Success with Cloning
and Other Successful Time Management Strategies
by Larisa Troche
Are there ever enough hours in the day to create the success you want and still have the energy for a fulfilling life after work? There are as many ideas for making magic as there are stars in the sky. But a little closer to earth, there are a couple of other things one can try to run your business, run your life, and oh yeah, keep your sanity while you’re doing it! Wouldn’t it be great if you could find free money, an extra pair of hands a great tracking system and a little more time in each day? We’re all graced with the same 24 hours in a day. What can one do to spend less time working and still generate the income and results one needs? Some miracle workers just make better use of their time and get more out of each day. For high achievers it’s difficult to give up control or to ask for help. Whatever the case, there are simple steps you can take today to make life a little easier and still take care of business! GENERATE PASSIVE INCOME. You can’t be everywhere at once, and there are only a finite number of hours in a day. Ideally you will start a business and build it up to the point where you can hire others to run the business while you sun your self on the beach. But until you reach that day, you can begin generating supplemental sources of income. Depending on how well you do this, doing so can either just improve your standard of living, or perhaps grow to one day replace your current income. The following are just three of the many ways you can try Passport Living and put a little more jingle in your pockets. Stock Market. Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, but I still recommend stock investments as at least one of the spokes in your money wheel. Any time is a good time to buy stocks. After all, Warren Buffet is still buying and he seems like he knows what he’s doing – I hear he’s had some moderate success. You just have to do your homework. I already have a nice little handful of companies that are doing quite nicely despite the general downturn in the market. Right now is a particularly good time to buy because companies are on sale! You should never pay full price for anything. You regularly shop for the best bargains on everything from groceries to shoes to cars and stocks are no different. For best results, create a watch portfolio, using specific criteria to buy companies you know and understand (start by reading Rule #1 by Phil Town). The newsletter by Motley Fool is also an excellent source of information (www.fool.com). Keep an eye on the companies you’re interested in and when the time is right, pounce! Buy now while stocks are down, before the economy recovers. Seems counter-intuitive, I know, but with careful study, you can be very successful in this area. I’ve created a watch list of about 12 stocks that I’d like to buy and I will, over time. For now, I’m just keeping an eye on them until I’m ready to make my move. Micro-lending. You’ve already heard about real estate and stock investments, but for something on a smaller scale let’s go online, shall we? Everyone knows about eBay and other online auction sites – still on my list when I find someone to show me how! But there’s also micro-lending on websites such as kiva.com or prosper.com http://www.prosper.com/join/KaizenDiva. Prosper.com is a person-to-person lending site
where one can borrow (lend) money for personal or business reasons and it’s all done through a bidding process similar to eBay. You can earn money three ways: by referring borrowers (earn $25 for those who sign up for a loan); by referring lenders (earn $35 for each person who signs up to be a lender) but the main way you can earn money by lending funds and thereby receiving the return of principal and competitive interest rates. Start small by making multiple loans of $50 each and as you become more comfortable you can bid on more loans and lessen your risk by spreading your funds among several loans rather than risking it all on one borrower. The reasons people on Prosper want to borrow money run the gamut from buying dentures (one of my loans!) to business capital to college to debt consolidation and everything in between. Surely you’ll find the right borrower for your portfolio. Prosper.com has historically provided very impressive returns. I strongly recommend setting up bidding portfolios whereby you determine the criteria from conservative to aggressive for the loans you want to bid on and Prosper will automatically place the bids for you. This way you don’t have to worry about checking to see if you get outbid – it happens – and you don’t have to keep checking back to see if you “won” the loan. Very addictive – I was checking the website all the time to find out the status of my bids. (Note: Prosper.com has recently gone public so be sure to check the website for updates or changes.) Blogging. Another way to earn passive income online is through blogging – or more to the point, through affiliate marketing on your blog. Check out JohnChow.com. He’s so good people actually pay him just to review their site/blog and he earns mad money from clickthroughs on the ads on his site. Another superstar whom I’ve recently discovered is Yaro