I know many successful internet marketers who make more money than a Fortune 500 executives. I have also come across many wannabees rookies who never make enough to get their first Adsense check. A big difference between the two groups of people is “time suck”.

Productive people are great at avoiding time sucks. Those activities and situations that drain time and energy without returning any significant benefit. Here are some common time sucks to avoid.

Twitter – Yes, you can be profitable on twitter but most people that use twitter do it for personal enjoyment and this can be a big time suck. Lets say you twitter once an hour. Each time you twitter you spend 2 minutes reading the your friends tweets, then you take 1 minute to think of something to write, then you take 2 minutes to write your message and get it to fit 140 characters. That is 5 minutes a twitter and almost a full hour every day. What are you getting in return for that full hour? A few laughs and some friendships? In that one hour you could have written an great article or emailed 15 link requests or used Twitter to turn a profit by tweeting links to intersting content on your website.

Consulting Proposals – At what point should you provide your prospect a detailed proposal? If you don’t submit a proposal you can’t be awarded the job. But if you take the time to prepare a proposal for everyone you will never have time to properly service your key prospects. I find it helpful to first ask for a timeframe, requested goals and size of their budget before I take the time to create a proposal. If someone thinks that a #1 ranking is only worth $100 and they want it done yesterday then it would probably be smart to kindly decline to submit a proposal. By reducing the number of proposals you create, you just might actually end up with more business by being able to better create and improve the proposals you do submit to the more likely prospects.

Email Everywhere – We all struggle to keep up with our email since email can be critical to keeping up open communication lines. It can also be a time suck that leads you down that rabbit hole of unproductivity. Have you ever traded jokes back and forth with emails. Before you know it you have exchanged 20 emails in 30 minutes of time. That 30 minutes could probably have been used on something more profitable. Ever have a stranger email you asking a question? I love being nice and helping people but often those questions can take over 30 minutes to research, respond and find the links to the material the stranger could have found if they were good at using Google. I have learned to never underestimate the amount of “suck” email can be. I am not even going to mention the time it takes to clean out the inbox with the newsletters and other automated emails you get because you have never taken the time to unsubscribe or turn them off.

There are many time sucks. I would recommend keeping a timer on your desk and tracking how you spend every minute of your day. You will certainly find some activities that suck up your time and are not directly driving you profit. I am not advocating that you cut them all out. There are some activities that can be a big indirect help and mental health boost. You should be aware of where your time goes so you can better maximize it.
Carpe Diem aka get your ass in gear

I am having a great Friday morning.  I am truly giggling myself to death.  Why you ask?  Well because I did the right thing and was a nice guy and showed someone how 35,000 of their backlinks were accidentally misplaced.  I could have ignored it but I decided to pass it on as free advice besides I found it very funny that a mistake this big would not have been caught by themselves.

So I told my former contact at that company (let’s call him Bob) that they implemented a javascript redirect instead of a 301 redirect when they rebranded to a new domain name and it is causing them indexing issues.  Bob naturally freaked out and started making calls.  The next day Bob tells me that it is not as big an issue as they originally thought and thanked me for letting them know.  Huh?  Bob seemed too calm.

I was not sure Bob understood the situation properly.  Yea it is a not a site wide problem (old domain has over 120,000 links).  It is an isolated problem that is much smaller.  It only impacts one page that has only 35,000 links.  I guess you could call me an alarmist because I would not be calm if 35,000 links was not properly redirected.  So I called Bob and I was explaining the sitatuation to make sure Bob understood it fully I stumbled across another anomaly on a different company site. 

On a seperate domain his company had properly implemented a 301 redirect except it pointed to a 302 which then redirected to a 302 which then redirected to a third 302 before it finally hit the proper destination page.  For some reason i find that long trail of redirects very funny.  I would not use it as an example of the best way to handle old backlinks when you move to a new domain

I just received a nice email asking if I would be interested in doing some SEO work for an affiliate site.  It is nice when I’m asked to work on projects, but 99% of the time it doesn’t make sense for me to do work on someone else’s affiliate site.  Why not just build my own site(s) for that industry. 

There are some exceptions to the rule like :  #1 If it is an established site that has a bug that needs temporary help, #2 It is a friend asking for a favor, #3 It  is a brick and mortar company with pre-built traffic that is looking to start an online presence. #4 You want to establish a long-term online presence and are willing to pay me a large sum of money to jumpstart it for you .

If your affiliate site project does not meet one of those exceptions and/or you do not have have a good reason why I couldn’t just build my own site here is some free SEO advice.

• Get links (you can post on several different forums that allow links in the signature)
• Get more links (contact relevant sites for reciprocal links)
• Get even more links (become a DMOZ editor, add your site to it & other directories)
• Don’t interlink all of the sites that you own
• Don’t host all of your sites on the same ip address
• Have unique content on every page (i’m talking text not different affiliate links)
• When writing try to include nouns, brand names – ya know keywords
• Use 1 or 2 keywords in your title tag and make the titles different
• Try to answer a question or need that users will be searching for
• Do something that no other site is doing, don’t be a cookie cutter site