Revisiting The 80/20 Rule and Why It Is Even More Critical To Your Business In 2009
The year 2008 for me was dominated by a long trip overseas, which meant I was away from home and in a constantly changing environment.
Although I boast I was able to run my business while traveling a circle around the globe, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t experience more pressure on the time available for work.
The way I chose to travel resulted in planning the details for my next stop a week before I arrived – sometimes just 24 hours before arriving or even after arriving! This included booking accommodation, flights and figuring out things like how to get from the airport to the apartment or hotel I was staying at.
Once landing in a city and settling in, the next “pressure” was determining what was worth seeing and doing, and ensuring the time available for fun was used on the best sites and attractions. This involves research and planning, reading reviews online at sites like TripAdvisor.com, buying tickets for tours and figuring out how to get to places using public transport.
When at home in Brisbane my time is quite fluid and I have few commitments or deadlines. With just my mother now living in Brisbane, I rarely have family events on and I’m not married with children, so I’m pretty much looking after myself.
Traveling dramatically changed how I live. What is normally stable in my life – where I live, what I do during the day and what I eat – became dynamic, with the variables changing every week. Suddenly my free time was gone and I was forced to live in perpetual inconsistency.
As a result of the constant changes in my life, I had to become very focused with how I used my working time. I didn’t want my blog to die, I had customers to support and I wanted to work on new projects so my business continued in a positive direction. This was no easy task, but I’m proud to say that I was able to achieve all my business goals in 2008 despite the changes to how and where I lived my life.
Revisiting the 80/20 Rule
If you’ve never read my article on the 80/20 rule, go do so now. It’s one of the most powerful concepts available today that can truly make a difference to your life and your business. My article introducing you to the rule has been one of the top 10 posts on this blog for years. You can find it here -
If I look at the metrics, this was a great year for my business. I more than doubled my revenues, my blog readership and email lists grew significantly, I had successful product launches and released some fantastic free resources like the Conversion Blogging video, not to mention publishing many articles on this blog that I know will continue to bring in traffic for years to come (the true essence of a pillar article).
None of this would have happened if it weren’t for the 80/20 rule.
Information overload has always been a problem. In 2008 it became even more of a problem. Although a great enabler and empowering tool for education, the world wide web has created a situation where it’s as important to be aware of what you need to know and do as much as knowing how to do it. If you don’t learn how to ignore 99% of what’s out there, you never get the clarity to learn the 1% that you should focus on.
I Want Your Attention
Rich Schefren’s New Coaching Program Opens Today
As many of my long-term readers know, I went through a Rich Schefren coaching program back in 2006. The reason I originally joined was because of what Rich presented in the Internet Business Manifesto.
Unless you have been deleting all your subscriptions to Internet marketing email lists then you probably already know that today Rich is opening the doors to his latest personal coaching program –
I wrote a notice to my newsletter about this program and I’m going to reproduce it below for my blog readers who are not on my newsletter so you can benefit from my experience with Rich’s training.
Before I do that let me be clear about one thing –
Rich’s coaching is only for a certain type of person because it’s cost prohibitive for many, HOWEVER, his resources like the Manifesto and the report he released last week, The Entrepreneurial Emergency, and the audios and teleconferences he releases, are all free and present great ideas. Yes there is a sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden sales pitch, but the core message can be taken away without spending a dime.
If the coaching program offer today from Rich is annoying you because you are sick of hearing about it or you think it’s way too over priced, just focus on what you can learn and implement from the free stuff.
For those of you in a position to invest in business coaching I give a strong endorsement of Rich’s programs. Rich is the only person I ever gave $5,000 of my money to for coaching. It’s worth it just because Rich is so generous with his personal time – you will definitely get a chance to talk to him directly if you join his program.
With that out of the way, here’s what I have to say about the Guided Profit System –
How To Start An Internet Business In 3 Easy Steps (And What Holds You Back)
It’s not quite as easy as the title makes it sound, but bear with me, this article will explain the three steps that are the foundation of every Internet business, why so many people go wrong and give you some realizations that might just be the key to take your Internet business to the next level…
I’ve been studying resources lately designed to teach Internet business, but not just introductory materials, content that goes beyond beginners and is intended to take you to making making millions online.
In my case I’m interested in advanced topics that I can apply to what I do and fill my current knowledge gaps to take the next step forwards. While hunting for those elusive gold nugget ideas I invariably scan the introductory materials and learn with interest how this particular person or organization cover the basics – how they suggest you get traffic and make sales.
My studies have led me to the conclusion that Internet business is actually quite easy. Explained in simple terms (which I will do in a moment), the structure of a successful online enterprise is comprised of a few components, that when linked together can deliver hundreds, thousands and even millions of dollars in online profits.
