Work Less, Earn More. Using the 80/20 Rule to Increase Productivity and Profit!

I don’t know about you, but for me as a child grow up I would look at successful businesses and think:

I would love to be the person who owns this business!

Notice that I didn’t want to work for the business, or even run the business. My whole goal was to own the business – because then I would be making a heap of money, and have everyone else doing all the work for me.

I’m not sure if that appeals to you, but to me as a young guy about the enter the workforce – this sounded like a dream!

That Was Over 10 Years Ago Now…

And I did go down the business road. I started out at University studying a ‘Bachelor of Business’ because I wanted to be that business owner, but found that they wanted to teach me how to work in one of those businesses (not run it) – so I quit after a year.

After that I decided that I needed to start building a big business if I was going to one day be able to live in my massive house and take one call a day to check how things were going (while living the dream).

That Started Long String Of Business Failures…

When I stopped to think of all the business ideas that I have had and the ones that I did and failed – I was surprised by the quantity.

Here is an abridged version:

• A Flyer Design Business
• Sourcing Properties for Real Estate Investors
• Website Design
• Online Golf Reservation Website
• Importing/Ebay Business
• Website Design (again)
• Product Marketing For A Architecture Firm
• Import/Distribution Of New Iced Tea Brand

I am sure there are a lot more, but that is enough to make me depressed at the bucket loads of potential that I let slip by.

Looking back, each one of these business could have been successful in their own right, but being the person I am – I gave up before the idea had the chance to flourish. You see, I am an ideas person. I thrive on creativity and find that processes and hard work seem to be incredibly large hurdles for me to pass.

Ideas Are A Dime A Dozen…

I remember frequently visiting entrepreneur forums discussing the latest ideas and seeing what everyone else was doing around the world, and every so often there would be one person who would say that they were ‘working on something that was going to be huge, but they didn’t want to say anything about it because people might steal their idea.’

This seemed logical to me until someone replied saying, ‘Everyone else is working on their own thing, and if anyone did copy you, the chances of them having the same drive and passion that you have for your project is incredibly small. It’s not the idea that counts – it is the effort that you put in to make that idea a reality!’

That is entirely true, and I knew that I couldn’t legitimately call myself an entrepreneur until I not only have a creative business idea, but I also followed it through to success.

I Turned My Attention To The Internet…

Now I know if you look through my list of business failures, you will see a lot of internet orientated ideas. However,  these were all targeted at bricks and mortar businesses and everyday golfers.

In my time scouring those entrepreneur forums I came across the concept of ‘making money online’. The whole idea was that you get people to visit your website, get people to click through to affiliate websites and then when they buy – you get paid. Seemed like a simple concept, so I decided to give it go!

I started blogging, had a great time and for once – stuck something out for long enough to see some success. In about 18 months, I was able to grow my blog from nothing to over 1,500 subscribers and was starting to gain a lot of influence withing my niche. The problem was, that I was working crazy hours (like most entrepreneurs) – but was not making very much money (I think my best month was just $400).

I spent all my time focusing on relationships and writing what I thought my readers wanted to hear – but my readers were not the ones that were making me any money. In fact it was the complete opposite. while my commentators were making my blog look incredibly active and successful, it was actually the older posts that were getting a little search engine traffic that were making the sales!

Then I Discovered The 80/20 Rule!

If you haven’t heard of the 80/20 rule before, it;s really just an incredibly simple productivity guide that states:

‘80% of the results come from 20% of the effort’

So in my case, 80% (or more) of my profits, came from 20% (or less) of my efforts. You see, I wasn’t focusing on search engine optimization (SEO)  in the slightest. Yet it was what was making me money.

So, all I had to do to make more money, was to put more of my focus onto SEO.

What Is The 20% For You?

The 80/20 rule is evident in all aspects of life and all businesses and can be seen in countless different forms.

80% of the complaints, comes from 20% of the clients.

80% of your traffic, comes from 20% of your sources.

20% of your staff will do 80% of your work.

Once you start to realize this – and look out for it. You will be able to fine tune your business to a productivity machine.

You can either optimize you business so that the 20% is fine tuned and the 80% is maintained, or you can drop the 80% altogether and put 100% of your effort into the 20% that is getting all the results (and freeing up a whole heap of time!)

