How to Work on Your Online Business Even When You Have Offline Work

In recent months I have been struggling with a challenge that I think a lot of online marketers deal with. The fact that we have a life offline. I have two offline jobs actually. One that provides a fairly predictable schedule with a relatively stable flow of income and limited demands outside scheduled hours and a second job that varies from absolutely nothing to sucking every minute of my waking attention. Now, the pay is hourly and it's a pretty good rate ($50/hour), but as most of you that have been in business know work is usually about more than just the "billable" hours". There are also the email messages back and forth, phone calls, the 15 minutes of looking at my calendar trying to figure out when I'm going to schedule someone.

Maybe I should take a lesson from lawyers and just start the clock each and every time I see an email in my inbox from a client, or the phone rings, but realistically they are not all "billable" problem solving calls. When this business cranks up it can be stressful and truth be told as my online work grows I hope to phase out some of the most stressful of these tasks. But, the problem is that our financial situation is not such that I can outright drop my offline work. The other problem is my offline work takes me away from building my online work and you can see where that's heading. I feel trapped many times because I don't have the time or energy to move forward with the online work and I don't want to drop things and let them go back to the abyss of 10-20 dollar earnings a month.

So, I've been trying a few strategies to still manage to "keep moving forward" with my online work. I've made no attempt to disguise the fact that I have outsourced more and more work in the last year. In many cases my decision is pure cost benefit. If I pay someone $10 to do the work it would take me several hours to muddle through.... then it's worth it to me. As long as that work is done well. With outsourcing various projects I have found that your mileage will vary. I've seen the results of some of the outsourcing I've done and frankly am sorry that I paid for a certain task or provider. I really have found some great resources though.

Outsourcing still takes time from what I've found. For the large part of several months that's part of the time I devoted my Friday's to. The first part was correspondence catch up for my other work, but the second half was "marching orders" and outsourcing. It could take a couple hours to outline everything that I wanted done though and many Friday's I just wasn't at a good mental state to try to organize that after having worked 60-80 hours Monday through Thursday.

So, I went back to an old fashioned, low tech idea. One day each week I usually get a chance for a real sit down lunch while I'm out. Now, most days it's not that luxurious.... most days it's fast food in about 5-15 minutes between appointments, but one day a week I really get to sit down and enjoy a lunch. Sometimes I'm lucky and get a few more chances at a real lunch, but I can pretty well count on one a week. I carry a spiral notebook and pen with me.

Back in my opening months of my "broad and sweeping plan to take over the world" as I like to refer to my online marketing (pinky and the brain cartoon reference there....) I would brainstorm every lunch and use my notebook to record my ideas. I started by just making a page for each site and jotting down ideas for articles as they came to me. Then, I started looking around me and out the window and getting ideas for different types of websites. For instance, signage is important, so many businesses and other groups use it.... I wonder if.... Those "wonder if's" or "what ifs" can be pretty powerful. Write everything down.

These days the notebook is a slightly different role. Yes, I still brainstorm on article ideas and site ideas, but I'm more concerned with "what should I do next for each site". In other words, which keywords should I target for growth in traffic, how do I market the site next?

Of course, you need to check keyword information online, but brainstorming for ideas is pretty easy offline. Chart out what you need to do next. Is there a certain page that should be getting traffic and hasn't - make some notes on it to work out what needs to be done next - break things up into small tasks.

Now, where I'm going with this is hopefully easy to see. You use that brainstorming time to start to carve up the tasks related to your sites into nice, small, manageable, well defined pieces. That means it's easy for you, if you have time to go ahead and get them done. It's also easy if you are outsourcing then to take your notes, type them up and send it along to your virtual assistant or chosen outsourcers and say, "this is what I want you to do".

I love carrying around the notebook... I use it for other things as well, but it's much better for brainstorming than anything else I've used. I prefer the small pocket size notebooks with lots of pages. (The chubby notebooks as they call them.) I've tried a laptop before, but it's limiting in many ways. I'm a fast typer, but sometimes the platform gets in the way of the task. Laptops have so many things to distract you. The internet is close at hand, email, stats all of which can suck time like a blackhole.

So, do yourself a favor - get a small notebook and start structuring what work needs to be done in those small moments of peace like lunch or before bed. I'd even vote to keep the notebook on the nightstand for those middle of the night brilliant ideas. I've already had one of those that I built a site out of and was glad to have it handy. (For me it was the second time the idea had hit, but I had long since forgotten it.)