Easy As 1-2-3
While we all have different ways of presenting what we do and the tiny details of getting a result vary, most Internet marketing experts teach the same few principles, which are in fact no different from what direct marketers have been doing and teaching for decades.
It goes something like this…
Rich Schefren Didn’t See This One Coming…
Willie Crawford posted this photo up on his blog. It’s a snapshot he took at the Las Vegas networking event attended by a bunch of people, including myself and Rich Schefren, the target of my tom foolery in the photo…
Rich definitely didn’t see that coming and probably hasn’t seen the photo yet, but now he will 
.
Rich may not have noticed my joking around (he was in a serious discussion at the time so he had an excuse) but in general he’s definitely one of the best guys I know of at predicting the future and seeing the big picture when it comes to business.
Right now he’s completing the final touches on his next report, the latest incarnation of the ideas he began with the Internet Business Manifesto, which as I explained to my newsletter subscribers, is the best free report I have read – it had the most impact on my business of anything I have studied online.
If you haven’t got the Manifesto yet, now is the perfect time to download it and read it in preparation for what is to come.
Download The Internet Business Manifesto
Did You Miss The Call?
A couple of days ago I was included on a call with Rich Schefren and a bunch of his previous clients, all of whom are tremendously successful Internet business owners.
If you missed the call you can listen to the streaming version here -
The Internet Business Manifesto Teleseminar
The call was a special series of expert-only interviews, where Rich interrogated each of us by asking the following four questions -
Inside My Business: The Evolution Of A Customer Service System
This is the third part in a four part series of articles on customer service.
In part one we looked at a example from Starbucks customer service, where a simple free beverage voucher left a lasting positive impression on me. You can read this article here – Reputation Management: Starbucks Offers A Simple Lesson In Good Customer Service.
In part two I walked you through the typical “growing pains” of a solo entrepreneur running an Internet business attempting to deliver personal customer service and how often as a result of success, things start to fall apart. You can read this article here – Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise.
In this next part of the series, as promised, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes tour of how I handled customer service through various different Internet projects I’ve owned in the past eight years. My system today is far from perfect, but it’s definitely much better than what it was. My current set-up allows me to have time freedoms and still look after my most important constituents (most of the time anyway!).
Starting From The Beginning
To fully put this into perspective we have to take a trip down memory lane way back to the beginning of my Internet business timeline (still one of the most popular article series on this blog and overdue for an update to add the last couple of years).
My first true success online was my popular Magic card game site, MTGParadise.com started in the late nineties. I created that site as a true newbie. I learned how to FTP, code HTML, create basic graphics and spent countless nights changing my website.
To start with I wrote content for the website myself and learned some basic Internet marketing techniques to bring in traffic, which pretty much amounted to link exchanges and regular participation in popular Magic newsgroups (this was a LONG time ago, back in the Usenet heyday when newsgroups were the Internet).
My site grew slowly, but with no benchmarks to really compare against I was happy enough with my few hundred daily visitors, adding another ten or twenty new readers per month, treating the project purely as a hobby.
Eventually I started to receive guest articles from other people who played the card game, which helped lesson my writing load. I spent most of my time back then struggling to make HTML do what I wanted to do and did not write nearly as much as I do now as a blogger and information product creator.
My Magic site didn’t become a big success until I added a forum to it. I made the decision on a whim because Magic players, at least in Australia, were used to using email newsgroups to communicate with and spent the rest of their time reading static websites. There wasn’t a forum out there at the time for Australia magic players because they were content with newsgroups, which had a critical mass of users.
I didn’t exactly see this as a business opportunity at the time. What I was interested in was playing with the forum script and seeing if I could get it to work (I was a real glutton for punishment back then, wasting time trying to make technology work when I wasn’t a coder). I certainly did not expect what would happen next.
My First Taste of Success
One of the reasons I enjoyed Magic had nothing to do with playing the game. What I loved was to trade cards. As an entrepreneur at heart, sometimes I preferred the act of performing commerce rather than playing the game, so I did see the potential for my forum to become a hub for card trading. I just didn’t expect it to become THE card trading site for Australian Magic game players – but it did.
Within a few months the forums began to really take off thanks to the increasingly active card trading community.
If you can create a site that is based on user generated content fueled by a strong hook – a reason for people to come back to the site every day – well, then you have struck gold in Internet business terms. Many multi-million dollar web business today are based on this principle (think eBay, Facebook, YouTube).
My Magic site did not become a multi-million dollar business, but it did carve out it’s own little corner in a very specific niche. As a result my traffic grew to over a thousand visitors a day, which I joked was probably the entire online population of Magic players in Australia (it’s a popular card game, but Australia doesn’t have a large population). I made my first real online income thanks to advertising sponsors on MTGParadise.com.
If you are interested to learn more about how I made money with my Magic site, see – How to make money from your website using advertising.