Over the last 6 months, I have been working on the second option, and really ‘trimming the fat’ so to speak and fine tuning my online assets. This has allowed me to systematize the process that is working for me, even to the degree where I am outsourcing a lot of the work  (making that dream I had as a kid of being the business owner – and not just the worker or boss, a much closer reality).

Tom is an Australian blogger that is currently researching and trialing the opportunity created by outsourcing jobs overseas. You can download his latest free ebook GEO Arbitrage, which explains it all in an easy to read format.

Pareto Principle: The Idea of Getting More through Less Effort

We have been taught, trained and possibly ‘brainwashed’ with the concept of in order to get what we want, we have to do more than the day before. For example, to get huge incomes through Internet, there are a lot of tips and advice… especially through ‘make money online‘ blogs’ authors who consider themselves as experts, are also telling us the same thing.

However, there is one question for you – are those advice and tips are absolutely accurate?

I do always believe that there are always alternatives in everything that exist in this world as long as we keep looking for those alternatives and keep pushing ourselves to think outside our box.

There are always two sides for a coin, right?

What is Pareto Principle?

For me, there is an alternative for the idea of  ‘work more to earn more’. This alternative is called Pareto’s principle – a principle that was first introduced in 1906 by Vilfredo Pareto. This principle has also been called other various names such as; the Law of Vital Few, the 80/20 rule and the Factor of Sparsity.

Pareto invented this principle as the result of his simple observation – 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of population and vice versa. Through this, he realized that X amounts of efforts will not necessarily create X amount of good results – the result can be more than the X value or lesser than what we expected. He discovered there is the existence of imbalance element between the input and output equation and this element existed in the observations that he carried out in other countries through different situations.

The key of this principle is there is existence of imbalance element in the ‘input and output’ equation and if we can identify for the 20% portion of input that will create 80% of the output portion, we will able to work in more effective and efficient way. This is because we will not waste most of our time for the 80% portion of input that will only create 20% output portion.

However, the accuracy of the percentage is not the main idea – the imbalance element that matters. The portion can be turned to 1% into 80% or 40% into to 60%.

How can you integrate this principle into your site?

The first step that you must take is to install and integrate in any statistic plugin or toll that will help you to identify the efforts that generate the most returns in terms of incoming traffics or sales. The tools that I recommend are Google Analytics for incoming traffic statistic and MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate for affiliate sales tracking.

Through these tools, you will able to track the performance of your site.

My case study - Huzzer Magazine: WordPress Seems So Easy!

I have also integrated into the idea of this principle. This is because I know that only the small portion of my contents will attract huge traffic and due to this reason, I have used a few ways to push the articles that belongs to the ‘20%’ portion of input that will create ‘80%’ of output i.e. traffics for my blog to gain more exposure especially for the first time visitors. These are the steps that I have taken:

• Put up Most Popular Posts widget at the sidebar as this widget will help to push the best content of my blog as only the articles that most of people read will appear.
• I installed Yet Another Related Posts plugin and put it at the end of each articles as this will ensure that other articles that are less popular will get notified by my blog visitors and not just ‘died’.
• I will only focus in limited number of social networking buttons such as Twitter and Facebook which give me the most incoming links by putting their buttons in the beginning and end of my contents. By putting a lot of buttons, they definitely don’t have the amount of time to hit all of the buttons. We are asking for them for a favor – so let it be quick and easy!
• I use minimalist design approach for my site as it will help to retain readers’ attention. With ‘messy’ design, it will keep distracting our visitors as there are a lot of things to be seen rather than only our contents. Let our blog have proper structured so that our readers can read the article first, then see related articles that they may find interesting, hit the social networking buttons and finally leave comments. It is better if we do not change this standard flow.
• I have only minimal amount of sidebar widgets in my blog’s sidebar which are value added to the visitors. Our visitors’ main intention to come to our blog is to read the content that they are interested in – not to know what is our blog’s Alexa ranking or amount of spam that we have captured.

