Your Internet Business - Achieving Success While Avoiding Burnout

Hang around any internet forum for a while, and you're sure to read a post from some exhausted, disillusioned 'apprentice' internet marketer who is ready to give up.

It's not only internet forums that carry sad tales of endless hours spent trying to 'break in'. You'll often see stories like this in testimonials for a system that has finally worked: relieved buyers tell of their rocky journey before finding the solution that did it for them.

If you're one of those who are dealing with a fed-up spouse who is urging you to find a 'real job', or credit cards that have reached the red zone after huge sums spent on the next sure thing, you may well be getting close to burnout.

What do you do? Keep trying - or give up? And if you do keep trying, how can you know what will work best for you? What is the best use of the hours you have available to you, without your health suffering?

Here are a few tips to help you find your way through the maze.


1. Work on the Tasks That You Find Easiest - Outsource the Rest.

There are many ways to make money on the Internet, but most of them require you to know how to work with two things: words and websites. When you're a beginner, focus on working with your strengths. For example, if you are a confident writer but a dud with the technical stuff, spend your time and money wisely. Use sites like Elance.com or Workaholics4Hire.com to find someone to do the things you find difficult. (You could spend a whole day trying to master something an expert could do in twenty minutes.) Instead, let the professionals work on the geeky stuff, while you write your own sales copy and tweak articles to make them unique.

If you're not so hot with either words or the technical aspects, you have a choice: (a) you can pay others to do most of the work, while you come up with the ideas; or (b) you can invest time to teach yourself necessary skills.

The quickest road to burnout is trying to master everything at once. ("I have to work this stuff out in the next three weeks or get another job!") Be kind to yourself, and allow yourself whatever training period you need.


2. Work With Your Personality, Not Against It.

By the time you're ready to embark on an Internet business, it's likely that you have enough life experience to understand your own work patterns. It is essential that you create whatever conditions you need to work efficiently.

Once you have chosen the type of business that seems right for you (for example: creating niche products, or building content sites that will bring in money from AdSense and affiliate sales) your first step should be to create a checklist of necessary tasks. What is the very first thing you need to do? What is the second? What is the third? Write them all down.

Decide on which tasks you will handle yourself, and which tasks you will hand over to others. Arrange these tasks in two separate lists. (If you have no money to outsource anything yet, then you'll still have one big list.)

If you are outsourcing certain tasks, find the professional who will be handling them and get things underway before you begin on your own list. This will give you a mental boost, because things are already happening! (Note that some outsourced tasks may have to wait until you have completed a step on your own list.)

Look back at your past experiences with approaching projects or new tasks, and decide which of the two following work patterns sounds most like you:

- you work best with a 'to do' list that challenges you, ticking off each task as it is completed.

- you become overwhelmed if you have too much on your list; you work best if you have just one task in front of you at a time.

Far too many new internet marketers panic at the sight of a seemingly interminable list of tasks. At the end of a day, if they've checked only three boxes out of twenty-seven, they panic. It all seems too much - and paralysis can set in. That, in turn, leads to disillusionment and another failed business.

If you know that this will be your reaction, then put your list away. Instead, write out the very first task on a piece of paper, and put THAT in front of you. That's all you have to accomplish - that one task.

Be careful that you don't look upon a whole complex project 'one task'. For example: don't write down 'build a website' as Item 1 on your To-Do List! Break large tasks down into smaller jobs, and focus on that. If your first task in building a website is to download the necessary software and install it on your computer, write that down as one thing on your to-do list.

Work your way through one task at a time, and give yourself credit for what you have accomplished. One final tip: pretend that you are hiring yourself, and treat yourself kindly - like a new employee that has to learn the ropes. As a boss, you wouldn't unfairly overload a 'newbie' starting out in the business - so don't do it to yourself!

How to Use Blog Trackbacks to Your Advantage

First of all, what is a blog trackback? A trackback is a type of blog feature that is used to associate blog posts on different blogs - or a way to notify a website or another blog that you have published an entry that references it. The result of this is that two or more different blogs are able to share readers.

The description above is a little hard to fathom so here is an example. Say you just posted an article to your blog about Pit Bull dog training. Now, as you are surfing the internet, you run across a similar or related post on another blog. So, you could use the trackback feature to notify the person who posted the other post about Pit Bulls that there is a similar post on your blog.

When your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, appears on the other blog's post, that blog's readers find out that you have something to say about Pit Bulls and may even pay your blog a visit to find out more.

In order to create a trackback, you have to get the trackback URL from the post where you want to send your trackback notification. It will be shown on the blog as a Trackback URL or possibly a Permalink. Once you have found it, copy the URL into the correct place in your blog's post. Your blog software will have some notation like Trackback URL identified for where the Trackback URL would go.

Once you have done this, save and republish your blog. Your blog software will automatically send the Trackback ping to the target blog's post. So now your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, will be listed on the other blog's post after that blog owner has approved it.

The trackback feature works by actually sending a ping from your blog to the blog you are trackbacking to notify them of your post. This also causes your post to be listed on the other blog, after it has been approved of course.

Trackbacks should be used to elaborate on or add to a related post. So if your post is on Pit Bulls, your trackback on another blog should also be about that related subject and not one like pet care in general or something like that. Blog comments can be used for posting non specific comments on blogs where trackbacks are topic related specific posts.

You may have noticed that by trackbacking you are essentially placing your link (permalink) on another blog, which creates a backlink to your blog. For this reason, when you set up your blog, modify the permalink structure to be more search engine friendly. This can be done a few different ways, but you want a structure that ends up having keywords in it as opposed to having more dynamic looking links.

By having the backlinks to your blog and by having them relevant to the content of your blog, you now have the ability of improving your blog's page rank. Those backlinks will strengthen both your link popularity and your link relevancy which will bring your blog more organic search engine traffic.

It should be noted that trackbacks should be used with care and not used as methods for spamming other people's blogs.