Avoid the WA black hole
WA can become to total time sink. If you participate in everything WA has to offer, you will never get anything done.
So how do I prioritize my WA participation?
The training is superb. Follow it step by step and you will be successful.
Using this blog to record you journey to success will provide you a record of what you think is important in your life. I try to post a blog at least once a week.
Providing traing not only fixes what you teach in your mind, it provides a record of important stuff you might otherwise forget.
Using personal messaging to work with a few other selected WA members can help strengthen relationships and foster ways we can work together.
MagiStudios video training is a treasure trove of information.
And of course, being able to use the "need help" feature at the top of each screen is a service that makes WA worthwhile if it offered nothing else. I've never failed to get an answer to a problem within just a few minutes.
Then there is webhosting. Being able to host 50 websites for $50/month is unheard of.
Now, the potential time wasters.
Following: I try to follow everyone whose in the top 200 and everyone who follows me. I get over 100 emails a day from people I follow. No way I can read them all. If you want me to read your post, give it a catchy title. I pick a half dozen a day to look at and respond to.
Live chat: I have a terrible time trying to follow a thread when a bunch of people are talking about different things.
Conclusion
Love WA and have to be careful not to spend to much time here.
How are you using WA? What do you find helpful and how do you balance WA with you actual money makeing internet business?
Recent Comments
77
I know exactly what you mean. When I first started here I would spend hours reading other people's blog posts. I don't want to say I "wasted" time because I did learn a lot. But I simply spent way too many hours doing this.
Just recently I deleted over 3,500 e-mails of WA notifications. That took up a lot of room in my e-mail box!
I screen my WA emails daily for stuff I want to respond to. The rest goes in a "LATER FILE" I intend to look at it later but rarely do. Anything in the "later file" older than a month gets deleted.
Hello! I was just thinking along the same lines earlier today. I am guilty of this. I can easily spend 3 or 4 hours here in WA and not do a thing to my website, when I need to try and build my business. But I love helping people and that’s what I truly try to do and that is the mindset we need to have but at the same time, we need to build out our business.
There definitely has to be a balance in it all. Sometimes it’s hard to find it. Thank you for this post! I may write a blog here in a bit with some similarities but I promise I ain’t coping you. Lol! It’s just been heavy on my mind today. Thanks again! Have a great night.
David
I got the idea for this post from a comment I made to another WAer. I’m honored if you got an idea from me.
"I get over 100 emails a day from people I follow. No way I can read them all."
"... give it a catchy title."
True!
How I dealt with that is like you stated: "..If you want me to read your post, give it a catchy title.", but I went a step further. I set my email platform to filter out emails that consumes my inbox = "mark as read". Remember, I didn't say block, spam it, or trash it. Simply make all those incoming emails to "mark as read" automatically so it does not interfere with the must see emails. Then, when time permits, I would go over those emails, and those catchy headlines got the click to view :).
Responding to 100 emails a day could be a full time job. In the interest of making decent progress on the training and/or building out your site(s) you must become selective.
You can do this by modifying your email notification list. This is done by going to your WA settings (click on the arrow to the right of your profile image in upper left side bar. Scroll to the bottom and find Email Notification Settings. Selectively reduce the notification boxes you have checked.
When I was a WA newbie I got sucked into the "black hole" of needing to have the highest WA ranking possible. I spent more time interacting here than on focusing on building and SEO'ing my site. I got all the way up to rank #30, when I realized I hadn't made a penny yet with my niche site.
So I decided to re-prioritize my time, and do some interacting here, I am usually in the top 300 to 400 rank, but spend more time actually building my business - which, since the readjusting, has now become profitable.
Successful people seem to think that way. I feel it's time I listen to your recommendation! Thanks TheOldSilly :).
Hi Bill,
Excellent post on time planning. I try and be selective in what I look at or watch.
I don't mean anyway to shun anyone I can help but I am not too interested in someone's local weather report or something like that.
But those I can help I will and of course I always, everyday need to work on our business.
Thanks for sharing.
Bill
The first time I attempted WA I was a total introvert about it and I wouldn’t say that was the whole reason why I failed, but being a little more engaging has helped me in my self development.
And it feels good to help out here and there but you are right at the end of the day your still trying to run a business so until you are where you want to be yourself there has to be balance for sure.
I try to scan the live chat a bit when I can but on mobile its a bjt hard. I respond to some blog post of the people I follow and poke into the unanswered questions to see if I can help anywhere but all of that probably takes up 30 minutes of my total time spent while working on my blog. I don’t count the time spending commenting on other blogs to get comments as a part of that.
Hi Bill
Very inspiring post! For me I try to divide the time..Sometime for WA such as watching the training videos, reading blogs, commenting on friends websites, and the live chatting.. The rest of the time, I work on my three websites. In this way, there is balance and there is time for everything.
Rania
Yea. That’s my plan too Bill. One website at a time. But for Arania or anyone who can make more than one site work at once, then go fir it!
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Do like this, have the same problem, so get very selective, your black hole got this answered.