Focus On The Important Not The Urgent

by James Phillipson

Many executives wish that they had an extra hour in every day. However, I would bet that most of them would get very little that is really important done with that extra hour. The time would often get consumed by the same type of urgent issues that laid waste to the rest of the day.
 

The Challenge

For many people, the challenge is to separate the strategically important things that will provide your business with transformative growth from the tactics that are perceived as urgent because they are time sensitive.

Ensure that you manage your time so that you allocate a significant amount to focus on the tasks that will grow your business. The urgent will always be there and will consume all of your time, if you permit.
 

Decide

It is up to you to manage your time to enable you to focus on what is relevant to your personal growth and to the business growth. Just like anything else, this does require management. It is not surprising that if you do not manage your priorities, they tend to absorb all of your time without focus on those that are really important.

If you do not have a list, you really need one. Read and implement the strategies here.

Links

• Why urgent is not a priority (Inc, Jan 2012)
• Eisenhower's urgent versus important (Brilliant Time Management, Aug 2010)
• Important vs urgent: 5 ways to focus on what really matters (Pick The Brain, Apr 2008)
• Covey’s time management matrix illustrated with comics (Sid Savara)
• Do you delegate or outsource the wrong things? (Marketing Actuary, Feb 2012)
• From bucket list to balk-it list (Riscario Insider, Apr 2012)
• image courtesy of Lijuan Guo

James Phillipson is a Chartered Accountant and a Principal of Mastermind Solutions Inc. with over twenty years experience in large and small businesses. He has provided financial counselling to his clients since 1996, often in the role of a Controller or Chief Financial Officer, for both public and private corporate clients. James has experience in financial roles in a wide variety of businesses and industries. This includes several large corporations and many medium-sized public and private companies. James can be contacted at james@mastermindsolutions.ca or 905-731-8255. You’ll find more details on the Experion website and LinkedIn.

What Is Article Marketing?

by Don Monk

It’s pretty simple. Article Marketing is just what it sounds like. You are marketing via Articles. It’s a way of promoting your website and product or service for free.

Articles are among the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.

How does this work?
Write articles relating to your website and submit them to “free content” submission sites. Easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?
The article on the free content site contains a link to your own website. Readers, after reading your articles, may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. Having them on the free content sites is also making these articles available to other webmasters who may wish to publish that article on their site.

If they do, your article will include a link back to your site. And anyone who reads the article on that site can still click on the link to visit your site.

As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links to your site also increases. Major search engines place lots of significance on incoming links to determine the importance of a site. This will then increase your website’s placement in the search results.

If your site is into promoting a product or service, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential customers for you. Even if visitors only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.

There are also those who already have specific things they need on their mind but cannot decide yet between the many choices online. Chances are, they may stumble upon one of your articles, gets interested by the content you wrote, go to your site and became enticed by your promotions.

See how easy that is?

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. They also index any article that is written about your own website’s topic. Once someone searches for that same topic, the list of results will have your site or may even show the articles you wrote.

And to think, no effort on your part was used to bring them to your site. Just your published articles and the search engines.

It is no wonder why many webmasters are suddenly reviving their old writing styles and taking time to write more articles about their site than doing other means of promotion
.
Getting your site known is easier if you have articles increasing your links and traffic and making it accessible for visitors searching the Internet. Since many people are now taking their buying needs online, having your site on the search engines through your articles is one way of letting them know about you and your business.

The good thing with articles is that you can write about things that people would want to know about. This can be achieved in the lightest mood but professional manner, with little not-so-obvious sales pitch added.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to free content site. In the shortest span of time also, those are distributed to more sites than you can think of.

Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had.

If you think you are wasting your time writing these articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them published and widespread on the Internet — not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your website and your products or services.

Try writing some articles and you will be assured of the sudden surge in site traffic, link popularity and interest. Before you know it, you will be doubling and even tripling your earnings.

Nothing like getting benefits for something you got for free!




Don Monk of Internet Marketing Planners helps market your business online as part of a complete Internet solution. You’ll find Don’s profile on the Experion website and LinkedIn.