Question of the Week:
What do you challenge yourself to do, next week?
It can also be for longer than just next week, but make sure to set yourself a clear deadline and make that deadline sooner than you’re really comfortable with.
Remember: You’re not pushing yourself unless you feel some resistance and you’re not growing unless you’re pushing yourself.
Cheers,
Please leave a comment below.
Note that I don’t reply to all comments, but I do read them all. If I don’t reply to your comment, it most likely means that I agree with what you say and don’t have anything meaningful to add, myself. I appreciate and read all comments and your comments play an important part in what I write about, so keep them coming.
Spammy comments are always filtered or removed. No surprise there.
Note that I don’t reply to all comments, but I do read them all. If I don’t reply to your comment, it most likely means that I agree with what you say and don’t have anything meaningful to add, myself. I appreciate and read all comments and your comments play an important part in what I write about, so keep them coming.
Spammy comments are always filtered or removed. No surprise there.
Best of luck with your product development Shane!
I’m going to challenge myself this week to only check & answer my emails twice a day. I’ve nothing critical this week – and recon I waste way too much time on emails!
That’s a very good idea. Checking e-mail too often is a real productivity killer.
Hi Shane
great post, focus and action, and pushing yourself are keys to moving forward
I sometimes over analyse and end up taking no action – i have spent most of this weekend looking for the perfect product review template and outline for writing a product review on popular microscope
the upshot is i have not written the review – i challenge myself to complete this task find a simple formula and stick with it
many thanks
Ken
That seems familiar. I’ve also wasted more time than I like to admit, trying to find the perfect theme for a site, tweaking and fiddling with settings etc. instead of doing things that will actually help the site get traffic.
Awesome Shane, now that you’ve released this, I’ll be holding you accountable to release the product, I’m not sure if you mention this in your course, but it’s always great to have someone who is also in IM to keep you accountable to make sure you actually hit your targets otherwise it’s pretty easy to tell yourself “I’ll do it tomorrow”
Ruchi
That’s very true. Having some good companions in the IM game is really helpful. Especially since non-IM’ers tend not to be terribly supportive of what we do, because they don’t understand it and thus don’t believe in it.
Hi Shane
Focus, or better yet the lack of it, is one of the biggest problems I have sometimes. But I think it is pretty common when you are multitasking. In Internet marketing you are doing a lot of different tasks and you have to learn to prioritize first and then focus on the task at hand.
There is also the tendency to over analyze, as Ken Edwards has mentioned, and the need to make things perfect. All these factors make us less productive.
I am taking the challenge and see if I can be more productive not only next week but also the whole month. My challenge for next week is the following:
I will create a new WSO and launch it before the end of the week, maybe on Thursday. I have to start it from scratch and I do not know yet about what it will be.
To give you an idea, the last product took me around six month to complete. This one will be a shorter report, but still it will be a challenge for me to do it on time.
Wechito
Cool! Be sure to send me the link to your WSO thread on Thursday. :)
Hi Shane,
Can’t wait to see your product. There is no doubt that keeping focus, staying organized and getting stuff done is the number one problem for me right now.
Very good idea to put yourself out there with the close deadline as I am sure it will make you work much harder than if you didn’t put it out for all of us to see.
Thanks
Indeed. Nothing makes priorities clear like an imminent deadline. :)
Reminds me of Raymond Aaron. He advises 3 goals for each day – one that will satisfy you- that he calls the “minimum”; one that will stretch you – and that he calls the “target” and one that will amaze you – that’s the one he calls “outrageous”.
You’re going for outrageous, no doubt about it.
Go Shane, Go!!!
:-)
I’m cheering you on buddy!
My goal – really it’s focus and organisation. I create sites and promote them and yes I use Backlink battlplan, it’s superb, but each site I do seems to be a bit chaotic or incomplete somehow.
My challenge is to create and promote the site I am working on from tomorrrow fully, systematically and enjoy doing it too!!
For me, that’s Outrageous!
That’s an interesting concept. I’m definitely going for “outrageous” with this one.
A year ago, I did a challenge where I created tons of videos in a short time. I still made sure that they were quality videos and didn’t just produce crap. So, it was difficult, but it taught me a lot about video creation.
The way I see it, I am now “training” myself in a similar way, on the topics of product creation and product marketing. Training-by-doing (a lot), so to speak.
Thank you Shane! today you came across as a coach, an effective coach … even as you were talking, on this early Sunday morning, I was picking out what I was going to accomplish – I’m going to finish re-writing the neglected ebook waiting on my hard drive by Friday.