Starak at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. The quality and quantity in his free newsletter is great and I’m very excited about the possibilities. (I’ve only just begun their coaching program so I will certainly report back on my own experience!) Both of the aforementioned bloggers offer their own excellent free how-to reports which you can download by visiting their website. If yours is a popular site, you can actually earn real money from blogging and having your own website can also generate passive income. The money comes not from just having the blog or the website, but by becoming an affiliate with other websites that pay you when people see the link on your website and click through and or buy from them. Still, while you can earn money through your website, if it is your business website I’d recommend limiting the number of affiliate logos/links so that your visitors are not overwhelmed. Or have a separate blog-site (under your name, versus your company’s name). Note that in order to get advertisers you have to have the traffic to make it worth their while so get started with quality information with regular updates so you can get the “eyeballs” on your website and the money will follow! OUTSOURCE THE ROUTINE AND THE PRESSING. Small and emerging businesses can get beyond the struggle of the daily grind by outsourcing time drainers such as routine correspondence, forms, appointment setting, and the like, as well as word processing/desktop publishing for those big projects and proposals. Finding a good virtual assistant will save you way more than you will spend. You can’t put a price on time –there’s just not enough of it available.
Think about what your hourly rate is for your primary source of revenue, that is, what you charge for your key service or product. The money you pay for administrative support is nowhere near what you can earn by doing what you do best – finding and selling to new customers. Do it. Find a good virtual assistant today and your business will grow by leaps and bounds because you’ll be much more focused and effective. Virtual assistants are becoming more accepted and more mainstream. Due to the joys of modern technology, your assistant can be on the other side of the world (and price-wise, that’s probable the reality of making such an arrangement work.) So think about what it is that you consider to be time drainers and what may be keeping you away from your primary business functions. Make a list of activities to delegate and then begin interviewing candidates to find someone you can work with. Give her/him a few easy tasks just to make sure you’re both on the same wavelength and to get a sense for their level of skills and abilities. (Also read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. First, because it’s a great book, and also because he gives some wonderful pointers on working with a virtual assistant.) CARRY A NOTEBOOK. I am so behind the high tech 8-ball and I just love notebooks. They are so much more stylish than when I was in school, and eminently handy for capturing those little sparks of brilliance when I’m out and about. Don’t rely on your overloaded brain cells to remember everything. Jot it down! Make a list! Start the next best seller! Depending on what you write down, these notebooks can become the basis of your memoirs, or even your company’s operations manual. If the thought of pen and paper makes you crazy or seems a little archaic, they have so many cool micro-recorders now. Get one with a built in USB connection, so you can record those pearls of wisdom on the fly, and when you get home, you can upload it directly to your computer. Channel your musings and they might turn out to be great podcasts for your website. STEAL A FEW MINUTES. Before I got hooked on Bubble Breaker (the addictive little game on my cell phone) I always carried note cards – must keep in touch with family, friends and clients to-be; reading material – maybe that form with the tiny legalese that I wanted to look over more carefully one more time, or business literature to keep “in the know.” So If you commute or otherwise have stretches of downtime, make use of those short little spells in between your various adventures. And these stolen moments don’t have to be stationary – I actually find that I come up with some of my best ideas when I’m out walking. Hmmm. Must be something about being relaxed…even if only for 30 or 40 minutes. So there you have it. When all is said and done, the work will still be there when you get back, so try one or all of the above to give yourself a little extra breathing room. Don’t make yourself crazy. Just do things a little differently and you can earn more money and work smarter, not harder.
Larisa Troche, currently residing in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, is an advocate of the passport living entrepreneurial path, and runs multiple enterprises under the umbrella company The Larisa Group, which includes J I Martin Business Services (www.jimartinbizsvcs.info), providing consulting and financial solutions for small businesses. She is also the founder and managing director of Pink Passport Society (www.pinkpassport.org), a personal development and educational organization for women.