IF you're like me, perhaps you've been on the internet for less than a year. For those first few months, you pretty much just surf around absolutely dumbfounded by all the information available in cyberspace. Wow!
After a while, you actually feel yourself becoming addicted, and you can feel yourself being transformed into (Oh, no!) a 'Mouse Potato'.
Since you love this internet thing so much, you decide you may as well earn some money while manoeuvering that mouse. What a great idea! My own home business!
You join as many freelance 'work at home' job sites as possible, sending out your resume to all of them, and hoping that you'll land that perfect administrative-type job. Well, it appears that those jobs are few and far between. For every job opening, there are literally thousands of applicants. Unless you're a transcriptionist, have website design or techie skills of some sort, they are next to impossible to land.
So, it's on to a new quest!
By now you are definitely determined to make money on the internet. So you go into a manic search for the perfect affiliate program. After an exhaustive length of time and a few bad judgments, you settle on one or two that you feel are right for you and that you believe in.
Onward!
In the meantime, you have it in your head that you need a website. When promoting your affiliate program, you suddenly start noticing thousands of ads for information on internet marketing. Many of the ads are for marketing newsletters. Oh, my, look at all this information.
So you start signing up for just about every newsletter. Hm-mmm! How to design a website, how to work the search engines, how to get your ad to 600,000+ per day, how to write effective ads, how not to write ads, how to make your website sticky, how to publish your own newsletter, how to be one of the 5% who make it through the first year, how to not be one of the 95% who don't make it through the first year, how to use autoresponders to run your follow-ups, how to keep from having your ISP shut down by people yelling 'SPAM' at you, how to handle customer relations, how to do viral marketing, how to brand your business, how to go about campaign marketing, how to produce website traffic, and the list goes on and on.
And I ended up spending most of my time reading them. Sure, I learned a lot, but I don't even have a website yet!
Uh-Oh! Now look what has happened! You've got mountains of printed out information on every imaginable subject, your bookmarks are overloaded, your email folders are bulging, AND you find you're not using any of it because you've got SO much, you've forgotten about any of it specifically.
I won't even mention all those 'had-to-have' eBooks.
The heaps of paper are piled so high that it has become an insurmountable task to go through them, and the bookmarks have strange titles which don't ring a bell. Some of the emailed newsletters are still sitting where you put them to read in more depth, later, and you get to the point where you wonder:
'What the hell am I doing?'
Sometimes you get so frustrated, you just want to drown it all out in a flood of tears!
Time Out!
Has your mind become paralyzed? Have you lost all sense of priorities? Have you entered the 'cyberland of no return'?
No, I don't think so. There's still hope.
I realize I've painted myself into a corner. I have to leap over the wet paint to get out of this predicament. I'm going about this all backwards. I should only be gathering information which I need for building my website. The rest of the information can wait until I reach that point.
And, YES, I'm an 'information overload' junkie.
Here's what I'm going to do.
1. Unsubscribe to any newsletters, no matter how good they are, and face the fact that maybe I don't NEED that particular information yet. When I do, I can re-subscribe. Anyway, I hope they'll let me do so!
2. Get rid of all those bookmarks. Only keep the ones I recognize and use.
3. Clean out my email. If I haven't read it after six months I'm never going to.
4. Read only those eBooks that are relevant to the actual building of a website. The other ones can just set there and wait. Delete the ones I'll never use.
5. Actually, start physically building my website. Concentrate ONLY on building my website. Stop just thinking about it, and DO it! I can always change it as I go along. No one says it has to be the greatest thing since sliced bread!
6. I MUST get organized. My computer room looks like a tornado went through it. When someone comments, 'How do you FIND anything?' my reply is, 'As long as no one touches anything, I know exactly where everything is'.
And I 'usually' do. But since I'm going to 'clean house', I think I'll give the organization bit a try. Who knows, maybe I'll like it. I'll keep the printed material that is relevant to my needs, punch holes in it, and put it in binders. The rest goes in the car trunk to the recycling center.
7. I'll even make a schedule for myself such as an allotted time to read the ezines I'll continue to subscribe to. An amount of time to work on my website. An amount of time to place ads. An amount of time to read email and respond.
Oh, and only certain times to hit that 'get new messages' button.
Hopefully, once I've 'cleaned house', I can get rolling 'forward' instead of 'backwards' with a cleared-out mind.
No more 'information overload' for me. I've recovered!
Copyright 2001 Mary Holzrichter
Mary Holzrichter is an affiliate and member of The Newbie Club, a site packed with information for newbies. To join click HERE and to contact the author click Mary
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