Have a good week! Fran
Awesome!
Reminds me that I also have an unfinished ebook on my hard-drive. But I might not complete it, because it’s topic isn’t that interesting.
Anyway, best of luck with your ebook!
Excellent, Shane! If your next product is anything like your productivity webinar or videos that I was fortunate to catch, no doubt it will be a valuable product.
This challenge is just the thing I needed at this point in my online business.
I’m taking it on!
Cheers.
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
Hi Shane & I dont know if I will be able to sleep from now to friday;
“will he get it finished, is Shane pulling his(short) hair out….is he maxing out on coffee…”
I not sure but I thought I could see a little bead of sweat running down your forehead after the words ‘and it will be ready for Friday’! :)
anyways – just to join in;
Ive been working on a product since July(yes July!) & I am giving myself to this Sunday the 6th to finish it & get the sales page up & going.
keep it up Shane we you can do it ;)
Yeah, I do dread the amount of work I’ll have to cram into a few days to get this all done. No doubt I can get the product itself done by Fiday, but setting up the payment processing and affiliate system, creating a sales-page, making a sales video… all that sometimes feels like more work than making the products themselves.
Also: All the best with your own product creation challenge! :)
hi Shane,
Great on releasing new product by Friday! Will this be something that affiliates can promote?
My goal this week is to work as much as I can on my day job to earn some extra money. Also I will set up a blogger blog for backlink battle plan, write 2 articles for Ezine
articles, spin them and submit them using the backlink Quickstart methods.
Thanks,
Tom
Yes, I’ll do my best to have it ready for affiliate promotion by Friday as well!
Sounds like a good challenge you’ve set yourself for the coming week!
Shane,
What a great idea..
Set an ambitious goal for ourselves and then have to follow it through to meet our deadline.
I have decided to fully structure my backlinking as well as then implementing my backlinking to my rigid plan.
My Chellenge – I will have a full run of backlinking done for my website by Friday. This includes the full BBP outline as well as the hubs also being built for the site.
Hey Chris,
I hope you’ll report back with ranking reports. :) There should be a bump in rankings a week or so later, once you get all that set up.
Hi Shane,
I can’t believe the pace you’re launching new products. This will be 3th in 5 weeks!
Congrats!
I’m strugling to get my new book in print. Editing a real book does cost sooo much more time. And having to wait on editors and covercreaters does take forever. I want to have the final draft of the new book on tuesday, then it must be ready for publishing.
Monday 7th feb one of my books (ebook) will be promoted in a big online newsletter, so I want to run a final splittest on covers before this date. I will start to work on this this evening.
I’ve got a lot more things on my plate, including switching shoppingcarts and payment provider (will save me more than 6k (euros) a year!
I think I’m in for your product. Being even 1 percent more productive will make me more money!
btw, I’m also interested in your last product, secockpit, but I don’t have the time to focus on that product at this moment.
Cheers,
jan
Hi Jan,
Publishing a printed book is also one of the things on my bucket list. Actually, I probably have to hurry, so I can finish it before printed books go out of fashion completely. :)
Good luck with the promo next week!
Shane,
This is by no means a criticism. It’s just you have touched on the importance of goal-setting for GTD (getting things done.) You are challenging yourself to produce on a specific date, no excuses – like Alex did such a nice job of pointing out.
What was mentioned in your comments is what is just as important from what I understand, (and why I’ve let myself off-the-hook many times.) Goals also need to be set, and adhered to, for the tasks required to get there. It is one thing to set the ‘big goal’. How to accomplish it requires the step-by-step process. It is also of course, a mental exercise in that one of those sub-tasks deadlines could be missed, yet the overall project still completed on time. I have come to believe we can accept those small ‘failures’ and reset. It is when we see the deadline for the overall project slipping away we can become over-whelmed and accept, “Oh well, I’ll get it right next time.”
You mentioned: “No doubt I can get the product itself done by Fiday, but setting up the payment processing and affiliate system, creating a sales-page, making a sales video…
I’m sure you have those ‘deadlines’ set as well, right?
Plus, love the fact you have put yourself ‘out there’ with the public declaration.
Hi Al,
Yep, that’s a very good point. In my personal approach, breaking down tasks into tangible steps is a very important factor. Plus, I take the whole thing a bit further with what I call micro-goal-setting. Not as complicated as it might sound.
Having one huge goal but no small, achievable steps is a recipe for frustration and something that is often overlooked by the “think BIG!” advocates, IMO. (not that thinking big is a bad thing)
Hi Shane,
Very inspiring video. And I am setting my goal for this week too. I have been giving the ‘no time’ excuse for not building a new website with the help of your WordPress guide. I have registered the domain but haven’t just started doing anything. I will complete it by this weekend.
