A Mentor?

Why get a mentor?  Because if you don’t want to be prey to the industry, you’ll need to become king of your jungle, and if you read on you’ll see why you need a mentor to make the transition.  Let me explain; there is a significant likelihood that if you join a Network Marketing company you’re going to fail.   Of course your results may vary, but the average is 95% to 97%.  That goes for online or face-to-face marketing, it doesn’t matter.  This is a bare-boned and frank discussion of the reality of starting any business.  It’s DANGEROUS out there and if you are average you’ll be eaten alive.  Are you willing to be average, just fresh meat for an industry full of predators?  If the answer is an emphatic ‘No’, then you’ll need a mentor to become a “Leadership Lion”, a “Business Tiger”, and a “Marketing Bear”.

A mentor can help you get through two very steep learning curves.  One is marketing and sales, and the other is Business and Leadership.  A mentor knows the path, has been through this jungle before.  A mentor will help you become what you’ll need to be to succeed.

Become a Marketing Tiger.  Many people jump into a business opportunity thinking that they’ll invite a few friends to a meeting or put up a website and a sales funnel and the money will just come rollin in.  Not so…they’re already in the ‘Exit Lane’ from the industry and haven’t been involved 5 minutes.  Marketing and sales are at the heart of Network Marketing.  Don’t believe anyone who says “you don’t have to sell, you just share”, Horse Apples (Col. Potter, MASH).

Marketing is figuring out what to sell, whom to sell it to, how to find them, and what to tell them so they are attracted into communication with you so you can sell something to them.  And Sales is what you do with them once they show up at your door so they end up buying just exactly what they need and want, going away happy that they ran into you and telling their friends to go see you too.  This is a bit of a Swiss Cheese (full of holes) interpretation, but I think you get the point.  Marketing and sales are at the CORE of running a business.  Here are a couple of gold-letter definitions from the American Marketing Association for those of you who are sticklers for precision:

  • Marketing.  Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
  • Sales.  Any of a number of activities designed to promote customer purchase of a product or service. Sales can be done in person or over the phone, through e-mail or other communication media. The process generally includes stages such as assessing customer needs, presenting product features and benefits to address those needs and negotiation on price, delivery and other elements.

Folks this takes time to learn marketing and sales, are you willing to spend time?  Don’t expect money to come rolling in up-front without these skills.  To get up this learning curve fast, you’re going to need help.  You’re going to need a solid and tested training process, and you’re going to need a mentor who can guide you through.

Become a Business Bear and a Leadership Lion.  The second learning curve is the Business Owner Mindset.  This is my favorite because it doesn’t sound very hard.  When I first started in this business I thought it would be a cinch, after all I figured that I had an MBA, 20 years in Corporate world, and I was leaving my role as VP of Marketing.  WRONG; I was not prepared to instantly succeed as a business owner and it took a lot of energy to get there.  I didn’t realize how ingrained the employer-employee mentality was in my personality.  Bottom line, even if you have the marketing and sales skills, financial management skills, if you don’t have the mindset of a Business Owner, you’re going to bounce all over the profits board, and you’ll end up a casualty of the industry.

The reason is simple enough.  Employees know that if they go to work, they’ll receive money in exchange.  Business Owners know that they don’t make money unless they make it happen.  Successful business owners don’t quit because they have stalwart self-determination.  Successful business owners are driven from within, from desire and a dream and from passion.  They love what they’re doing, or at lease something core to what they’re doing.

This is the mindset that’s going to get you past the tough times.  It’s the mindset that’s going to see zero sales and just keep pushing forward.  It’s the mindset that asks “how am I going to make this happen” when you get Google-Slapped (lose your AdWords account).   It’s the mindset that gets you up in the morning with a smile on your face when you’re losing money, knowing that you’re ultimately going to make money because of what you do each and every day to improve your business.  And it’s the mindset that forces you to change your entire personality and become an ‘Alpha’ leader so you can literally attract people into your business like a magnet.

Take it from me, you’re going to need a mentor who can help you make this transition into a business owner’s mindset.  It’s a steep learning curve, and I didn’t make it to the top until I had a mentor.

Get a Mentor.  Three percent to five percent make it in the industry, that’s all.  Eighty percent of those work with a mentor.  In fact over time they have a series of mentors as the ramp up their success year-after-year.  Are you going to be a statistic of this industry, or are you going to become a Business Lion, a Leadership Lion, a Marketing Tiger, and a Business Bear?  Get a mentor.  You’ll thank me for it.

4 Comments

admin, January 27th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Online Marketer Information Overload: Stick With One Course At A Time

If you’re going to be an online marketer of MLM or Network Marketing products and opportunities, you’re going to want to get some training courses and information as you get started.  Knowledge is one of the keys to success as an online entrepreneur and you need to be spending no less than 2 hours each day literally soaking in as much as you can possibly hold!  But don’t make the mistake I’ve learned the hard way.  Don’t buy more than you can use at one time.  There are a lot of really enticing training opportunities on the Internet and if you are attracted to too many, you might quickly find yourself deep into information overload and budget overload.  My hard-earned advice to you is to select a training course or training material, stick with it until you have completed it, and then implement what you learned before moving to the next training.

Guys, what I’m telling you here is golden.  You can take it to the bank.  Just this week I’ve been pounded with emails from some of my favorite Internet marketing gurus enticing me with elaborate landing page videos and offering the “most comprehensive” training available on the Internet, or the “only training available online at this level of intensity”.  And of course there is always a limited timeframe associated with every offer, which carries a really affordable price; you know it’s affordable because they tell you just how much the competitors would charge for similar training…if it were even available.

So I know “from whence I come” my friends.  With all these attractive offers sometimes it’s easy to believe you’re getting yourself ahead just by purchasing it.  In the heat of the game, when you’re behind on your marketing and pushing to get everything done, it’s somehow reassuring to latch onto some new training product.  In some strange way it can make you feel like you’ve made progress for the day.  Don’t be a sucker!

Don’t be tricked by every single beautiful training course or information product that comes your way.  If you are, two things will happen.  You’ll go broke learning to be an online marketer, and you’ll feel guilty because you’ll never get through all the training that you’ve got stacked in the corner next to the file cabinet.  Take it from me.  I’ve got thousands of dollars of worth of incredible training just waiting for me to start digging through.

Remember, it’s not the training material or even the process of learning the new information that will make you a success.  It’s the act of IMPLEMENTING what you’ve learned and then testing and adjusting it to maximize your ROI that will makes you a success!  So just stick with the training you’ve selected, implement it in your marketing and fine tune it.  Then, and ONLY then, move on to the next great training.

Buy, study, implement and adjust.  That’s the sequence you want.  You and your business will go further and faster if you follow this sage advice.  I know that mine has.  Good luck!

Abstract:  There are a lot of really enticing training opportunities on the Internet and if you are attracted to too many, you might quickly find yourself deep into information overload and budget overload.  My hard-earned advice to you is to select a training course or training material, stick with it until you have completed it, and then implement what you learned before moving to the next training.

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admin, January 16th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized