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One of my biggest challenges with freelancing has always been finding enough time in the day to get everything done.

What I’ve learned is that the only way I can make this work for me is to not take on too much work and work smarter not harder.I typically work 6-8 hours on my business. These hours are not the typical 9 to 5 hours. Instead I am a shift worker.

 I work throughout the day long. I take frequent breaks because I have to in order to take care of my family’s needs.To me, they are my first priority so I work my IM business around their needs.

Here is my family-friendly work schedule:

Right now, I’m in the middle of figuring out my taxes for 2007 and just realized that I spent over $3,500 bucks last year buying Internet Marketing educational stuff. This includes courses, special reports, software, and other stuff.And you know what? I didn’t use much of it at all. In fact, I don’t even think I used half of it. This is very sad indeed.It’s not that I didn’t have good intentions, it’s just that once I reviewed the material, I became information overloaded and began feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and more confused than before I read it.

Although I hate to admit it, this is how I spent the majority of 2007. In fact, I was so paralyzed with fear that I would do the wrong thing that I didn’t do much of anything. Just dibbled and dabbled here and there searching for the next best thing.

Then, I began focusing on one thing at a time and my luck turned around for the best. Woohoo.

Here are some tips for those of you who are suffering from information overload right now:

1. Realize that you’ll never learn everything about internet marketing that there is to know. Marketing on the ‘net changes every day. New techniques are born every minute. The good news it that you don’t have to know everything to be successful. In fact, you probably know enough already to make money online. You simply have to focus on one thing at a time and then move on once you get profitable.
2. Set realistic goals for yourself. My goal this month is $75.00 a day, and I plan to achieve this by not trying to do too many things at once. For me, I am focusing on rewriting two PLR articles a day and writing two articles a day, too. Then, I plan on creating one report. That’s it. I know that I can accomplish this easily.
3. Remember that there is no right or wrong way to make it in the internet marketing business. You can use social marketing, pay per click, article marketing, and even affiliate marketing. The key to success is to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work.
4. Don’t get frustrated. Even the gurus had to start somewhere. There are no quick fixes for internet riches. Forget the next best thing. Concentrate and get it done. Focus and work on the small challenges first. My grandmother always says, “How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time.” Internet marketing is your elephant and you have to choose whether you want to eat his ear, the trunk, or the mid section first.
5. Master the basics. Learn how to write well, how to direct traffic, etc. For instance, it doesn’t matter if you learn all about creating niche sites if you don’t know how to create quality content that visitors will read.
6. Don’t try to get it all too quickly. There will always be more information. And that information will still be here tomorrow or next year. You are your time. Learn one thing and then move on to the next.
7. Don’t buy a ton of unrelated material. For instance, if you’re going to master Squidoo, then only buy Squidoo products. Don’t turn around and purchase a ton of stuff about affiliate marketing or Google AdWords as this will only confuse and frustrate you. Instead buy that stuff when you’re ready to focus on that method.
8. Remember that the information you have is supposed to educate you, not make you crazy. As long as you apply what you learn and focus, you will succeed.

Information overload is real, but you can avoid it if you follow the above steps. Take it from me, I’ve been there and I have $3,500 worth of products on my hard drive to prove it.

I have to be honest with you. I had been attempting the whole Internet Marketing thing for about a year before I really started seeing any results from my efforts. It wasn’t that I didn’t try to achieve greatness. It’s just that I kept being pulled in so many directions that I didn’t know where to turn.

Every single day, I was bombarded with all sorts of messages from this guru and that one. The more I signed up for “free offers,” the more I received ones that required money. Just about everyone seemed to achieve success but me.This person kept touting this product and this one kept saying, “No, you need this one.”

As a newbie Internet Marketer, I kept right on buying eBooks and courses looking for the newest and best thing that would make me the next internet millionaire.I would then get all excited, read the book, try it out half-heartedly, lose interest and move on to the next thing. The result? I was spinning my wheels getting nowhere fast. After a year, I had accumulated about $4000 in debt from all my reading material and was startng to think that Internet Marketing was a total waste of time. Then, by divine intervention, I found the book by Dennis Becker called 5 bucks a day, which changed my life.