Thanks for the motivation!!
Cheers
Rema.
Cool! Good luck with your personal challenge!
Hello Shane,
Turning my focus back local, I am pre-building 40 or so generic service related pages, (painters, plumbers etc) and getting them ranked near the top of page 1 on Google. The reason? To give me more confidence when comes time to pick up the phone and start selling. When they sell, they will be customized for the clients. I can do about 3 a day. So far, getting ranked has been a piece of cake. (BLBP is my secret weapon.)
To make a long story short, one of the pages is called Internet Marketing…which is actually a page for me. (I make pages for myself free of charge.) I’m revising it slightly to just go ahead and do something I have been thinking about for the last year…and that is local, one on one, IM training for beginners to intermediates.
The text has been written and the page built. Next comes three or four short vids for the page as well. I need to get this knocked out by mid week so I can get back to building the other pages. I’m going to toss it out and see what happens. Dunno if they are ready for it around here, but I know what I have to offer is far and away better than those get rich quick gimmicks they advertise on the radio. If successful, I can give the folks a righteous steer and help pay the bills in the process.
Thanks Shane for your Sunday vids!
Norm
That’s some good offline marketing advice right there. :)
You’ve got a great project/challenge lined up. I’d love to hear an update next week.
me too spent alot of time trying to find a good wordpress theme,would you share if you find a good one :) thanks.
Dude, there are too many good ones. My go-to for themes are mostly Elegant Themes.
This is really a good thing, to “make” us challenging ourselves. I will take this on, as staying focused and actually doing also boring tasks is a huge problem for me.
I need to do the keyword research for a new site and plan and execute my backlinking tasks each day and actually do them for the 2 existing sites.
It would be a good idea and also interesting, if all commenters here came back next Sunday to this page and let everyone know in a small comment, if they actually have achieved what they wanted during this week.
This would act as testing out your own commitment and show how well we all stick to a goal we put up. Would you all agree? (Shane could give us a little reminder in his next Sunday-update invitation?)
I agree: I’d love to hear updates next week and I’ll make sure to mention it again! From the replies so far, it looks like it will be a busy week for many! :)
Hi Shane
followed through and got the review done
thanks for giving me the mental push
cheers
Ken
First success story! Congratulations on reaching your goal. Time to set the next deadline, I’d say. :)
OK Shane, it’s on. Deliver by Friday, or else. We’re holding you to it.
(How’s that for a little extra pressure!)
Absolutely. Currently, I’m pretty well on track for delivery on Friday. Although I haven’t gotten much else done, today…
Hi Shane
talking of getting things done – I have been sitting on the fence on wether to purchase backlinks battleplan
couple of quick questions
to do one full round of links how much time would you need to put in
would you do the same process for every single page on your site that you wanted to rank for on a given keyword
many thanks in advance
Ken
Andy Williams reported that the first run took him about 10 hours.
Subsequent runs will be quicker, since you won’t have to create new accounts and won’t have to repeat all of the steps.
Of course, if you have content created for you, rather than creating it yourself, that would also cut down the time necessary by quite a big margin.
For link-building I treat each page separately, since I’m always working to get one page ranked for one particular keyword. Most of the steps in BBP can and should be applied to individual pages on your site.
Regards,
Shane
Hi Shane. – It it Tuesday….. and I am sure that today is a monster production day for you. I recently read a Self Discipline report that is very helpful in getting the Mr. Hyde inside of us all (the guy that says things are too much work and you are not really that good at it anyway..) to quiet down and pitch in and help. Your blog post is another step in foiling my Mr. Hyde’s biggest weapon: Perfectionism. OUCH — I have wasted so much time in preparation but NOT taken action because I am not certain that it will come out perfectly. Even though time after time – the best results and the most learning always come from simply diving in. Thanks for that!
I am focused on Friday for a deadline too — and knowing I am not alone is a great help.
Hi Scott,
Perfectionism is usually my biggest hindrance to getting things done as well. On the other hand, it’s always a balancing act, because I do want my products to be polished and high quality. The trick is to know where to draw the line between working on improving the quality in a meaningful way and just getting lost in details.
All the best with your own challenge!
Continuous improvement is how I look at it. Perfectionism can be a good motivator.
Look forward to reviewing your new product.
I challenge myself to review all your keyword research material and get more familiar with SECockpit. Adjusting the focus in this area has become my top priority, thanks to you!