When you start your own business you think that you have to do everything yourself. You want your business to succeed so you become a perfectionist and want everything done correctly and the way that you want it. Now this is ok, but a lot of tasks can be delegated to others. If you put too much on yourself you will end up getting stressed out and burnt out. This had happened to me a few times and that is why I delegate tasks to others so I am able to be more productive.
Start out Small
If you are like me you have a large list of daily tasks to do. Take a look at that list and pick out the smaller tasks that are easy and anyone can do. For me some of the easier things to do are posting news on ThinkComputers. That takes up about 30 minutes of my day and if I can eliminate it by delegating it to someone else I will. Small tasks are good to start with because they are easy for others to learn.
What Stresses You Out?
No everyone loves what they do, I know there are things that I have to do everyday that I wish that I didn’t have to do. Something you hate can be something that someone else loves to do. For example I really do no like doing motherboard reviews. They are just long and drawn out and all the tests that are required really take a long time. But I need to do motherboard reviews because they do really good traffic, which translates into money. Well one of my staff writers Frank loves doing motherboard reviews. He had no problem taking over the motherboard reviewer position from me.
Make sure they get something out of it
I’m not one to delegate a ton of work to someone and that person gets nothing out of it. I mean people are not going to work for you if they are not getting anything out of it. All of my reviewers on ThinkComputers get to keep the products they review. So in Frank’s case he gets to keep the motherboards he reviews, no bad right? In the blogging world this also follows suit, many bloggers allow guest bloggers to link back to their own blogs. This gets the guest blogger some traffic and makes it easier for the other blogger as he does not have to write posts everyday.
Make Sure You Stay Involved
If you have a good brand it should be easy to delegate tasks to other people, but you don’t want everyone else doing all of the work. In the case of a blog you don’t want all of the posts being written by other people. Most people come to your blog to read about what you have to say. I mean guest posts are good and interesting, but they want to hear what you have to say. If you are only posting 1 or 2 posts a month and the rest are guest posts people might find a new blog to check out. With ThinkComputers I stay involved by still doing reviews and dealing with all PR matters. I also post all news on the site to see what is going on in the computer hardware world.
Don’t Be Afraid
A lot of people are afraid to delegate tasks to others because they are afraid that someone else will not do a good job or will mess something up. The only thing I can say to that is give the person a chance.
If you have too much on your plate try to delegate some tasks to other people. You will be surprised at how much more productive you will become.
Everyone knows the tradition, frame your first dollar. A lot of times you see them hanging in local restaurants etc. In the online world there is no such thing since we get paid via check or direct deposit, but it is funny to think about making that first little bit of money online. I’ve only really started making a living online a few years ago, before that it was little by little. So let’s take a stroll down memory lane and see the different ways I made money online before making money online was so popular.
I think the first bit of money I made online was with AllAdvantage. If you don’t know what AllAdvantage was it was a program that you installed on your computer and it would display ads on the bottom of your screen while your surfed the internet. It was a lot like AGLOCO, but you actually got paid. Since I was on the computer most of the time when I was in highschool it was easy money to me. I remember getting my first check for $25, I was really surprised that I got paid for just surfing the web. AllAdvantage did not last long, only from 1999 – 2001.
After AllAdvantage I started selling computers on Ebay, back then computers were expensive and not that many people knew how to build them, or knew about Newegg. I was able to buy parts cheap on Newegg and build a system and put it on Ebay for $200-$300 more than what I paid and was able to turn a profit. It was not the easiest thing to do, but it gave me extra cash. Now you can buy computers so cheap it is not even worth trying to build custom PC’s. I also sold custom computers to people around the neighborhood.
ThinkComputers actually did make some money before I really took it seriously. KDS actually bought an ad on the site for $1000 for one month! That is actually a lot, even by today’s standards. Back then we were one of a handful of sites doing hardware reviews. Like I said I never took ThinkComputers seriously up until a few years ago. So what did I do with the $1000? I gave $500 to the guy that was helping me do reviews and I took the other $500 and bought a new digital camera, which actually really helped out ThinkComputers a lot.
