Journaling Tips

Journaling Tips: How to Start Journaling

I wrote last week about some journaling ideas. I spent a whole week and I did not start my Internet Marketing journal. Well you might well ask why? Crazy when I already had some great journaling tips to follow.

Maybe I needed to start with the basics for starting journaling – some journaling tips I got from my friend.

Getting started journaling isn’t something that you need to think about too hard. Yes, you can spend time finding just the right journal book or application. Or you can just start writing – or banging away on the keyboard.

Here are some simple guidelines I found

• Dust Off Your Pen and Paper. Keep it simple and start writing. It’s easy to take with you.
• Do It First Thing in the Morning. Just do it and make it a habit. Guess when I do my investing journal. Directly after I update prices and trades from the day before. OR
• Do It Last Thing at Night – i.e., turn it into a habit. Not really going to work for me as I am trading last thing at night with US markets opening around midnight my time.
• Write Every Single Day – make it a habit and stop relying on memory. My 63 year old brain knows all about that. What did I do last week?
• Start Simply. Just get the words down. Over time you will find ways to get your stuff more organised especially if you want to use it as a basis for blogging or to-do lists or progress reviews.
• Start with Today. Write down what happened today (or yesterday). Let the words flow about actions and feelings and frustrations. In time you will want to write about what was working and what was not (I hear my investing coach talking there). It is exactly what I do in my investing journals.
• Keep It Private – that keeps you honest. It is a big step to go public – I do on my investing journal because I get paid and I learn from people who make comments. They also learn and begin to know me.
• Try different types of journals. There are all sorts of journals out there. Stick then with what works.

In summary, choose whether to use pen and paper or use a device and start writing

My Journaling Week

My journaling journey this last week was hard work. I did not apply the journaling tips. That said, my investing journals came out like clockwork – every day I made trades. My Internet Marketing journal went nowhere. The clues lie in the story of the week – what went on?

My Internet Marketing week feels like it has been a complete waste of time. I did not write the journal. I struggle to remember what I actually did. A journal entry a day would have helped with that.

What did I do:

• Launch LeadsLeap ads for the new lead magnet I posted the week before. That took some action to make the ad, make the graphics, modify the follow up sequence, make the PDF accessible. The tracking systems do tell me that I did get some traffic flowing – 229 hits plus 111 plus 130 clicks on links with 1 person joining one of my lists.
• Run two Guaranteed Solo Mails solo ads which gathered 340 of those clicks but only that one opt-in (I can run those 3 days apart so I did get something right).
• Spent some time exploring what other people do with their journaling, how they use it to drive their blogging. Of course, I could have just followed my own advice in the journaling tips – start writing a journal, publish it, make it searchable just like I did with my investing journal. I was looking for a bit more than that – maybe it was because I know what my real problem is. I know I was making real progress when I wrote up an action list each week building on what did and not work the week before. Blame it on Twitter who pulled a working horse from underneath me. I stopped the close focus on what to do next week and began to drift away looking for other ideas.
• Tidy up my click tracking onto my own domain. I use ClixTrac.com and they have a facility to use a custom domain. I wanted something that was a little less obviously a tracker. I have become a little slack at separating out link tracking so I know exactly where clicks come from. I wanted to start the process of being more disciplined – this was a good forcing device.
• Add an exit pop-up on my blog – using a LeadsLeap tool
• Write up a blog post and email all of my lists with the post
• Send out newsletters for the blog posts and for the weekly webinar. I do not do this every week – maybe every fortnight. Not really measured if it works or not.
• Attend live coaching on the co-branded book. I did only some of the homework.

Yes. Journaling would have pinned the problems down a whole lot sooner.

Focus and Consistency – Plans and Action

This post arrived from my mentor on Monday.

I will extract a few words (I ringed them)

• Prioritize
• Plan
• Strategy to implement
• Execution consistently

Grand words and smart words – he always talks a lot about consistency and focus.

Focus is the stuff of priority and strategy (He does plan and strategy. I do strategy and plan – blame my Business Science professor). It is all about working out what to do and how to do it. The next step is all about converting grand ideas and strategy and plans to action. That takes to-do lists. Now that is the guts of delivering consistency and focus.

