Mark from WebDiggin had this good question in the comment section of my last post, so I thought I better give it a more extensive response in a new post. There are still a few days left to participate in the $25 contest they are running and odds are looking good so far…

As you might have noticed, recently I have been going through some big changes that apply to the way I am working. I was spending around 16 hours a day (and after coming across Court and Vic´s blog I actually only slept for a few hours, staying up reading and watching videos… ) on my websites and this blog.

And when I say spending, … I mean wasting time, without a set schedule just trying to do whatever I could without a real set schedule, looking at short term “victories” instead of planning for long term success.

I have been running this blog for 3 months now and it has brought me to getting in a better frame of mind and therefore gearing towards adapting a more business mindset.

3 Months ago, most of my time would go to working this blog, posting, responding to comments, spending hours on design and tweaking (in the end that did not turn out all that great, looking at the current design LOL), linking through comments on other blogs, and spending a lot of time tweaking and trying to re-invent the wheel.

But more and more I got into a downwards spiral. Whenever I would get affiliate commissions it was more a long shot lucky approach than a real business approach. Whenever I got adsense clicks same thing applied, it was more luck than anything else, some lost visitor coming in by mistake clicking on and ad.

I knew I was on the wrong track, return on my time was way low, and I just had to take action. I started reading Courts blog, making notes and learning a lot from his posts. I started reading Zen to Done and little by little the pieces started falling in its place.

Then I started reading Vic´s blog and that is what the real turning point was. I was blown away with his down to earth posts and I finally had to admit to myself I was on the right path but taking all the wrong turns.

Right now I am still adapting to a new schedule and a new way of doing things, one of the biggest changes is probably some investment in programs that will take a lot of work out of my hands, having things automated so I can work in a more productive way, taking active action.

I don´t spend money on PPC at all. I have in the, to promote affiliate products and getting some return with commissions, but in the end, it just wasn´t worth all the hassle for me. I knew way too little about it to produce good results and spending way too much money I think I should have spent in a better, more productive way in the long run.

My own foolish mistake of not tracking it the way I should and forgetting to set a finish date for one of the campaigns I was running when visiting my folks for a week, had me come back home to a huge bill. An expensive lesson that was…

So if it works for you, great and many congrats, I prefer staying clear from PPC for now and focus on ways to getting organic traffic instead, which I think will work out better on the long run.

I have always been a Mac-girl, never touched a PC in my life and many times I came across programs that would automate things like article submission, link building, directory submission etc but they would only work for PC. I tried installing a virtual PC on my Mac but had memory issues and my Mac would start slowing down immensely so I threw out that idea. Very frustrating to say the least, but at that point in time I took the path of least resistance, wanting to stay with what I knew, which was working with a Mac. Not a great way to treat your business, I know now.

Like I said, Vic´s blog was the turning point for me, especially some things he says like “Guys, don´t over think things, take action” … him closing up on the cam, repeating it a few times and just the way he does it, made the click, having me realize I really had to take action and overcome some personal issues.

Out of the time I was spending before, 90% would fall in the “over thinking things” category, leaving very little time to actually take action. The other 10% was spending time on things that would only give profit short term.

So in short, another business approach set up to fail.
The only thing that hasn´t made me stop already, is the core belief that I am able to do this, I am convinced I can and will do it, plus I don´t want to give up because I love doing this. I got to the point though where I really had to start adapting to a real business approach, treating this as work and not just “playing around”, getting real and treat it as a real job.

I got sucked into trying out all different programs like the “Big Guys in Blogging and Affiliate Marketing” are recommending, but since found they really arent all that great.

Maybe I have just misunderstood them all along, but the nagging feeling of pieces of the puzzle missing stayed with me for a long time. Maybe it was just me being stupid, but after trying many different things the Biggies claimed you can´t live without in order to get the expected results, I just kept feeling worse and worse and a lot of things I was supposed to do just did not feel right.

As you might be aware, many people start affiliate marketing, blogging and websites in order to make money, thinking it is the answer to all their problems, thinking life working at home is a breeze, because hey, there are some pretty darn good results to be achieved.

There are many people out there promising all sorts of huge earnings, showing off their “own earnings” if only you use their products and do things a certain way.

What happens?

Many people get sucked into buying stuff they really don´t need, crappy e-books that tell them how to make money selling e-books (by throwing together more crappy e-books and selling them to other suckers for example).

They find it is not that easy to sell crappy stuff since nobody seems to want to buy them (and with reason) and they give up. Or they have some results but their conscience starts hitting in, feeling bad about what they do, and also making them give up.

Other people get so hung up on how their website looks that they end up with absolutely great websites, without any organic traffic. Then they spend hours, days, weeks, trying to get people to visit through very time consuming ways which in the long run only has given them traffic as long as they were spending that much time promoting. Again, the negative short-term return makes them give up; thinking it just does not work.

Or the few sites they have get sandboxed by google and they don´t have the breath to sit it out, getting completely discouraged and again, give up.

One piece of the puzzle for me is that I just did not dare to touch the PC bit and programs I could use to automate things but I just did not want to switch to PC´s, and could not invest money in order to do it another way.

However, my office looks different today, last week I have made a few changes in hosting companies, hosting plans and the amount of domains I currently own, plus I sorted out my administration and finances.

The most important change though is the presence of a monitor/keyboard I have borrowed from my boyfriend and a PC a good friend of me has given me to use for the next few months in order to finally switch to automate processes that were very time consuming in the past.

Because of their help I can spend the money I had planned to use to buy a PC on other things, like programs to automate things, hosting and domains.

I have made a schedule of how many sites I set up weekly, (a reasonable amount which is not too overwhelming to start off with), how much time is spent on each in order to promote them through automated programs (directory submission, article submission and social bookmarking), time I have to spend weekly on keeping up with administration, but it is not dead set yet, since some things will take less time in the future when I have adapted to my new way of working and some things will start taking more time because of the growing nature of the overall business.

Plus and maybe even most important, I have made an outline of goals and things to be finished at certain times. All reachable goals, nothing that will daunt me when looking at them but quite the contrary, giving me a positive kick.

I have another list, listing future investments in order of importance to automate more things making me able to work faster.

As for your initial question, “how I break up my day“, I will probably post on that more detailed in the future, once I get more settled after all recent changes, plus share more details on how things are working out, what programs I have tried and tested, what is working and what is not.

Right now though I really can´t say too much about it, since I feel that would not be fair to my readers and there is nothing I can really specify and backup anyways.

At this moment and time, the best I can recommend is reading the 3 blogs I mentioned earlier, BloggerUnleashed, CourtneyTuttle and Make Money for Beginners since those are the blogs that have put me in this new frame of mind and got me to setting up real business, finally.

It would be nice to see though how others go about it, there is a lot to learn from each other and I would really love to see how others break down their day and how they invest their time setting up business.

If you have posted on how you spend your day or plan on doing so, please link to that post in the comment section!