Pareto’s principle is a very flexible concept as it can be applied with anything and at anywhere. The most important thing that we must know is there is imbalance element in this world and if we can identify the factor that contribute to us more, we will able to earn more with less effort as we will know and possibly stop doing the stuff that consumes most of our time, but brings less returns.

I believe that great life comes not necessarily through a lot of effort. It comes when we take the right actions and consistently focusing on them.

This guest post is written by Helmi Asyraf Abdullah, the author of Huzzer Magazine – Wordpress Seems So Easy! He believes that there are always two sides of a coin which is the main reason he is supporting DoFollow commenting movement.

At the moment, he is offering 5 internet marketing tools and special gifts through his collaboration with Obox Design, premium themes developer for those who subscribe with Huzzer Magazine.

One Bloggers Strategy For Making Money Online

Try To Remain Positive Even Though Your World Is Rocked

Not so easy to do even though it is said that there is a bright side to every dark moment in your life if you look hard enough. However, only a strong person or a true believer would be able to view the loss of a bunch of money in the stock market as an opportunity rather than just a flat-out disaster. I mean we are talking about money here, a substantial amount of money, gone, poof! Just like that.

It’s what happened to me several years ago and it’s one of those life-changing events that, even if you are so deep in self-pity that you can’t recognize it at the time, has a positive spin on the rest of your life. As it turned out it’s the thing that set me firmly on  the launching pad to the blogosphere. You see, it was at that moment that my wife and I decided to invest our money in ourselves, not in a place, where, if you don’t know what you are doing is more like gambling than investing.

As just your average investors it was a financial set-back that at our age was going to be tough to recover from, strictly from a standpoint of limited funds to invest and the time it takes to ripen any investment. But worse than that, it made us feel helpless and stupid.

Baby Boomers On A Short Leash

So where does a baby boomer couple looking at trying to retire and quit the grind put their few and hard-earned investment dollars, a place where their investment would not only be safe but would go forth, be fruitful and multiply? Why, the Internet, of course!

That’s not to say the decision we made to yank all our money out of the stock market and invest it in an Internet venture was an easy one, in fact, everyone thought we were crazy! But where else but the Internet, would an opportunity exist for two people in their mid-fifties, to have any kind of chance to make up their losses in time to enjoy a secure retirement?

If We Build It Will They Come?

I had some basic computer skills back then and a desire to write for a living, however, a best selling novel was beyond my capabilities. As Dirty Harry used to say, “a man’s got to know his limitations” and after being burned by investing in something I knew literally nothing about I decided I needed to write about those things that I  did know – first-hand, and from personal experience, things that interested me and that I had a passion for.

Ok, so based on that idea I decided to build a network of blogs and websites where I would post original, keyword loaded material on a regular basis, get noticed by the search engines, sit back and wait for the cash that advertisers would throw at me to have a presence on one of my nichey little blogs. After all, it’s the reason I became a blogger in the first place, I hoped it would be the strategy that would result in income that would subsidize whatever retirement income I could salvage from bad investing decisions. I suspected that one blog making a ton of money was out of the question as I am not a Huffington kind of person, but a hundred websites, each making a dollar a day, was more than doable. Oh, was I about to learn a valuable lesson in making money online.

Making Money Online Is Doable But…

In reality, making money online is not about those “Secrets to Internet Wealth” programs out there that want to tell us all how to get rich for only two easy payments of $39.95. I am sorry to be the one to say it out loud BUT making money online, really making money online is about patience, it’s about an investment of incredible amounts of time, it’s about dedication and a belief in yourself, and it’s about doing things the right way, no shortcuts, no scammy little schemes, just hard work. There are those who do not want to hear the truth about what it takes to make money online, they would rather dream that making money online is easy, just a few measly hours a week will have you making thousands a month. Uh huh, us real bloggers grounded in reality know better.

I’m here to tell you that making money online is definitely doable, I’m making it as we speak. Maybe not the big dollars that everyone thinks us bloggers make but every day is encouraging. I learned early on from a webmaster that I have much respect for that if you follow best practices and build your blogs with the reader in mind, that is, make your blog the best it can be, you can believe that the rest will follow.