My last year of high school and my first few years of college I did not have a whole lot of time on my hands between working a regular job and going to school. So it was not like I could spend a lot of time online trying to make money. I did however find a survey program that would pay $5 per survey, which isn’t a lot, but if you do a few a week it is easy extra cash. One thing that was really cool about this survey program is that they would actually send you products and then you would take the survey on them. A lot of it was food too, so I would get like “no name” chips and pop and get to try them out etc.
While in college John Chow told me about Google Adsense and that lead me to learning about making money online the easier way. So now I spend most of my time working on ThinkComputers and this blog.
Some people are morning people and some are not, but even if you are not a morning person you should start off your day right. If you have a slow start then you will end up getting less done and you will feel like crap too. I do a good amount of my work in the morning so if I’m barely awake I will end up being less productive and usually I will make mistakes and have to go back to correct them. That is why starting off my day right is very important to me.
Take a Shower
I usually jump in the shower as soon as I get up. It is a great way to wake yourself up. Before I would wake up, do some work, then get in the shower. But like I said I would end up being less productive. Now that I jump right in the shower I am wide awake when I sit down at the computer.
Eat Something
This is very important, your body will slow down if you don’t eat. I usually eat cereal or if I have time I will make some eggs. Most people just opt for coffee in the morning, but caffeine will only take you so far. Try to eat something in the morning even if its just some fruit or a breakfast bar, these should hold you over till lunch time. Sometimes I flip flop eating and taking a shower depending on how I feel.
Exercise
You have to get your blood moving in the morning, now I’m not saying to do a full working but a few quick exercises will wake your body up and get you moving. And usually after doing the exercises you will feel a lot better too.
Get Out
If you are like me you spend a lot of time on your computer stuck at home or in an office. If you get any chance to get out before you go into work it really helps. I try to take a run around the block or something similar. I don’t know if it is the fresh air outside, but it really helps.
Starting your day off right will really help you to be more productive and will make it easier for you to get through the day.
Well the CES Swag Contest is over and I have e-mailed the winner. If they do not reply to my e-mail within 5 days I will pick another winner. I think that the contest went very well and I want to thank everyone for participating. Pictured above are the extra items that I threw in. Since a lot of people commented saying that they liked pirates so I added in a Pirates of the Burning Sea T-shirt and I also added in another t-shirt and a Samsung flash drive. The main reason I did the contest was to increase my RSS subscribers. My goal was to get over 200 and up until the last 2 days we were looming around 180 so I wasn’t sure if it would make it over 200, but yesterday we had 209 and today we have 229! So the contest was a success in my eyes.
If you are wondering how I came up with the winner I did it in excel. It was easiest done this way since you can export your RSS by e-mail subscribers into an excel sheet. Once I did that I added the people who made blog posts about the contest. Then I had to create a custom function to randomly select an e-mail from the list of e-mails. If you want to know how to create a custom function you can do so here. The random selection function I used can be seen here. It was actually easier than I thought it would be, I really didn’t want to have to write out all of the e-mails into a script or something like that.
If you did not win the contest don’t worry we will be running a contest in March. Not to give anything away but it will be an accessory for a product that most of you probably have. The contest will probably be run the same way. Congrats to this months winner!
That’s right I will be picking a winner tomorrow, but to sweeten the deal I will be adding a few more things to the prize list. Since moving into my new place I realized I have way to much stuff, so why not give it away. I mean I have no use for it, so some of the swag that I was going to keep is going to be given away. I will let you all know tomorrow what the extra prizes are.
If you don’t know about the contest it is really easy to enter. There are 2 ways to enter the contest. The easiest way is to subscribe to my RSS feed via e-mail, that will get you 1 entry into the contest. You can also write a blog post about the contest linking back to the contest and having another link to BobBuskirk.com. You must have both links in the post, this will get you 2 entries. Once you make the post make sure you leave a comment on this post. So in total you can have 3 entries.
As I said I will announce the winner tomorrow! If you want to subscribe to my RSS feed via e-mail you can do so below.
Follow Me!