• A strategy
• A plan of action
• To-do lists

And then follow up to measure what worked and did not work and make changes. Now I have been working on this latter part – I do know what is not working.  The real challenge comes here.

What’s Not Working

A lot of what I am doing is not working the way I would like

Example: Lists are big enough (over 5,000) but not responsive enough. That tells me there is a mismatch between what they want and what I offer. Maybe they just do not know me = another topic.

That has pushed me in two directions:

1. Try different lead magnets to reduce the mismatch – i.e, get a different type of person on the list.
2. Explore different products that might fit with them.

And it is this pushing in two directions that creates the problem in my head. There are a bunch of things that happen. You may well resonate with this as you do it too.

• I chop and change to try new things.
• I stop doing the regular things that are key to building a relationship.
• The emails get to be a few days apart, for example.
• I start looking for shiny objects.
• I spend more time scrolling social media and less time engaging.

Basically running around like a blue-assed fly or standing like a rabbit in the headlights.

Now the journaling helps to clear that up – it forces me to write down what is going on in my head.  I can begin to see the mess. Then I can start to take action. The big part of the problem though has nothing to do with that – those are excuses. It has to do with this

• A strategy
• A plan of action
• To-do lists
• Follow up to measure and change

Simple really.

Getting to Action

So I did spend some time working on a way to formalise the managing of to-do lists. I already have the first cut framework sitting in Trello which I put together some time ago. Just got to push ahead and build on the structure that I started all those months ago.

The to do list has some core elements that just have to happen every day or few days

• Organic traffic effort
• Email the list
• Manage ads on the ad platforms currently in place (Leads Leap and Solo Ads)
• Prepare for new things (there is the co-branded launch coming up; build out a new paid ads channel; deploy some of the tools from the tool shed (I did the click tracker this week), etc.)
• Implement new things and make them routine
• Manage integrity of the engine (e.g., security; upgrades; broken links). I did quite a bit of that this week – WordPress updates take some tidying up.

Structure for Action

Maybe the structure could go along these lines

• Routine tasks
  • Traffic
  • Reviews
  • Nurturing
• New Project tasks
  • Co-branded book launch
  • New lead magnets (2 done)
  • New product offers (I did write up a list)
  • New technology (especially video)
• Maintenance tasks
  • Security
  • Payments/Renewals
  • Installation Updates

Now I did find a blog post about the way Marc Andreessen, the founder of the Netscape browser, uses Trello to organise his to-do-lists.

He uses 3 lists

• To-do list — containing all ‘must do’ commitments that need to be prioritized.
• Watch list — containing everything that has a blocker stopping you from doing it right now, but that you need to keep tabs on.
• Later list — containing literally everything that you might want to do ‘later’ but isn’t a priority.

What he does then is migrate tasks from the watch list and later list as and when they are all ready to be acted on.

That fits with my thinking – really using 3 buckets to feed a list of things to be done each day. The power of Trello is it allows you to visualise the lists side by side and it makes it easy to move things or copy things from place to place. And it is a free, shareable tool – easy to assign team members to tasks when the outsourcing begins. Feels like the topic for another blog post.

Source:  Implement The Marc Andreessen Productivity System In Trello on Medium.com

And then I came across this blog post – 7 Inspirational Trello Boards. What really caught my eye was the series of Buffer Boards

 

Read that here 

Definitely another topic to write about as I implement a better to-do lists process.

Resources

Click Tracking: ClixTrac offers a banner and link tracking service that allows you to keep track of how many times your advertisements and links are being viewed and clicked.  There is a free service which covers a modest monthly number of clicks . I ran out of clicks and upgraded to the Pro Plan – that gives me use of a custom domain. I just registered the domain and forwarded the nameservers to ClixTrac. They do the rest.  What I like is it includes banner rotators. I rotate all the Internet Profits banners on my blog website and on my Staged stages using ClixTrac. Sign up for free here

Project Management: I use a project management tool to document all my work steps. That will provide a toolbox for managing projects and also for managing an outsourcer down the line. My tool of choice is Trello.com – try it for free

Journaling Tips Grab your copy of the journaling PLR here – it’s a free resource.

Credits

Journal Photo by Jessica Lewis