Now with 70 plus websites I am on the road to making even more money online and you can do it too! Just pay attention to the valuable information that the guys here at MakingMoneyOnline.com are happy to share and what the people within their circle of friends can teach you about blogging just by reading their posts, articles that are chock-full of the kinds of blogging tips that will help YOU become a successful blogger and how YOU can start making money online!

Revenue Generators

Here are the revenue generators that have been contributing to my bottom line with steady (not yet spectacular) income:

Google Adsense

Text Link Ads

Amazon Affiliate Programs

Direct Ad Sales

Featured Links on Link Directory

Other Affiliate Programs

In-Text Links (Kontera)

Each of these revenue generators contributes daily to my goal of reaching $1.00 per day in ad revenue per site. I am encouraged each time I check my stats and it’s really gratifying to see the hard work starting to pay off with actual cash in my pocket!

My network is my legacy, it’s debt free because I didn’t get ahead of myself and only introduced blogs or stores to the network as I could afford to do so, one at a time. So, every penny of profit goes right into my pocket!

My advice to you, step away from the TV set and get in front of a computer! Blogging is fun and profitable, it’s still in it’s infancy, anyone can do it, and it’s FREE! Start your own legacy by building YOUR own blog today!

This guest post was written by Dick Schaefer AKA, the Boomerblogger. You can see more of Dick’s work on some of his blogs: My-Baby-Pet.com, BoomerRVer.com,  or contact him via his hub site: LeisureAdvertising.com

Interested in Guest Blogging? Click Here for details.

How to Use HubPages to Make Money Online

There are thousands of ways to make money online and HubPages is one of the best ways to get started with it, especially if you are good at writing and new to making money online. Joining HubPages is free and easy and you don’t have to invest anything. You can write about anything you want whenever you want so you won’t be feeling the pressure to keep a posting frequency. And best of all you could be making money while writing about the things you like.

How to Make Money from HubPages

There are some direct ways and some indirect ways that you can make money with HubPages. First let’s look at the direct ways you can make money online.

• Adsense – HubPages is a revenue sharing site, whenever you build a hub (a page about something you like) Adsense ads are automatically inserted to it. They use a service called YieldBuild which calculates the best possible places for the Adsense ads so you can be sure that your Adsense ads are optimized. In your settings you can set your Adsense publisher id and you will get 60% of the impressions from your hub. Now some will argue that instead of getting the 60% of page impressions why not write a blog post about it and get all the impressions to you. Problem is it will be pretty hard for you to rank for those terms in Google and get search engine traffic. HubPages is a trusted site by Google and it’s easy to get good ranking for your Hubs and because of the internal linking structure of HubPages you will get lots of traffic from other related hubs as well. All these benefits mean you have a better chance to make more money from HubPages.
• Kontera – You can also enable Kontera ads in your hubs so you have more chances of earning money. I personally don’t use Kontera in my hubs because I think they get in the way of good user experience but you might want to check them out and see the results in your hubs.
• Amazon Widget – You can also add Amazon widgets to your hubs. You can set your Amazon partner id in the affiliate setting and when a user buys something via your widget you get a commission.

Those are some of the direct ways you can make money with HubPages but there are more advantages to using HubPages which can indirectly help your earnings.

• Creating Hubs for Affiliate products – I have mentioned this before in the article as well, Google places a lot of trust in HubPages and your Hub about some affiliate product can easily outrank your blog post about that same affiliate product. Of course building back links is the best way to rank in Google but because of the internal linking structure and the trust Google places in Hub Pages you have a definite advantage while using Hub Pages.
• To Build Back links – Hub Pages is a great way to build back links to your blog or website. It’s relatively easy to get a good PR for your Hubs and as long as you maintain a Hub score of more than 75 you will get nofollow back links from your pages. My blog about Make Money Blogging is ranked well for some good key words and the links from my hubs played a major role in doing that.

I joined HubPages in the hope of getting some back links… but I got back links, money and a whole lot of knowledge as well. Since it’s free to join you’ve got nothing to lose and I assure you, you have a lot to gain. Check out my hub about “Want one-way back links? Try guest posts” to get an idea of a hub. I’m sure you can find the create my own button in there

This “Guest Post” was written by Nishadha  Silva. You can learn more about  Nishadha at Make Money Blogging.