How to get your time back and still make sales like clockwork

What would you do if you had an extra 3-5 hours of leftover time each week?  Play a round of golf?  Serve a needy cause?  Plan a quality outing with your family?  Just plain ‘ol relax?

Go ahead and pencil your answer into next week’s schedule, because there are three ideas that will “a.d.d.” an extra 3-5 hours of disposable time to your week. :)

These ideas have been extremely helpful in freeing up time for our members and team.  Might as well add your name to the list too!

1. ACCESSORIZE.   Something that helps tremendously in managing your time is the use of ready-to-go “accessories”.  The idea here is to create an “accessory” (more on this in a minute) that will help you complete daily or frequent tasks much more quickly. 

Here are some of the ones we use everyday…

Templates.  With an online business, you'll find that you spend a lot of time writing salesletters and content pieces. So, have a standard template which is full formatted that you can work from in creating new salesletters.  A good template has placeholders (“Main Headline Goes Here”) in spots throughout the page for headline, story, subheadlines, bullet points, call to action, guarantee, etc.  Instead of reformatting from scratch, you can be ready to just write. 

Swipe files.  There's are a huge help if you ever suffer from writer's block.  Start collecting:  email subject lines, universal blog topics, ezine article topics, titles, openings, bullet points, search phrases, types (of articles, of blog posts, of products, of list mailings, etc) and so forth.  The idea here is to have a set of easy access idea starters and prompts so you don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking up what “angle” to write from. 

Copy and Paste files.  Ever get the same question from customers?  Find that your coaching clients solicit the same kind of advice?  Do you type the same email over and over again?  Plug in the same information into a form?  Anything that you type out more than 2-3 times should become a copy and paste message that you store in a named text file, email predefined or form filler software program.  Instead of typing it out again, I simply click a button or two and time is saved.

Checklists.  We rely heavily on my checklists.  Not only do they make you more productive in general (a clear list of things to do will have that effect on you; better still is seeing items checked off!), but they also save you a lot of time trying to remember certain aspects of a task that you may not be proficient at. For best results PRINT THEM OUT!  We have them for almost everything we do.

Software.  If it can be automated or semi-automated by a software program, app or tool, you should be all for it.  You can save time every day by using a password program, a piece of software that fills in forms that require your personal details (name, address, phone number, etc.), autoresponders, email filters (for sorting and prioritizing) and so forth.  

2. DISCARD.   While “accessories” create leftover time by completing tasks faster, the “discard” category creates leftover time by NOT completing tasks at all!  The idea here is priceless:  if something on your schedule (or you are considering for your schedule) isn’t necessary, simply don’t do it.

It's important to stress that we're not talking about becoming a procrastinator here.  That’s not the point at all.  Procrastination is another enemy!  What we're talking about here is determining which activities are important enough to include on your schedule, and which are not.  By eliminating the unimportant things you can free up time to spend at your discretion.  Let's look at three simple guidelines for determining if something should be “discarded”. 

First, discard anything that doesn’t really matter.  It may sound really cool that you have a 10,000 Facebook® fans … but does it really matter to your business?  (For some, the answer is YES.  For others, it is definitely a NO. You can't take "Likes" to the bank)  Do you really have to get that blog setup BEFORE you get started selling your program?  Can you get by with three articles on your affiliate resources page instead of five?  Anything that doesn’t really matter, discard it.

Second, discard anything that doesn’t have a significant impact on your business.  A step beyond that is looking at the amount of impact an activity has on your business. If you spend 10 hours a week on Linkedin™ and that brings in 100 unique visitors to your site but you can instead work 5 hours a week as a guest blogger to bring in 100 unique visitors, then make the switch.  Whenever possible, look to upgrade on how you use your time so you get a better result.  Oftentimes, you’ll also create LEFTOVER TIME in the process.   Replace activities that produce minimal results with higher concentrated activities that produce the same or better results in less time.

Third, discard things that have a low profit return on time investment.  Said another way, devote the majority of your time on activities that directly bring in profit.  EG. If you like getting free traffic from affiliates then you should spend most of your time on creating new products and resources for them to use t. That's going to be the best use of your time since your affiliates, partners provide traffic for you.  It would be a less valuable use of your time if you spend time posting on Facebook™ when new offers are what your affiliates want.   Spend most of your time on things that MAKE MONEY.  If it’s not making you money, stop doing it.  

3. DELEGATE.   Another thing that will absolutely free up time is for you to become a manager and not a marketer.  That is, you stop doing everything yourself and start relying on other people to take some of your workload from you.  Whether this is outsourcing to a vendor at Upwork.com, handed off to an intern, or split with a partner, getting others to do some of your work can quickly free up your time.

Here are three scenarios highly recommended for delegating some of your tasks…

When you are stuck.  If you get to a step in any process that you cannot complete on your own, it’s time to consider getting someone else to do it for you.  While you may be able to spend the next several hours (or days) figuring it out on your own, why would you?  Aside from the frustration that is certain to weigh upon you, it’s also a complete waste of your time.  Unless it’s a skill that you need to master (and even then I’d hire someone to show me how to do it initially), your time is better spent on something else.

When others can do it faster and more skillfully.  You might be able to create graphics but is that your area of expertise?  A designer is going to be much faster than you and much better than you in that area.  There’s no reason to do everything yourself – that’s what experts are for in every field.  When your sick, you go to the doctor.  When you're in legal need, you see an attorney.  When you need a webpage created, you should call your web guy.  Your time is worth more to your business when you use it on revenue-generating tasks instead of other things which someone else could do faster and better.  

When it costs you less than your time investment.  This is a big one. Look at how much an hour of your time is worth.  Let’s say it’s $100 an hour doing revenue-generating tasks (product creation, coaching, etc.).  If it’s going to take you an hour to create a handful of banners, buttons and other promotional graphics for your new product and a graphics guy will do the set for $27, what do you think you should do?  You're going to hire him right?. 

Why?  Because you're trading $27 for $100 when you do.  You could save $27 by doing it yourself, but you'd lose the hour and the $100 you would have made on revenue-generating tasks.  It’s simple math.  Whenever you can get someone else to do something for less than what your time is worth doing it yourself, it’s a no-brainer to delegate/outsource.

If you pick one or more of these ideas and simply begin implementing them into your weekly schedule, you’ll find that you have a LOT extra “leftover” time each week to spend as you please. :)